What began as an ordinary day turned out to be one of the worst tragedies in the history of Bangladesh: the Nimtoli fire in Dhaka. I was shocked when I saw news reports of the tragic accident showing numerous buildings burning mercilessly, people running around in chaos with no idea where their loved ones were, and still others trapped inside the buildings, screaming, being burned alive . However, nothing seemed to have any effect on the merciless fire that continued to burn, claiming as many lives as possible and turning a deaf ear to the desperate cries of hundreds of people. The blazing flames simply devoured everything in their path, reducing it to ash. It finally subsided in the early hours of dawn, but the damage it left behind was enormous: piles of debris and corpses strewn across buildings that had been burned like coal. As police and firefighters recovered countless bodies from the ruins, I wondered about the strange nature of life and death. In her essay “The Death of a Moth,” Virginia Woolf contemplates how life and death are separated by a single thread of “energy” and how ultimately the force of death breaks the thread, overpowering life and demonstrating its strength. superior (385). Woolf reflects on how life and death are two mutually exclusive forces of nature, yet are intertwined by the law of nature itself. In the essay, Woolf observes a moth, an “insignificant creature” as it attempts to “[enjoy] its meager opportunities” of a particularly vibrant morning, full of life, energy, and activity (385). However, the moth soon finds itself facing a force that Woolf believes to be far greater than life energy. It is a force “which, if it had wanted, would have submerged an entire city, not simply a city, but masses of men… middle of paper……. These are also echoed by humans in an attempt to delay death. However, as Woolf argues, death is indeed the ultimate destination of all living beings. What matters most is how we reach that destination. All rational living creatures “deviate further and further from [their] original course of life and make ever more complicated detours before reaching [their] final goal of death” (Freud 32). Robert Frost in his poem “No Gold Can Remain” writes: “Nature's first green is gold, its hardest shade to maintain.” The fact that life is a "hue" that we want to maintain calls into question Woolf's alleged claims; if death is truly the strongest force in nature and life the weakest, then why do all living things choose the weakest force? Perhaps there is a force stronger than the force of life and death, which governs life and death, and which I believe is the force of nature.