In writing his journal this deeply debilitated man attained a kind of nobility. He had found a way, in Luria’s words, ‘to live, not merely exist’. Luria’s book about him, The Man with a Shattered World, leaves him still living with his parents in his home town of Komovsk, sitting at his desk each morning, working on his journal. He died in 1993 at the age of seventy-three, still writing sentences to himself.
