eight minutes. if you had eight minutes to live, what would you do? it's not long enough to have sex, not good sex anyway. and what meal could you whip up in eight minutes?
if you knew the world was ending, but no one else did, this is what you'd do: you'd put the dog on his lead and walk outside as usual. you wouldn't wear a watch. you'd walk down the street in the normal fashion but this time, every speck of matter would burn into your mind like the outline of a body on a wall after a nuclear flash.
Dennis whatsit, the TV scriptwriter, gave a wonderful interview as he was dying. he saw the cherry blossoms as never before.
in a long life, 80 years, you feel there is plenty of time for all that. 80 years of ecstasy would be too much.
but you can have ecstasy just with your eyes and ears and divers other faculties. you can walk outside, look at a dog, a cat, a tree, a flower, or you can put a piece of music on or you can even eat a peach. and if you let yourself fall into it, if you tune into every pip of nervous messaging, you will be knocked over by just being alive.