... a book about death.

Without suspecting it, we are all living like somnambulists, performing the day's tasks mechanically, blindly, superficially, whether they are purely manual tasks which one could perform with one's eyes closed, or intellectual tasks which demand the most concentrated attention, the most unsleeping vigilance, the intensest application. Even when we grapple with a thought which we are striving to express, we feel, obscurely, that we are thinking of something else; something, we cannot say what, which seems to us far more important.

—Maurice Maeterlinck, Before the Great Silence, translated by Bernard Miall.