Creatures of a Day: And Other Tales of Psychotherapy

by Irvin D. Yalom

There’s a Schopenhauer quote that compares love passion with the blinding sun. When it dims in later years, we suddenly become aware of the wondrous starry heavens that had been obscured, or hidden, by the sun. So for me the vanishing of youthful, sometimes tyrannical, passions has made me appreciate the starry skies more and all wonders of being alive, wonders that I had previously overlooked. I’m in my eighties, and I’ll tell you something unbelievable: I’ve never felt better or more at peace with myself. Yes, I know my existence is drawing to a close, but the end has been there since the beginning. What is different now is that I treasure the pleasures of sheer awareness, and I’m fortunate enough to share them with my wife, whom I’ve known almost all of my life.”

Buridan’s ass, an ancient philosophical paradox involving an ass placed between two equally sweet-smelling bales of hay, who starves to death because he can’t decide which one to choose.

All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike. All is ephemeral – both memory and the object of memory. The time is at hand when you will have forgotten everything; and the time is at hand when all will have forgotten you. Always reflect that soon you will be no one, and nowhere.