[Death] is the real universe.... That’s what it all means.... That’s why it’s so important to live as long as you can. All the good things are now —a thin little rind of what we call life, put on for show, and then—the real universe for ever and ever. To thicken the rind by one centimetre—to live one week, one day, one half-hour longer—that’s the only thing that matters.... Picture the universe as an infinite globe with this very thin crust on the outside.... We are born on the surface of it and all our lives we are sinking through it. When we’ve got all the way through then we are what’s called Dead: we’ve got into the dark part inside, the real globe. If your God exists, He’s not in the globe... from His point of view, we move away, into what He regards as nonentity, where He never follows. That is all there is to us, all there ever was.... Reasoning itself is only valid as long as you stay in the rind. It has nothing to do with the real universe.... You try to connect things and can't. They take your head off...and you can't even look back on what life was like...because you know it never did mean anything even from the beginning.