If in our moments of happiness, mastery, ecstasy, we say Yes to heaven and to earth, and all we need is misfortune, sickness, the decline of physical powers to start screaming No, this means that all our judgments can be refuted tomorrow and that it is easy to mistake our life for the world. It is not obvious, however, why weakness-whether of a particular person or of an entire historical era-should be privileged and why the old nihilist from Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape should be closer to the truth than he himself was when he was twenty years old.
- Czesław Miłosz