Reading 1

“You are, let us say, a citizen of the United Kingdom. And in your late forties you notice, with some sourness, how much of your social time is spent listening – or remaining silent – while your elders talk about health and its maintenance, about diet advisories and exercise regimes, about diagnoses and prognoses, about treatments, about surgical interventions, et cetera, et cetera. All this goes on for year after year after year until at a certain point – in your mid-fifties – you find that the health chat no longer sounds like a snore in another room. Is this mere habituation? No. The ugly truth is that you’ve started to find it all rather interesting. Mortality, when it’s close enough to reveal its lineaments, turns out to be rather interesting…”

- Martin Amis, Inside Story (2020)

“It’s normally agreed that the question ‘How are you?’ doesn’t put you on your oath to give a full or honest answer. So when asked these days, I tend to say something cryptic like, ‘A bit early to say.’”

- Christopher Hitchens, Mortality (2012)

“Towards the end—if we live long enough—there is often a competition among our declining and decaying parts as to which will get top billing on our death certificate. As Flaubert put it, ‘No sooner do we come into this world than bits of us start dropping off.’”

- Julian Barnes, Nothing to be Frightened Of (2008)