If I am going to die, there’s no need to ‘make peace’ with myself, no reason to ‘compose myself’ for death. The way I face extinction is just as fleeting, just as irrelevant, as the way I faced every other moment of my life. The one and only thing that could make this time matter would be finding a way to survive.

Greg Egan, ‘The Walk’, in Axiomatic, London, 1995, p. 220