W. Somerset Maugham
speaker
1,790 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard 8 Sep
W. Somerset Maugham’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
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Recording by April six zero nine zero
On death and immortality.
Did it ever strike you, dear reader, that it must be a particularly pleasant thing to be dead?
To say nothing hackneyed about the blessed freedom from the cares and vexations of life.
Which we cling to with such tenacity while we can.
And which, when we have no longer the power to hold,
We let go all at once, with probably a feeling of exquisite relief.
And to take no account of this latter probable, but totally undemonstrable of felicity.
It must be what boys call awfully jolly to be dead.
Here you are, lying comfortably upon your back.
What is left of it?
In the cool dark, and with the smell of the fresh earth all about you.
Your soul goes knocking about amongst an infinity of shadowy things.
Lord knows where
Making all sorts of silent discoveries in the gloom of what was yesterday, an unknown and mysterious future, and which, after centuries of exploration, must still be strangely unfamiliar.
The nomadic thing doubtless comes back occasionally to the old graves.
If the body is so fortunate as to possess one.
and looks down upon it with big round eyes, and a lingering tenderness.
It is hard to conceive a soul entirely cut loose from the old bones, and roving rudderless about eternity.
It was probably this inability to mentally divorce soul from substance that gave us that absurdly satisfactory belief in the resurrection of the flesh.
Showing 1121–1140 of 1,790 · page 57 of 90
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