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Whether or not we admit it to ourselves, we are all haunted by a truly awful sense of impermanence. I have always had a particularly keen sense of this at New York cocktail parties, and perhaps that is why I drink the martinis almost as fast as I can snatch them from the tray. Horror of insincerity, of not meaning, overhangs these affairs like the cloud of cigarette smoke and the hectic chatter. This horror is the only thing, almost, that is left unsaid at such social functions. These functions are almost always (in a conscious way) like that last dinner of the condemned: where steak or turkey, whatever the doomed man wants, is served in his cell as a mockingly cruel reminder of what the great-big-little-transitory world had to offer.
About their lives, people ought to remember that when they are finished, everything in them will be contained in a marvelous state of repose. The rush is temporary. The great and only possible dignity of man lies in his power deliberately to choose certain moral values, like a character in a play, immured against the corrupting rush of time. Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.