Expanding outward, London's preference aligns with Romanticism's taste for the sublime and with American individualism. Thoreau's Walden (1854) declares a wish to "live deep and suck out all the marrow of life," a line that, like London's, prizes depth over duration. In a different register, Nietzsche's The Gay Science (1882) dares readers to "live dangerously," proposing risk as a path to self-creation. These antecedents suggest that the meteor metaphor is not an isolated flourish but part of a lineage that treats heightened experience as a moral good. The continuity matters: it turns a personal motto into a cultural argument, asserting that brilliance, even if brief, can reveal values that comfort cannot. [...]
