Events stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute. What is urgent is not urgent for ever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, like itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing. Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future.

So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.

The past tempts us, the present confuses us, and the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast terrible in-between. But there is still time to seize that one last fragile moment.

If he has a last thought, if there is time for a last thought, it will simply be, So this is what a last thought is like.

One thing that comes out in myths, for example, is at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.

Each minute the last minute.

But at midnight — strange, mystic hour, when the veil between the frail present and the eternal future grows thin — then came the messenger.

The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.

These memories are the memorials and pledges of the vital hours of a lifetime. These hours of afflatus in the human spirit, the springs of art, are, in their mystery, akin to the epochs of history, when a race which for centuries has lived content, unknown, behind its own frontiers, digging, eating, sleeping, begetting, doing what was requisite for survival and nothing else, will, for a generation or two, stupefy the world; commit all manner of crimes, perhaps; follow the wildest chimeras, go down in the end in agony, but leave behind a record of new heights scaled and new rewards won for all mankind; the vision fades, the soul sickens, and the routine of survival starts again.

The chance which now seems lost may present itself at the last moment.

This is your life and its ending one moment at a time.

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

On certain occasions human beings are imbued with the belief that they can accomplish anything. In such moments they seem to glimpse much that is normally invisible to human eyes. Then, later, even after they have sunk to the bottom of memory’s well, these moments sometimes revive and again suggest to men the miraculous plenitude of the world’s pains and joys. None can avoid these moments of destiny; nor can anyone — no matter who he is — avoid the misfortune of seeing more than his eyes can take in.

Something is beginning in order to end: adventure does not let itself be drawn out; it only makes sense when dead. I am drawn, irrevocably, towards this death which is perhaps mine as well. Each instant appears only as part of a sequence. I cling to each instant with all my heart: I know that it is unique, irreplaceable — and yet I would not raise a finger to stop it from being annihilated. This last moment I am spending — in Berlin, in London — in the arms of a woman casually met two days ago — moment I love passionately, woman I may adore — all is going to end, I know it. Soon I shall leave for another country. I shall never rediscover either this woman or this night. I grasp at each second, trying to suck it dry: nothing happens which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever in myself, nothing, neither the fugitive tenderness of those lovely eyes, nor the noises of the street, nor the false dawn of early morning: and even so the minute passes and I do not hold it back, I like to see it pass.

History is a construct...Any point of entry is possible and all choices are arbitrary. Still there are definitive moments...We can look at these events and say that after them things were never the same again.