If you lived in Paris in the 1920s, you might have enjoyed reading a newspaper called L’Intransigeant. It had a reputation for investigative news, metropolitan gossip and incisive editorials. It also had a habit of dreaming up big questions and asking French celebrities to send in their replies.
In the summer of 1922, the paper formulated a particularly elaborate question for its contributors:
An American scientist announces 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 cataclysm? Finally, as far as you're concerned, what would you do in this last hour?
Among many celebrities who were consulted on their pre-apocalypse plans was a reclusive, mustachioed novelist called Marcel Proust, who had spent the last fourteen years lying in a narrow bed under a pile of thinly woven woolen blankets writing an unusually long novel without an adequate bedside lamp.
Enthusiastic about contributing to newspapers, and in any case a good sport, Marcel Proust sent the following reply to L’Intransigeant:
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 how beautiful it would become again!Ah! if only the cataclysm doen'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.
That’s what Marcel Proust thought. What do you think?
Reference books:
Kalampedia 