The bluish colour of non-existence

(Conversation between Ernest Hemingway and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

'And do you know how to be dead, Johann?' asked Hemingway, in order to lighten the gravity of the moment. 'Do you really believe that the best way to be dead is to waste time chatting with me?'

'Don't make a fool of yourself, Ernest,' said Goethe. 'You know perfectly well that at this moment we are but the frivolous fantasy of a novelist who lets us say things we would probably never say on our own. But to conclude.... You see, I have come to the definite conclusion that the eternal trial is bullshit. I have decided to make use of my death at last and, if I can express it with such an imprecise term, to go to sleep. To enjoy the delights of total non-existence, which my great enemy Novalis used to say has a bluish colour.'

Milan Kundera - Immortality, 240