Irrelevant

As if this walk to my death is all that matters, now; as if these last few minutes of my life have superseded everything else.
They have, though, haven’t they? Everything else is past, is gone.
Yes – and so will this begone. 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.

[Greg Egan, Seeing da Axiomatic, 1995,
Gollancz 2010, p.218]