Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, the best thing

Host: The night was heavy with fog, its grey breath curling around the edges of an abandoned pier. The sea was silent, save for the occasional groan of the wooden planks, and a single lantern swung from a rusted hook, its flame trembling like a nervous thought.

Jack stood near the edge, his coat drawn tight against the cold, eyes fixed on the black water below. Jeeny sat on an overturned crate, her hair damp, clinging to her cheek like threads of night.

The foghorn sounded — deep, melancholic, as if the world itself was mourning.

Jack: (quietly) “Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, the best thing would be to have never been born at all.”
Heinrich Heine had a dark sense of humor, but I think he was just being honest. Don’t you?

Jeeny: (softly) Honest, maybe. But not whole. Heine saw only the shadow, not the flame. Death might be peaceful, but it’s not better, Jack. It’s just… empty.

Host: The sea wind shifted, carrying the smell of salt and iron. The lantern’s flame fluttered, throwing shifting light across their faces — Jack’s, stern and hollow; Jeeny’s, soft, yet haunted.

Jack: You say that because you still believe in purpose. But what if there isn’t one? What if we were just accidents, born, suffered, and forgotten? Maybe Heine was right — maybe the luckiest souls are the ones who never had to play this game at all.

Jeeny: (looking out to sea) If life is a game, then at least it’s one we can still touch, still change. The ones never born — they never loved, never laughed, never looked up at the stars and wondered why they were there. Isn’t that tragedy, too?

Jack: Love, laughter, stars — all of it just distractions from the truth. You think it’s beautiful because you’ve learned to forget the cost. Every birth is a sentence to pain, every smile a delay of grief. What sense is there in creating life just to lose it?

Jeeny: (turning to him) Then what’s your alternative, Jack? A world without birth, without music, without even the ache that proves we were alive? Isn’t nonexistence a kind of cruelty, too — the denial of even the chance to mean something?

Host: A gust of wind rushed between them, lifting the fog for a moment — revealing the vast, endless black of the ocean beneath. The water was so still it seemed like glass, reflecting the moon in broken silver lines.

Jack: (his voice cold) Maybe meaning itself is the illusion. You can spend a lifetime searching, but in the end, the sea takes everything. Every name, every dream, every breath. It’s all forgotten. Just… washed away.

Jeeny: (gently) You think death erases us. But I think it only transforms us. Energy doesn’t disappear; it changes shape. Even our pain becomes part of something larger, something we can’t see.

Jack: You sound like a poet trying to rewrite physics.

Jeeny: (smiles faintly) Maybe I am. But even science says we’re made of stardust, doesn’t it? That the iron in our blood came from exploding suns. Tell me, Jack — if that’s true, why call it nothingness?

Host: The lantern creaked as it swayed, casting long shadows that danced like ghosts along the pier. Jack looked down, his reflection trembling in the water.

Jack: (quietly) I’ve seen people die, Jeeny. There’s no grace in it. Just fear, struggle, and then — silence. Whatever Heine meant, I think he just wanted escape. From pain, from memory, from himself.

Jeeny: (whispering) Maybe. But escape isn’t the same as peace. Even Heine — in his final years — still wrote, still spoke to the world, bedridden and broken. He didn’t stop. Doesn’t that tell you something?

Jack: That he was too stubborn to quit.

Jeeny: Or too human to let the darkness win.

Host: The sea sighed, a low, rhythmic murmur like a heartbeat buried beneath the waves. The fog began to thin, and a pale light bloomed on the horizon — not quite sunrise, but a hint of it, a promise deferred.

Jack: (looking toward the horizon) You ever think maybe he was right, though? That sleep is just practice for death — and that’s why it feels so peaceful?

Jeeny: (nods) Maybe. But that’s what makes waking so sacred, isn’t it? Every morning we rise from that small death, and still — we choose to go on. That’s what Heine forgot. The miracle isn’t that we die; it’s that we return from nothingness every day and still dare to care.

Jack: (murmurs) “Dare to care.” You make it sound simple.

Jeeny: It isn’t. But it’s the only choice that keeps us alive. Even when we’re hurting. Especially then.

Host: The wind calmed, and the sea turned to silver beneath the first line of dawn. The fog peeled away like curtains, revealing the distant horizon — endless, and yet fragile.

Jack: (half-smiling) You always manage to find light, even when there’s nothing but dark around you. You should’ve been a preacher.

Jeeny: (laughs softly) No. Just someone who’s seen the dark and still believes it can’t last forever. Maybe death is better than life, Jack — but only if life has already forgotten how to hope.

Jack: (pauses, voice low) And what if hope is just the cruelest lie we tell ourselves?

Jeeny: (touches his hand) Then let it be a beautiful one. Because the lie that gives us strength might still be truer than the truth that kills us.

Host: For a moment, neither spoke. The sun began to rise, its light spilling over the water, painting the fog in gold. The pier creaked, old wood groaning under the weight of the morning.

Jack: (softly, almost to himself) Maybe Heine wasn’t wrong. Maybe he was just… tired.

Jeeny: (nodding) Maybe. But even the tired can rest, Jack. The never-born can’t.

Host: The camera would pull back, the two figures now bathed in morning light. The sea stretched infinite, and the sky, once grey, now bled with color — rose, amber, and white.

The quote still echoed in the air, but it had changed somehow — no longer a dirge, but a confession.
That perhaps sleep is good, death may be better,
but to have been born, to have seen the light even once —
that, too, might be the greatest rebellion against nothingness of all.