“ When the witnesses have disappeared, a great man’s death ceases forever to be a disaster; time turns it into a trait of character. An old defunct is dead by nature; he is dead at the time of baptism, neither more nor less than at the time of extreme unction; his life belongs to us; we enter it at either end or in the middle; we go up and down the course of it at will. ”
 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words (1964). copy citation