When we press the thorn to our chest we know, we understand, and still we do it. - Colleen McCullough

What could death be for him but the entrance into everlasting life? For the rest of us, the passage is not so easy.

It was four hundred years since a Julius had sat in the consul’s ivory curule chair,

There's a story... a legend, about a bird that sings just once in its life. From the moment it leaves its nest, it searches for a thorn tree... and never rests until it's found one. And then it sings... more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. And singing, it impales itself on the longest, sharpest thorn. But, as it dies, it rises above its own agony, to outsing the lark and the nightingale. The thorn bird pays its life for just one song, but the whole world stills to listen, and God in his heaven smiles.