There is no remedy for time. Or, at least, we do not know what it is. But we must trust in the flow of time, we must live. The body ages because it is time, as does everything that exists on this earth. I am well aware that we have succeeded in prolonging life and youth. For Balzac the critical age for a woman began at thirty; today it begins at fifty. Many scientists believe that in the not too distant future it will be possible to avoid the ailments of old age. This optimistic prediction stands in contrast to what we know and see every day; poverty is increasing on more than half the planet, there are famines, and in the former Soviet Union, in the final years of the Communist regime, the rate of infant mortality rose. (One of the causes of the collapse of the Soviet empire.) But even if the optimists are right, we will continue to be subject to time. We are time and cannot escape its dominion. We can transfigure it but not deny it or destroy it. This is what the great artists, poets, philosophers, scientists and certain men of action have done. Love, too, is an answer: because it is time and made of time, love is at once consciousness of death and an attempt to make of the instant an eternity. All loves are ill-starred, because all are made of time, all are the fragile bond between two temporal creatures who know they are going to die. In all loves, even the most tragic, there is an instant of happiness that it is no exaggeration to call superhuman: it is a victory over time, a glimpse of the other side, of the there that is a here, where nothing changes and everything that is, truly is.