It wasn’t that he took part in the adults’ conversations, he was devoid of pedantry – he just listened – it was more as if he were gripped by a kind of sombre tension, inappropriate in a boy, which made him seem always alert, always looking out of windows, like someone looking out at a world slipping by before his eyes and which he’s not yet allowed to enter, like a prisoner who knows that no one is waiting or refraining from doing anything just because he’s not there and that his own time is disappearing along with the world rushing by him; it’s a common experience amongst the dying too. He
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