Well," he sighed to no one in particular, and looked up into yet another alien sky. "Here we are again. - Iain Banks

He looked up from it at the stars again, and the view was warped and distorted by something in his eyes, which at first he thought was rain.

But did that mean that the urge to live was the result of some sort of illusion? Was the reality, in fact, that nothing mattered and people were fools to think that anything did? Were the choices either despair, the rejection of reason for some idiot faith, or a sort of defensive solipsism?

Death, he remembered somebody saying once, was a kind of victory. To have lived a long good life, a life of prodigious pleasure and minimal misery, and then to die; that was to have won. To attempt to hang on forever risked ending up in some as-yet-unglimpsed horror future. What if you lived forever and all that had gone before, however terrible things had sometimes appeared to be in the past, however badly people had behaved to each other throughout history, was nothing compared to what was yet to come? Suppose in the great book of days that told the story of everything, all the gone, done past was merely a bright, happy introduction compared to the main body of the work, an unending tale of unbearable pain scraped in blood on a parchment of living skin? Better to die than risk that. Live well and then die, so that the you that is you now can never be again, and only tricks can re-create something that might think it is you, but is not.