[at-l] What would you do? (When the world ends) Marcel Proust's answer from 1922

[sloetoe at yahoo.com (Sloetoe)]

### In the summer of 1922, the Paris weekly newspaper
_L'Intrasigeant_ posed as their "Man on the street" question
something along the following:

"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 sudden 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 apocalypse? Finally, as far as you're
concerned, what would you do in this last hour?"

Like today, persons of various social rank and background were
queried, including a palm reader, an actress, a cyclist, a
politician, a taxi driver, and novelist Marcel Proust. His
answer, for me, ranks him with Socrates, Henry Thoreau, Helen
Keller, Theodore Roosevelt, and of course, Dave Matthews, as a
person who knew something important about how to live.
Proust said:

"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."


Isn't that so major?
Eat, Drink and be Merry, for tomorrow we (may) die.
CARPE DIEM.
Live your Love.
Walk your talk.
Sloetoe




=====
Spatior! Nitor! Nitor! Tempero!
   Pro Pondera Et Meliora.

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