All of us have read thrilling stories in which the hero had only a limited and specified time to live.
Sometimes it was as long as a year;
sometimes as short as twenty-four hours,
but always we were interested in discovering
just how the doomed man chose to spend his last days or his last hours.
I speak, of course,
of free men who have a choice,
not condemned criminals whose sphere of activities is strictly delimited.
Such stories set up thinking,
wondering what we should do under similar circumstances.
What associations should we crowd into those last hours as mortal beings?