Sublime

But little by little the oscillations become slower, to the point of resolving themselves in mild and melancholic long waves; from this moment on all is decided, and life is nothing more than a preparation for death. This can be expressed in a more brutal and less exact way by saying that man is a diminished adolescent.

The house was large and deeply lived-in, all the shelves and surfaces stacked with books and boxes, framed pictures, old greeting cards set up like tent cities. If there was a spectrum of spaces defined at one end by my barren apartment, this marked the other extreme. Every single surface told a story. A long one. With digressions.

Florida Scott-Maxwell’s Stoic diary during her terminal illness, The Measure of My Days,