The way to see how beautiful life is

"If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives... But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance – interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death."
"That's all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon – I don't want it! But I'm not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say O lovely! I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don't give a hoot for eternity."
"It's nothing to do with eternity," said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. "All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?"

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossed (Gollancz, 2002) p. 158