At the age of seven, I had a clear sense that everything had already happened to me.

I ran through the list, to be sure that I had forgotten nothing of the course of human life: I had known divinity and its absolute satisfaction, I had known birth, anger, incomprehension, pleasure, language, accidents, flowers, other people, fish, rain, suicide, salvation, school, destitution, uprootedness, exile, the desert, illness, growth and the feling of loss attached to it, war, the intoxication of having an enemy, alcohol - last but not least - I had known love, that arrow shot so keenly into the void.

Apart from death, which I had brushed up against several times and which would set the counter back to zero, what was there left for me to discover?

My mother talked to me about a lady who had died from eating a poisonous mushroom by mistake. I asked her age. "Forty-nine," she replied. Seven times my age: who was she fooling? What was the problem of dying after such an insanely long life?

I felt dizzy at the idea that the providential mushroom might find me at such a remote age.


from Amelie Nothomb, The Life of Hunger