There is a sense of eternity about books, works of art, and generally all human achievements.  Or perhaps a consolation.  One tells oneself: surely if human beings can create such works, their lives must mean something?  Surely it can’t be the case that they just live a few decades and turn into nothing and that’s that?  Perhaps this is more of a consolation than a fact.  The consolation is that even if we are in fact highly ephemeral beings, we at least have the power to expand and extend the width of our live indefinitely.  The obverse interpretation perhaps takes two forms: Camus’ defiance of meaninglessness, and Dylan Thomas’s “Rage against the dying of the light!”  Think of Proust, dying at 51…