...of the void

Alas, eternity rises before us and we are afraid of it - afraid of that thing which must last for such a long time, we who last for so little.
For such a long time!
Doubtless when the world no longer exists (how I would like to be alive then - living without nature or men - what grandeur in that void!), doubtless there will be darkness then - a little burnt ash which will have been the earth and perhaps a few drops of water - the sea.
Heavens! Nothing more - emptiness - only the void spread out across the vast expanse like a shroud!
Eternity, eternity! Will it last for ever?... for ever, without end?
And yet what remains, the smallest scrap of the world's debris, the last breath of dying creation, the void itself, will necessarily be weary of existing. Everything will call for total destruction.
This idea of something without end makes us grow pale. - Alas! and we will be put in it, all of us now living - and this immensity will sweep us along.
What will we be? A nothing - not even a breath of air.
I have long thought of the dead in their coffins, the protracted centuries they spend like that under the earth filled with rumours and cries, and they so calm, in their rotten wooden boxes, their gloomy silence interrupted, at times, either by hair falling, or by a worm slithering by, over a shred of flesh. How they sleep there, lying silent - under the earth - under the flowering turf!
And yet, at wintertime, they must be cold under the snow.

[Memoirs of a Madman, Flaubert, G.]