There are times when old age produces not eternal youth but a sovereign freedom, a pure necessity in which one enjoys a moment of grace between life and death, and in which all parts of the machine come together to send into the future a feature that cuts across all ages: Titian, Turner, Monet. In old age, Turner acquired or won the right to take painting down a deserted path of no return that is indistinguishable from a final question. Vie de Rancé could be said to mark both Chateaubriand's old age and the start of modern literature. Cinema too sometimes offers us its gifts of the third age, as when Ivens, for example, blends his laughter with the witch’s laughter in the howling wind. Likewise in philosophy, Kant’s Critique of Judgement is an unrestrained work of old age, which his successors have still not caught up with: all the mind’s faculties overcome their limits, the very limits that Kant so carefully laid down in the work of his prime. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 2)