" You’ll always get the kind of person who watches himself acting, who
sees himself as if in some continuous performance. Who believes there’ll be witnesses to report his generous or
contemptible death and that this is what matters most. Or who, if there
are no witnesses, invents them — the eye of God, the world stage,
or whatever. Who believes that the world only exists to the extent that it’s reported and events only to the extent that they’re
recounted, even though it’s highly unlikely that anyone will
bother to recount them, or to recount those particular facts, I
mean, the facts relating to each individual. The vast majority
of things simply happen and there neither is nor ever was any
record of them, those we hear about are an infinitesimal fraction
of what goes on. Most lives and, needless to say, most deaths, are
forgotten as soon as they’ve occurred and leave not the slightest
trace, or become unknown soon afterwards, after a few years, a
few decades, a century, which, as you know, is, in reality, a very
short time. Take battles, for example, think how important they
were for those who took part in them and, sometimes, for their
compatriots, think how many of those battles now mean nothing to us, not even their names, we don’t even know which war
they belonged to, more than that, we don’t care. What do the
names Ulundi and Beersheba, or Gravelotte and Rezonville, or
Namur, or Maiwand, Paardeberg and Mafeking, or Mohacs, or
Nájera, mean to anyone nowadays?’ — He mispronounced that
last name, Nájera. — ‘But there are many others who resist, incapable of accepting their own insignificance or invisibility, I
mean once they’re dead and converted into past matter, once
they’re no longer present to defend their existence and to declare: “Hey, I’m here. I can intervene, I have influence, I can do
good or cause harm, save or destroy, and even change the course
of the world, because I haven’t yet disappeared.” — ‘I’m still here,
therefore I must have been here before, "

― Javier Marías , Tu rostro mañana