From time to time I like to reread the opening sentence of ‘Speak, memory’, that kind of autobiography he wrote Vladimir Nabokov. It goes like this: The cradle rocks over an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is nothing more than a brief sliver of light between two eternities of darkness. Then Nabokov points out that what will remain when we have died our absence gives us more fear and uneasiness than what was already there before, when we did not yet exist. In other words, we may like to believe that our passage through the earth has left some mark, but what worries Nabokov is precisely that the eternity that crushes us before and behind makes us all more insignificant than a speck of dust.
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