"There is nothing more tragic for a man who has been expecting to die than a long convalescence.
After that touch from the wing of Death, what seemed so important is so no longer; other things
become so which had at first seemed unimportant, or which one did not even know existed.
The miscellaneous mass of acquired knowledge of every kind that has overlain the mind gets
peeled off in places like a mask of paint, exposing the bare skin - the very flesh of the authentic
creature that had lain beneath it.

"And I compared myself to a palimpsest; I tasted the scholar's joy when he discovers under more
recent writing, and on the same paper, a very ancient and infinitely more precious text. What was
this occult text? In order to read it, was it not first of all necessary to efface the more recent one?

"I was no longer the sickly, studious being to whom my early mortality, with all its rigidity and
restrictions, had been suited. There was more here than a convalescence; there was an increase,
a recrudescence of life, the influx of a richer, warmer blood which must of necessity affect my
thoughts, touch them one by one, inform them all, stir and color the most remote, delicate and
secret fibers of my being. For, either to strength or to weakness, the creature adapts itself; it
constitutes itself according to the powers it possesses; but if these should increase, if they should
permit a wider scope . . . I did not think all this at the time, and my description gives a false idea
of me. In reality, I did not think at all; I never questioned myself; a happy fatalism guided me. I was
afraid that too hasty an investigation might disturb the mystery of my slow transformation. I must
allow time for the effaced characters to reappear, and not attempt to re-form them. Not so much
as neglecting my mind therefore, as allowing it to lie fallow, I gave myself up to the luxurious
enjoyment of my own self, of external things, of all existence, which seemed to me divine..."