Publisher's Synopsis
All my life long I have been singularly destitute, I believe, of that physical shrinking from death which so many human beings feel so acutely. I do not mean that I am in any hurry to die; as long as things go on tolerably well with me in the world, I have no insuperable objection to continue living; but whenever I stand face to face with death, as has happened to me several times in the course of my career, I regard the prospect of annihilation with perfect equanimity. I can honestly declare that all such occasions my only doubts and fears have been for the safety and the pecuniary position of the survivors, especially of those more immediately dependent upon me. For myself, I have never felt one moment's disquietude. And I attribute this entire absence of fear of death to the unusual fact that I have once already tried dying, and found it by no means a painful or terrifying experience. I mean what I say quite literally. I have not the slightest hesitation in asserting that once in my life I really and truly died - died as dead as it is possible for a human being to die: that that I was afterwards resurrected. I have felt and know the whole feeling of death - not part of it only, but the actual end of dying. I did not stop halfway; I died and was done with it; and when I came back to life again it was no mere case of awaking from which is foolishly called 'suspended animation', but a genuine revival, a restoration of vitality to a man as dead as he ever can be or will be.
