From entries in The Book Against Death that were published for the first time in English in the Fall 2021–Winter 2022 issue of Salmagundi. Canetti, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, worked on the manuscript from 1937 until his death in 1994. Translated from the German.

1942
Pascal was thirty-nine years old when he died; I will soon be thirty-seven. That means I have barely two years left, which isn’t much time!

1946
I would like to be able to not think of death for an entire week, not even of the word, as if…