The book takes place over a week in July 2011 that begins with Dessaix collapsing in Oxford Street, Darlinghurst, and being rushed to nearby St Vincent's Hospital.

He had come from Tasmania for a reading at NIDA of his play A Mad Affair, which imagines what happens during an hour-long encounter between the Russian writer Turgenev (subject of another of Dessaix's books) and a young actress on a train in 1880.

The play's subject, infatuation ("always about beginnings"), becomes a theme in the book, which is an artful rendering of his bodily experiences and his stream of thoughts about love, travel, literature, religion, mortality and other concerns familiar to readers of his work.

How, I wonder, did he write this meandering but precise, playful and often profound essay while teetering near death, or remember it all after his recovery?

"This is what the Americans call creative non-fiction," Dessaix says from Hobart. "You're not making things up but you are rearranging them on the page to please and lead the reader forward.

"I am lying on my back and all I can do is think, and I thought very clearly. I remembered sounds and smells and the burnished forearm [of a paramedic] on the first pages. I'm not good at anything else: words are the only thing I can be creative with and defend myself with."

From his bed he makes this as much a travel book as any of his others. "There's a hopefulness to travel, don't you think?" he writes. And says, "What I've done is transport my little self away from suburban life. Travel is being transported and confronted by the possibility of other selves."

Dessaix finds himself "interesting" in India,  "galvanised, more alive than in Germany or Sweden". Stories from a trip to India lead to the Indian concept of darshan –  "the electrifying sense of seeing at the moment of being seen" –  and the destructive goddess Kali, who seems to throw careful plans into chaos.

The book echoes his autobiographical novel Night Letters, in which the narrator R., recently diagnosed with an unnamed illness, writes from Venice about his European travels and meditations on desire and death.

At the age of 70, Dessaix's perspective on death is partly shaped by living with HIV. "I've been under threat for quite a long time now," he says. "All humans are, but my threats have names."

The book's title comes from a Philip Larkin poem that begins, "What are days for? Days are where we live." Dessaix says, "In my last chapter I tried to indicate that I really am intent now on having a good day and not thinking about how many years I have. A day is the only space you can be optimistic in at my age.

"The book is about restoration: my heart was restored, a love of life was restored, good books restore something in us that we think we've lost."

He recalls his childhood, a story told in his 1994 memoir, A Mother's Disgrace, about being raised by adoptive parents in suburban Sydney and eventually finding his birth mother and his identity as a gay man.

Central to this book are friends and especially Peter Timms, Dessaix's partner of 30 years, whom he awaits in hospital not far from where they met through a newspaper ad: "He's back. My continuance. My wholeness." Mattering to someone is a source of Dessaix's happiness, as is letting go of the unimportant.

And his heart? "It's fabulous. I went to the doctor recently because I was travelling to Ladakh [in northern India] and had to go up to 18,000 feet. He said, 'Your heart is as good as new'.

"Something about the way I have lived life and thought about life, it doesn't mean bad things don't happen but I do come through OK. In the end, of course, I won't."

WHAT DAYS ARE FOR

Robert Dessaix

Knopf, $29.99