The historical crisis of the years around 1990 left Norberto Bobbio "dumbfounded like many of my generation" and made him acutely aware of his age. He describes this age in an unmistakably cool manner: exclusion from society, living in memory, awareness of the unachieved, slowing down. And again and again the question: How has one managed to avoid all the cars, roof tiles, lightning, and diseases and reach a ripe old age? How deep does the well of memory go? How should one accept boundaries without recognizing them? How does one deal with the wealth of the past, with the feeling of having only reached the foot of knowledge, with the realization of falling more and more out of the technical world every day; and how with one's own mistakes and false predictions?.