Books aren't made in the way that babies are born, they are made like pyramids. There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed on top of one another, and it's back-breaking, sweaty, time-consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.
As you get older, the heart sheds its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms which break off several branches at one go. And while nature's greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.
He also felt, in the last year of his life, that he was 'liquifying like an old Camembert'.
