The Last Days of Immanuel Kant remains one of Thomas de Quincey's most unique and elaborate texts. Thanks in large part to the memoirs signed by Ehregott Wasianski, the English essayist was able to lend his words to Kant's faithful friend and recount the last moments of the famous Enlightenment philosopher. Meticulously following the flow of events, De Quincey gives us an account in his pages of the worries that now invade that poor spirit in once brilliant. Trapped by his old age and health problems, the philosopher is portrayed as an exhausted and sick man.

His memory and balance losses afflict Wasianski, who tries by all means to make his life more bearable until his last breath. We must not lose sight, however, of the fact that, even if we rely on the testimonies of some of his contemporaries, what De Quincey puts before the reader is a work of speculative non-fiction, subject to discursive intrusions and very subtle biographical deviations, and in which the figure of the philosopher is sublimated while satirizing in his most intimate facets. From this mixture of irony and tenderness ends up a deep melancholy, that of time passing and that inexorably destroys even the most enlightened minds.