Nabakov, linked in  Andrew Sullivan.  I find the commonsense notion that what will happen to our consciousness when we die, will be pretty much like what was happening before we were conceived, to be at once compelling, comforting, and frightening:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our
existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of
darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views
the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at
some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a
young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking
for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks
before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged — the
same house, the same people — and then realized that he did not exist
there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse
of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar
gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what
particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage
standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a
coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events,
his very bones had disintegrated.