Turning Each Minute Into a Century
“Not that far away there was a church, and its gilt roof gleamed in the bright sun. He remebered that he gazed with terrible intensity at that roof and the rays of sun that sparkled from it; he could not take his eyes from those rays of light; it seemed to him this light was his new nature and that in three minutes he would somehow melt into it. His uncertainty and revulsion against this new thing which was bound to happen at any moment were terrible; but he said that nothing was more awful than the incessant thought, ‘What if I was not to die! What if life was given back to me! What an eternity! And it would all be mine! I would turn each minute into a century. I would miss nothing. I would reckon each passing minute and waste nothing!’ He said that this thought finally filled him with such rage that he wanted to be shot as soon as possible.”
Prince Myshkin’s account of a man, 20 minutes before his execution from The Idiot
You are about to die, in twenty minutes, by firing squad. What would you be thinking?
