In the silence stardrops are heard dripping, falling from heaven somewhere in the great distance. Their echoes skip and bounce across the great sky vault. This is the only sound in heaven and on earth. - The sound emanates from a faucet not quite turned off. Alone in the world and lonely, the faucet drips, drips.

These reminiscences are organized in 70 parts. The narrator switches between his vantage point as an old man and as a child.

Every now and then the old man draws us out of the years of childhood to the present. Virtues are evaluated and set up against what has already passed. And then he dives back into time past, and new fragments of life are conjured up.

It annoys him that he now, symbolically speaking, finds himself at the end of the world and only can look back on the life that youth now journey through while he is fettered in the prison of old age. However, the life he looks back on is also exceptional.