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I was a delicate child, and to my great embarrassment I was excused from gymnastics as a teenager owing to an illness whose identity is still mystery, at least to me. That is when I acquired my world-weariness, a permanent and invincible lethargy that was to get worse with the passing years. Tiredness as a natural state has for many years been a recurring theme, when I'm complaining about life in letters and conversation. My friends consider it a bad habit of mine, almost an attempt to attract attention, and they don't take me seriously. “I'm increasingly falling apart”, I recently told an old friend. He replied with a slightly mocking air: “You've been telling me that for twenty years”. But the truth is - and it is difficult to explain this to anyone younger - that the descent into the void is long, much longer than I would have ever imagined, and slow, so slow as to appear almost imperceptible (although not to me). The descent is continuous and, what is worse, irreversible: you descend one step at a time, but having put your foot on the lower step, you know that you will never return to the higher one. I have no idea how many more downward steps are to follow. I can only be sure that their number is steadily decreasing.
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Notes
1. The author was nearly 87 when he wrote these words. [Ed.]
2. A. Campanile, Opere, ed. by O. Del Buono (Milan: Bompiani, 1989), Vol. II, pp. 1470-71.
3. [Elias Canetti, The Conscience of Words, translated from the German by Joachim Nengroschel, New York, Seabury Press, 1979.] [Ed.]
4. In a dialogue between two old people who write to each other and give accounts of their lives and thoughts, she says to him: "If only I could think like Madame Chevreuse, who when she was dying, believed that she was about to speak to all her friends in the other world, it would be a wonderful thought" - Ninon de Lenclos, Lettere sulla vecchiaia. Corrispondenza con Saint-Evremond, ed. by D. Galateria (Palermo: Sellerio, 1994), p. 90.
5. Cf. M. Cesa Bianchi, Psicologia dell'invecchiamento. Caratteristiche e problemi (Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1987). Right at the beginning, after pointing out the negative connotations of the term "getting old", the author observes that there are exceptions. He gives the example of some wines and the maturation of cheese.
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