“We deliver death into the dim hands of instinct and we grant it not one hour of our intelligence. It is surprising that the idea of death, which should be the most perfect and the most luminous, remains the flimsiest of our ideas and the only one that is backward? How should we know the one power we never look in the face? To fathom its abysses we wait until the most enfeebled, the most disordered moments of our life arrive.” (Maeterlinck in Tolstoy, pg. 12)
