Inevitable death, then, makes life absurd. He writes: “We want love to last and we know that it does not last; even if, by some miracle, it were to last a whole lifetime, it would still be incomplete. . . . In the final analysis, every man [is] devoured by the overpowering desire to endure and possess . . . those whom he has loved.”13 Even the steely philosopher Bertrand Russell argued that the secular view—that all human labor, love, and genius are “destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system”—results “henceforth” in the “unyielding despair” of the soul.14
