“I suddenly began to think about time as the thing that unites an endless rosary of senseless events; and also about the fact that only in the sequence of these events is there meaning; and that it's not God, not love, not beauty, not the greatness of intellect that determines this world, but only time -- the flow of time and the glimmering of human life within it.
Human life is its sustenance. Time consumes everything living by the ton, like a gigantic blue whale consumes microscopic plankton, milling and chewing it into a homogenous mass, so that one life disappears without a trace, giving another, the next life, a chance. Yet it wasn't the disappearance that grieved me the most, but the tracelessness of it. I thought to myself: I've already got one foot there, out in complete forgottenness.”