J’ai lu tout ce que je pouvais trouver comme littérature sur la mort, à commencer par Platon pour arriver à La Mort d’Ivan Ilitch de Tolstoï, La Mort et la pensée occidentale du professeur Jacques Choron, Le Déni de la mort, d’Ernest Becker.

Lost in a featureless wasteland of my own mortality, and finding no traction in the reams of scientific studies, intracellular molecular pathways, and endless curves of survival statistics, I began reading literature again: Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Woolf, Kafka, Mo

My old man and I lived for fifty years seeking happiness and not finding it; and it is only now, these last two years, since we had nothing left and have lived as labourers, that we have found real happiness, and we wish for nothing better than our present lot.'