"I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die. Just think of how many of projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it, our life, hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which certain of a future delays them incessantly. But let this all threaten to become impossible forever. How beautiful it will become again. Ah, only if the cataclysm doesn’t happen this time! We won’t miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India. The cataclysm doesn’t happen; we don’t do any of it because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would be enough to think that we are humans and death may come this evening. Feeling suddenly attached to life when we realize the immanence of death suggests it was perhaps not life that we lost our tastes for, so long as there was no end in sight, but our quotidian version of it. That our dissatisfactions were from a certain way of living, than anything irrevocably morose about human experience. Having surrendered the customary belief in our own immortality, we would then be reminded of a host of untried possibilities lurking beneath the surface of an apparently undesirable, apparently eternal existence."