There is death in life and it astonishes me that people pretend not to know that: death whose pitiless presence we feel in each change we survive, for one must learn how to die slowly. We must learn how to die: there’s our whole life. I am not ashamed, Dear, to have wept, another Sunday, cold and too early, in the gondola that kept turning and turning, passing vaguely outlined neighborhoods that seemed to me to belong to another Venice located in Limbo. And the voice of the barcaiolo asking to be paid at the turning of a canal…