A Confession

: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.

“We ap­proach truth only inas­much as we de­part from life,” said So­crates when pre­par­ing for death. “For what do we, who love truth, strive after in life? To free ourselves from the body, and from all the evil that is caused by the life of the body! If so, then how can we fail to be glad when death comes to us?

“The wise man seeks death all his life and there­fore death is not ter­rible to him.”

fer­ment­ing its ‘life.’ The lump will dis­in­teg­rate and there will be an end of the fer­ment­ing and of all the ques­tions.” So an­swers the clear side of sci­ence and can­not an­swer oth­er­wise if it strictly fol­lows its prin­ciples.

“What is the mean­ing of my life?” was: “You are what you call your ‘life’; you are a trans­it­ory, cas­ual co­he­sion of particles. The mu­tual in­ter­ac­tions and changes of these particles pro­duce in you what you call your ‘life.’ That co­he­sion will last some time; af­ter­wards the in­ter­ac­tion of these particles will cease and what you call ‘life’ will cease, and so will all your ques­tions. You are an ac­ci­dent­ally united little lump of some­thing. That little lump fer­ments. The little lump calls that

“What will come of what I am do­ing today or shall do to­mor­row? What will come of my whole life?”

could not sat­isfy my­self with that. Had I been like a man liv­ing in a wood from which he knows there is no exit, I could have lived; but I was like one lost in a wood who, hor­ri­fied at hav­ing lost his way, rushes about wish­ing to find the road. He knows that each step he takes con­fuses him more and more, but still he can­not help rush­ing about.

hung. I saw the dragon clearly and the honey no longer tasted sweet. I only saw the un­es­cap­able dragon and the mice, and I could not tear my gaze from them. and this is not a fable but the real un­answer­able truth in­tel­li­gible to all.

One can only live while one is in­tox­ic­ated with life; as soon as one is sober it is im­possible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stu­pid fraud! That is pre­cisely what it is: there is noth­ing either amus­ing or witty about it, it is simply cruel and stu­pid.

I too clung to the twig of life, know­ing that the dragon of death was in­ev­it­ably await­ing me, ready to tear me to pieces; and I could not un­der­stand why I had fallen into such tor­ment. I tried to lick the honey which formerly con­soled me, but the honey no longer gave me pleas­ure, and the white and black mice of day and night gnawed at the branch by which I

My men­tal con­di­tion presen­ted it­self to me in this way: my life is a stu­pid and spite­ful joke someone has played on me. Though I did not ac­know­ledge a “someone” who cre­ated me, yet such a present­a­tion—that someone had played an evil and stu­pid joke on my by pla­cing me in the world—was the form of ex­pres­sion that sug­ges­ted it­self most nat­ur­ally to me.