The cardiac intermittence has been more or less frequent, yet every day I have had periods of regular pulsations (58-66-72 per minute) as usual.
The day before yesterday I contracted a bad cold, accompanied by a little fever. Wondering if it would degenerate into pneumonia, I faced anew the possibility of a near end, and I resumed the analysis of my thoughts, feelings, and sensations.
As my 70 years draw near to their close, it seems to me that a feeling of satiety with life, what I call the “natural death instinct,” is gently beginning to evolve.
When, in autumn 1910, experimenting with typhoid cultures, I had soiled my face and mouth, I naturally said to myself that it might give me typhoid fever. I washed my face and beard with soap and a solution of sublimate without considering that I was safe against the infection. I reasoned that it would be preferable to contract the disease and to die of it. (At my age typhoid fever is almost always fatal. I had never had it, and might therefore consider myself in a state of receptivity.) It is fine to fall on the battlefield, especially at an age when life and activity are already on the wane. But all that was pure reasoning; instinctively I still felt a great desire to live, and it was with joy that I counted the days which separated me from the danger of having contracted typhoid fever. I felt much relieved a fortnight after the incident, considering that the limit of incubation was passed.
Thus reasoning and feeling or instinct were not in accord.
Since then, in the three following years, a modification has taken place in my psychical condition.
The prospect of death frightens me less than before. During my cardiac crisis of the 19th October 1913 I even felt no fear of death, and my satisfaction at my recovery was less than before.
I think it is that difference in quantity which constitutes the first symptoms of indifference towards death, an indifference which is hardly perceptible at first.
Satiety with life is sometimes observed in old people of 80; it is not surprising to feel the first approach of it about 70, especially in the case of a man like myself who began very early to lead a very intense life.