Dailies

Life if it were to end soon

By Joy ⋅ April 8, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

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I’m re-reading Alain de Botton’s lovely, lovely book “How Proust Can Change Your Life“. Now that I am here in Vancouver, doing minimal work because of radiculitis and going to doctor’s appointments, I now find myself with time to read in the train or bus or while waiting at the reception area. Time became a little slower for me this week.

At the beginning of the book, de Botton talks of the newspaper L’Intransigeant in the 1920’s that posited a situation to select French celebrities:

An American scientist announces that the world will end, or at least that such a huge part of the continent will be destroyed, and in such a way, that death will be the certain fate of hundreds of millions of people. If this prediction were confirmed, what do you think would be its effects on people between the time when they acquired the aforementioned certainty and the moment of cataclysm? Finally, as far as you’re concerned, what would you do in this last hour?

The last celebrity consulted was Marcel Proust, and he sent the following reply:

I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many 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 all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! If only 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 have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.

This made me think of the Eckhart Tolle book again when he talked about looking at things as they are, without pre-conceived notions and labels, and finding the beauty in them. Somehow I imagined it would be similar to what Proust is saying here, except in the context of death. Proust talks about negligence that deadens desire. Tolle talks about unawareness that desensitizes us to our true self and the true nature of things. Bottom line is, we should live life now. We should be here now. Why wait for the last hour?

I’m not sure what I’d do in the last hour. Definitely nothing to do with the computer. I’ve already spent a good part of my life with it.

What would you do?