In one of his most stunning utterances Nietzsche said that a joke is an epigram on the death of a feeling.17 Our improvisation was violently scatological, and would not survive transcription. But feelings were being mourned: feelings about the first half of life. Youth can perhaps be defined as the illusion of your own durability. The final evaporation of this illusion parches the skin beneath the eyes and makes your hair crackle to the brush. It was over. There would be hell to pay. Dying suns of a certain size perform the alchemist’s nightmare: they turn gold into lead.
