'"Why persist in existing, the poet Rilke asks, “when this span of life might be fleeted away / as laurel”? The answer he gives is at once straightforward and glorious, and it is one with which Brian Greene would surely concur: “. . . because being here is much, and because all this / that’s here, so fleeting, seems to require us and strangely / concerns us. Us, the most fleeting of all.”' John Banville The Irish Times

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