Julian Barnes

You won't have had much time to think in those three seconds before it hits you.

One of my French gurus is the 17th century philosopher Montaigne, and he said we should think about death on a daily basis.

We should make it our familiar.

That's the best way of treating it, not as some awful sort of ghastly skeleton with a scythe in its hand coming to chop us off.

But we should think, he says, we should think of death

death when our horse shies or when a tile falls off the roof of a house.

We should make it sort of, we should almost domesticate it, tame it in this way.

And then we should hope to die while planting out our cabbages.

That's a wonderfully sort of wise approach to it all.

I haven't got a vegetable garden anymore.

I used to have one.

And when I planted cabbages, they didn't do very well.

That's the only fault I can find with Montaigne's view of death.

I've certainly been thoughtful about it.

I've certainly been afraid of it.

And it's a kind of moot point if you're

Very familiar with the idea of death and the way it happens, whether you therefore enjoy life more knowing that it's so passing.

I don't know the answer to that.

Do you feel like you enjoyed life more because of your – Well, I actually think that people who don't think about death at all enjoy life probably just as much as people who do.

So that's a bit of a downside.