That explained why my apprehensions on the subject of my death had ceased from the moment when I had unconsciously recognized the taste of the little madeleine because at that moment the being that I then had been was an extra-temporal being and in consequence indifferent to the vicissitudes of the future.
— Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past or in Search of Lost Time
Sidenote: I have a project in Claude that is simply, “revisions.” Any passage I want to understand more clearly, I paste into Claude and —due to the project and memory instructions— it returns to me four variations of the same passage. Often, I’ll combine passages to come up with a variation that is most clear, such as this one:
And so the mystery resolved itself. My fear of dying had vanished because, in that instant of unconscious recognition —without meaning to—the self I inhabited was no longer a self moving through time toward an end. It was a self lifted out of time altogether—and such a self is naturally indifferent to whatever the future holds.