The French philosopher, who wrote about the importance of accepting risk and living a truly alive existence, died fearlessly, attempting to rescue children from choppy waves in Saint-Tropez. They survived; she did not.

Risk and fear: From water, and from fire: As we speak, Saint-Tropez is directly menaced by a massive forest fire in the region.

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Here is a famous sentence from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) — a rivulet of Clarissa’s consciousness:

This has the balance and beauty, the well-observed ‘interior’ feel, of the great modernist’s sentences. That is, this is not speech; it’s the intimate candid mulling mind, the mind observing London in motion and talking to itself about it. Woolf never forgets to meld the objective world and the subjective, to cast subjectivity as always in response to the world outside itself. All those repetitions – out, out, out; very, very – are the squirreling mind circling its deep familiar themes, its odd, personal, peculiar obsessions and dreads. The ever-circulating cabs function as an objective correlative for, a provocation in the direction of, nihilistic despair: They go in and out, in and out, around the taxi stands and the streets, perpetually, conveying the pointless fever and fret of existence (hence Clarissa’s sympathetic apprehension of what the frightened, shell-shocked Great War veteran Septimus Smith has communicated in killing himself).

The word perpetual, with its religious undertones, comes to this aggressively secular woman (“love and religion would destroy that, whatever it was, the privacy of the soul”) from what has inevitably clung to her from having grown up in a religious (though itself rapidly secularizing) culture. Lux perpetuam, in traumatized godless post-war London, becomes the infernal machinery (tanks, cabs) of perpetual motion. (And perpetual, paired with sense, offers Woolf the assonance that gives her sentences their poetic feel, just as a routine assonantal phrase like taxi cabs does.)

In this sentence’s reference to the sea, we get three crucial elements of human awareness and engagement: nature, culture, consciousness. If you look at the sentence in isolation, it doesn’t make much sense: Why, in the midst of intense city life, would one feel oneself alone and adrift at sea? Why would one say such a silly thing as that it’s very very dangerous to live for even one day?

At sea: Well, that one’s not too hard. The phrase to be at sea conveys confusion, bewilderment, displacement to a wilderness; and the vast formless sea rising up in Clarissa’s mind in the midst of the sharply delimited city of forms communicates her psychic distance from the ongoingness of life, her preoccupation with the majesty and stupendousness and vacancy of death itself. For, having no religious frame (heaven; hell) in which to place, narrate, furnish the event, she can only summon up the strongest image possible of nothingness and separation from all people and things.

The day is like wide water, without sound.

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And why does it feel exceedingly dangerous to live even one day?

Two reasons come to mind: First of all, very simply, life is in fact quite treacherous, moment to moment. Read Robert Louis Stevenson’s spectacular essay, “Aes Triplex,” for the best evocation of our ridiculous and noble denial of this reality. You are lazing on an elegant beach in Saint-Tropez. Just behind you fires rage in its beautiful forest, and in front of you the placid ocean is also a devourer.

But every day is dangerous as well because life is so seductive: “Heaven only knows why one loves it so.” But one does; almost everyone desperately loves life. So the danger life extends toward us as we rush to embrace it every day is the danger of being caught up in the lie that it never ends. (Freud: “To endure life remains, when all is said, the first duty of all living beings. Illusion can have no value if it makes this more difficult for us.”) Both Woolf and James Joyce set their novels (I have Ulysses in mind) in one day; we follow their characters through one morning, afternoon, and night, and then the novel ends with the night. This is fiction allowing us access to the truth of our brevity.

In Ulysses, at the graveside of his friend Paddy Dignam, Martin Cunningham laments: “In the midst of life…”

In the midst of life, we are in death.

At the end of the same episode, Joyce’s hero, Leopold Bloom, inverts this: “In the midst of death we are in life.”