"…Death, before weighing to heavily upon us, enriches us, our powers grow at its contact; then, it performs its work of destruction upon us. The evidence of the uselessness of all effort, and that sensation of a future corpse already rising into the present and filling time’s horizon, end by benumbing our ideas, our hopes, and our muscles, so that the excess of energy provoked by the quite recent obsession is converted – when that obsession is irrevocably implanted in the mind – into a stagnation of our vitality. Thus this obsession incites us to become everything and nothing…[It] transforms us into that kind of decomposed hero who promises everything and accomplishes nothing: idle men wasting their breath in the Void; vertical carrion whose sole activity is reduced to thinking that they will cease to be…"
— Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay