Henri Bergson died in Paris on January 4, 1941, at 81. He'd won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, unusual for a philosopher, for prose that the Swedish Academy said combined "brilliant imagery" with ideas about time and consciousness that influenced an entire generation of European thinkers. His concept of duree, the idea that lived time is fundamentally different from the measurable time of clocks and calendars, reshaped how philosophers, novelists, and psychologists understood experience. Bergson argued that human consciousness flows as a continuous stream, not in the discrete measurable units that science imposes on it. Science's tendency to spatialize time, to treat it like a line that can be divided into equal segments, misses its essential character. Real time, as we actually live it, stretches and compresses. A minute of boredom and a minute of joy are not the same minute. Marcel Proust was deeply influenced by this idea; so were William James, Gilles Deleuze, and the entire phenomenological tradition. His lectures at the College de France drew such enormous crowds that traffic jammed the surrounding streets, a phenomenon the French press dubbed "Bergsonism." He was arguably the most famous philosopher in the world between 1900 and 1920. When the Nazis occupied Paris in 1940, Bergson was exempt from anti-Jewish laws because the Vichy government offered him honorary Aryan status. He refused it. Despite severe arthritis that left him barely able to walk, he stood in line with other Jewish Parisians to register under the racial laws, reportedly in the freezing cold, in failing health. He died weeks later of pulmonary congestion. His refusal to accept special treatment became one of the quiet moral acts of the occupation: a philosopher who chose solidarity with the persecuted over the comfort of a status he found contemptible.