for just as it is hard to imagine that a dead person used to be alive, or that somebody who was alive is now dead, it is almost as difficult, and of the same order of difficulty (for the annihilation of youth, the destruction of a person full of energy and light-heartedness, is already a form of oblivion), to conceive that she who was young is now old, when the juxtaposition of the appearance of this old woman with that of the young one seems so strongly to exclude it that old and young and old again seem to be taking it in turns, alternating as in a dream, so that one would never have
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