noon glow

Some philosophers say that matter has no real existence, and that the world has no external effect, but is merely an illusion reflected from human perception and imagination. This, by God, is an excess of abstraction bordering on madness. But there is no doubt that the world has a different image in every mind from its image in all other minds. No two men among these nations see it as a single entity. You may see two men sitting in the same room, one of them wishing to waste his life because of the ugliness of the world in his eyes, and the other wishing to live forever to savor its beauty and delight. Can it be said about these two that their world is one and the same? Hence, it is permissible for us to say that a copy of the world dies whenever a person dies, or that the whole world dies in the dull, wretched soul, since the continuation of the world for people does not benefit a person at all, if his world that he sees in his thoughts and dreams dies. Likewise, the human soul is exposed in life to sorrows that distort the image of the world in his eyes, or almost kill it, so he has the right to mourn it with the mourning of the dead and lost, while in truth he only mourns himself, which has lost the pleasure of feeling the beauty of life, and the life of the world in him. Abbas Mahmoud Al-Akkad