A CONFESSION [18]
kill yourself, and you won't discuss. If life displeases you, kill
yourself! You live, and cannot understand the meaning of life --
then finish it, and do not fool about in life, saying and writing
that you do not understand it. You have come into good company
where people are contented and know what they are doing; if you
find it dull and repulsive -- go away!"
Indeed, what are we who are convinced of the necessity of
suicide yet do not decide to commit it, but the weakest, most
inconsistent, and to put it plainly, the stupidest of men, fussing
about with our own stupidity as a fool fusses about with a painted
hussy? For our wisdom, however indubitable it may be, has not
given us the knowledge of the meaning of our life. But all mankind
who sustain life -- millions of them -- do not doubt the meaning of
life.
Indeed, from the most distant time of which I know anything,
when life began, people have lived knowing the argument about the
vanity of life which has shown me its senselessness, and yet they
lived attributing some meaning to it.
From the time when any life began among men they had that
meaning of life, and they led that life which has descended to me.
All that is in me and around me, all, corporeal and incorporeal, is
the fruit of their knowledge of life. Those very instruments of
thought with which I consider this life and condemn it were all
devised not be me but by them. I myself was born, taught, and
brought up thanks to them. They dug out the iron, taught us to cut
down the forests, tamed the cows and horses, taught us to sow corn
and to live together, organized our life, and taught me to think
and speak. And I, their product, fed, supplied with drink, taught
by them, thinking with their thoughts and words, have argued that
they are an absurdity! "There is something wrong," said I to
myself. "I have blundered somewhere." But it was a long time
before I could find out where the mistake was.
VIII
All these doubts, which I am now able to express more or less
systematically, I could not then have expressed. I then only felt
that however logically inevitable were my conclusions concerning
the vanity of life, confirmed as they were by the greatest
thinkers, there was something not right about them. Whether it was
in the reasoning itself or in the statement of the question I did
not know -- I only felt that the conclusion was rationally
convincing, but that that was insufficient. All these conclusions
could not so convince me as to make me do what followed from my
reasoning, that is to say, kill myself. And I should have told an
untruth had I, without killing myself, said that reason had brought
me to the point I had reached. Reason worked, but something else
was also working which I can only call a consciousness of life. A
force was working which compelled me to turn my attention to this
and not to that; and it was this force which extricated me from my
desperate situation and turned my mind in quite another direction.
This force compelled me to turn my attention to the fact that I and
a few hundred similar people are not the whole of mankind, and that
I did not yet know the life of mankind.
Looking at the narrow circle of my equals, I saw only people
who had not understood the question, or who had understood it and
drowned it in life's intoxication, or had understood it and ended
their lives, or had understood it and yet from weakness were living
out their desperate life. And I saw no others. It seemed to me
that that narrow circle of rich, learned, and leisured people to
which I belonged formed the whole of humanity, and that those
milliards of others who have lived and are living were cattle of
some sort -- not real people.
Strange, incredibly incomprehensible as it now seems to me
that I could, while reasoning about life, overlook the whole life
of mankind that surrounded me on all sides; that I could to such a