Though “ ‘the wake-up call to mortality’ sounds a bit like a hotel service,” in fact this translation’s metaphor hits just the right note: “it is like being in an unfamiliar hotel room, where the alarm clock has been left on the previous occupant’s setting, and at some ungodly hour you are suddenly pitched from sleep into darkness, panic, and a vicious awareness that this is a rented world.”5 It is just this sort of unanticipated wake-up call that many experience, even in a “secular” age.
