The old classic I’ve been thinking about for the past week and half:

Conversation Concerning Life and Death

MARAT:

[speaking to SADE across the empty arena]

I read in your books de Sade
in one of your immortal works
that the basis of all life is death

SADE:

Correct Marat

But man has given a false importance to death
Any animal plant or man who dies
adds to Nature’s compost heap
becomes the manure without which
nothing could grow nothing could be created

Death is simply part of the process

Every death even the cruelest death
drowns in the total indifference of Nature

Nature herself would watch unmoved
if we destroyed the entire human race

[rising]

I hate Nature
this passionless spectator this unbreakable ice-berg-face
that can bear everything
this goads us to greater and greater acts

[breathing heavily]

Haven’t we always beaten down those weaker than ourselves

Haven’t we torn at their throats
with continuos villainy and lust

Haven’t we experimented in our laboratories
before applying the final solution?

[…]

We condemn to death without emotion
and there’s no singular personal death to be had
only an anonymous cheapened death
which we could dole out to entire nations
on a mathematical basis
until the time comes
for all life
to be extinguished

MARAT:

Citizen Marquis
you may have fought for us last September
when we dragged out of the goals
the aristocrats who plotted against us
but you still talk like a grand seigneur
and what you call the indifference of Nature
is your own lack of compassion

SADE:

Compassion

Now Marat you are talking like an aristocrat

Compassion is the property of the privileged classes

When the pitier lowers himself
to give to a beggar
he throbs with contempt

To protect his riches he pretends to be moved
and his gift to the beggar amounts to no more than a kick [lute chord]

No Marat
no small emotions please

Your feelings were never petty

For you just as for me
only the most extreme actions matter

MARAT:

If I am extreme I am not extreme in the same way was you

Against Nature’s silence I use action

In the vast indifference I invent a meaning

I don’t watch unmoved I intervene
and I say that this and this are wrong
and I work to alter them and improve them

The important thing
is to pull yourself up by your own hair
to turn yourself inside out
and see the whole world with fresh eyes

– Peter Weiss, Marat/Sade (1964), translated by Geoffrey Skelton

book here and DVD here.