Enfin

After the best book, the most beautiful woman, or the finest desert you've ever seen, you tell yourself this is where the rest of your life begins.

     In fact, something else happens: another book, another woman, another desert. And the rest of your life becomes life itself. It was merely the illusion of the end.

     Even the hope of a definitive horizon, a horizon which would stamp what precedes with an irrevocable quality, is apparently not possible. New Deal of Life. New Deal of Desire.

     If everything can seem indifferent when you have encountered the most beautiful of things, why don't we regard the opposite situation as equally fateful: having read the worst book, having seen the dullest landscape, having met the stupidest, ugliest woman? There should be a perfection of - and hence an absolute limit to - the insignificant, the useless, the trivial and the banal, beyond which, as in the contrary case, there would be nothing more worth waiting for.

     In fact, it is not that way. After seeing the worst, you do not say, 'O time, suspend thy flight!' There is no ecstasy of uselessness.