To splat, or to be splatted? That is the question.
Is it nobler to suffer through all the terrible things fate throws at you, or to fight off your troubles, and, in doing so, end them completely?
To do the final splat, to sleep—because that’s all the final splat is— and by a sleep I mean an end to all the heartache and the thousand injuries that we are vulnerable to— that’s an end to be wished for!
To take the final splat, to sleep. To sleep, perhaps to dream—yes, but there’s there’s the catch. Because the kinds of dreams that might come in that final sleep— after you have left behind your mortal tenticles— are something to make you anxious.
That’s the consideration that makes us suffer the calamities of life for so long.
Because who would bear all the trials and tribulations of time— the oppression of the powerful, the insults from arrogant octolings, the pangs of unrequited love, the slowness of justice, the disrespect of inklings in office, and the general abuse of good folk by bad— when you could just settle all your debts using nothing more than an unsheathed splat gun?
Who would bear their burdens, and grunt and sweat through a tiring life, if they weren’t frightened of what might happen after the final splat— that undiscovered country from which no visitor returns, which we wonder about and which makes us prefer the troubles we know rather than fly off to face the ones we don’t? Thus, the fear of the final splat makes us all cowards, and our natural willingness to act is made weak by too much thinking.
Actions of great urgency and importance get thrown off course because of this sort of thinking, and they cease to be actions at all.