Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Susan Ertz (1894–1985), a British-born novelist and essayist who later lived in the United States, was known for epigrammatic observations about modern life, marriage, and self-knowledge. This line circulates as one of her characteristic wry aphorisms, contrasting grand metaphysical yearning with the mundane problem of how people actually spend their time. It reflects an early-20th-century milieu in which traditional religious hopes (including immortality) coexisted with growing secular restlessness and boredom. The “rainy Sunday afternoon” evokes a culturally familiar scene of enforced leisure and introspection, when ordinary diversions are limited and one confronts one’s own inner resources—or lack of them.

The remark satirizes the mismatch between people’s abstract desires and their practical capacities. To “long for immortality” suggests a wish for endless life, meaning, or cosmic significance; yet the inability to occupy oneself during a dull afternoon implies a poverty of purpose, imagination, or self-direction. Ertz’s point is not simply that immortality is undesirable, but that many who crave it have not learned how to live well in the time they already have. The rainy Sunday functions as a miniature of eternity: if one cannot endure a few quiet hours with oneself, the fantasy of infinite time may be less a noble aspiration than an evasion of the harder work of cultivating meaning in the present.