Who in the heart of certain anxieties at the bottom of some dreams, has not known death as a shattering and miraculous sensation with which nothing in the order of mental experience could ever be confused? You have to have experienced this gasping crescendo of anguish which comes over you in waves, and then swells you as if blown up by some unbearable bellows. The anguish draws nigh and then withdraws, but each time fuller, each time more ponderous and apoplectic. Which the body itself is, having reached its limits of distension and force - and yet it must go on. It is a sort of suction-cup on the soul whose tartness is like an acid slurping up the limits of what is feelable. And the soul cannot even fall back on a breakdown. For this distension itself is false. Death is not so easily satisfied. This distension, in the order of physical experience, is like a film negative of that shrinking process which is to keep the mind busy over the entire area of the living body.
This held-in gasp is the last, really the last. It is time for taking stock. The minute feared so much, dreaded so much and so much dreamt of is here. And it is true that one is going to die. One watches and measures his breath. And time unfurls completely, in all its immensity, and is resolved in such a way that it is bound to dissolve without a trace. 
Go ahead and die, you poor dogged bone. They are quite aware that your thought is not complete or finished; in fact no matter which way you turn your head, you haven't even started thinking.
Which makes no difference. The fear you are assailed by now is drawing and quartering you in exact proportion to this impossibility. For you are quite aware that you have to make it to this other side which nothing in you, not even this body - above all, this body you will take leave of without ever forgetting its substance, thickness, and impossible asphyxia - is prepared for. Antonin Artaud
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