An evening of life! I have achieved it. Life, in the end, is nothing more than a habit that you lose after all the others.

As Marcel Jouandeau approached his seventieth birthday, he began to observe the signs of his aging and wrote this book about preparing for death and gradually parting with joys and worries. Death enters a person secretly, silently, like a splinter. Juando admitted that he was obsessed with his death and was waiting for it, just as they were waiting for a solemn test. He tried to lie in a coffin and realized the horror of complete numbness, denial of the manifestations of life.

As you grow old, everything gradually becomes a memory - even the present. You even perceive yourself as having left a long time ago. Life little by little moves away from you and becomes smaller, as if you were looking at it through an inverted lorgnette. Gradually it loses all its significance, all its brilliance, all its sharpness, all its entertainment. Finally, it turns into nothing, and at the moment when you lose it, you essentially do not lose anything - that means you do not die.