At the End of the World

An American scientist announces that the world will end...what do you think would be the effects on people between the announcement and the moment of cataclysm? What would you do in this last hour? ***

These were the questions printed in the French newspaper L'Intransigeant in 1922 where they invited replies from celebrities of the day. Answers from readers ranged from last act of religious worship to predictions of social mayhem.

Marcel Proust, author of the monumental In Search of Lost Time, had this to say...

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 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 Lourve, 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.

Indeed, it should have been enough. Why are we all acting like myopic ants, labouring and hoarding away as if there'll be time to savour life after death? Feel free to take that as either a rhetorical question or a genuine logical problem...the former if you are miserable (like Proust always was), and the latter if you are an economist.

If nothing else, this would make a good dinner conversation.


*** The newspaper article and Proust's quote are drawn from 'How Proust Can Change Your Life' by Alain De Botton, Picador, 7.99 pounds (though available at the Strands, NY, for about that figure but in dollars)