𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐓𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐬 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐓𝐨 𝐁𝐞 𝐍𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐖𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐍𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐅𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐈𝐬 𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠
“It gives me a melancholy happiness to live in the midst of this jumble of lanes, needs, and voices: how much enjoyment, impatience, desire; how much thirsty life and drunkenness of life comes to light every moment of the day!
And yet things will soon be so silent for all these noisy, living, life-thirsty ones! How even now everyone's shadow stands behind him, as his dark fellow traveller!
It's always like the last moment before the departure of an emigrant ship : people have more to say to each other than ever; the hour is late; the ocean and its desolate silence await impatiently behind all the noise - so covetous, so certain of its prey.
And everyone, everyone takes the past to be little or nothing while the near future is everything; hence this haste, this clamour, this outshouting and out-hustling one another.
Everyone wants to be the first in this future - and yet death and deathly silence are the only things certain and common to all in this future!
How strange that this sole certainty and commonality barely makes an impression on people and that they are farthest removed from feeling like a brotherhood of death!
It makes me happy to see that people do not at all want to think the thought of death!
I would very much like to do something that would make the thought of life even a hundred times more worth being thought to them.”
Nietzsche: The Gay Science, German edition 1882, English 2001, Cambridge University
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