Thoughts on catastrophes and my reading of a passage by Marcel Proust about the subject.

Here is the question presented to Marcel Proust by the French newspaper L'Intransigeant in 1922, followed by his brilliant reply.

“An American scientist announces that the world will end, or at least that such a huge part of the continent will be destroyed, and in such a sudden way, that death will be the certain fate of hundreds of millions of people. If this prediction were confirmed, what do you think would be its effect on people between the time when they acquired the aforementioned certainty and the moment of cataclysm? Finally, as far as you’re concerned, what would you do in this last hour?”