“How old the world is! I walk between two eternities…”

Salon of 1767 (1798), Oeuvres esthétiques <!-- p. 644 -->
Context: How old the world is! I walk between two eternities... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don’t want to die!

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Denis Diderot 106
French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist 1713–1784

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