An unrelenting observer of himself and his surroundings. Not even eighteen years old, Thomas Bernhard was torn from his musical studies in 1949 by a serious illness. He sinks into the dull white of the hospital wards, at the mercy of the trained gaze of the staff, who accurately categorize him among the dying. The last station of the barely living is the bathroom, from which only the dead emerge. Surrounded by this atmosphere that kills the will to live, he suddenly knows that he must not stop breathing, that he wants to live.