I have always envied those nineteenth-century characters who were able to look back and distinguish the landmarks of their lives, of their development. Some event would mark a point of transition, a different stage. I am talking about writers; but what I really have in mind is the capacity of certain types of people to rationalize their lives, to see things separately, if not clearly. And I understand that this phenomenon shouldn’t be limited to the nineteenth century. […] Either because of some basic flaw of my mind or because of the fluid, amorphous nature of life itself, I have never been capable of distinguishing any landmark, let alone a buoy. If there is anything like a landmark, it is that which I won’t be able to acknowledge myself—i.e., death. In a sense, there never was such a thing as childhood. These categories—childhood, adulthood, maturity—seem to me very odd, and if I use them occasionally in conversation I always regard them mutely, for myself, as borrowed.

Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986)