Following the theme of death in my previous posts on Lin Yutang and Philip Larkin, Julian Barnes describes another haunting metaphor from Alphonso Daudet, another forgotten writer like Lin Yutang, on the transience of life:
He had no illusions about immortality. He and Goncourt had discussed the matter in 1891. Goncourt outlined his own beliefs: that death means complete annihilation, that we are mere ephemeral gatherings of matter, and that even if there were a God, expecting him to provide a second existence for every single one of us would be laying far too great a book-keeping job on Him. Daudet agreed with all this, and then recounted to Goncourt a dream he had once had, in which he was walking through a field of broom. All around him there was the soft background noise of seed-pods exploding. Our lives, he had concluded, amount to no more than this: just a quiet crackle of popping pods.
