The Life of a Stupid Man

The hand with the pen began to tremble, and before long he was even drooling. The only time his head ever cleared was after a sleep induced by eight-tenths of a gram of Veronal, and even then it never lasted more than thirty minutes or an hour. He barely made it through each day in the gloom, leaning as it were upon a chipped and narrow sword.

Just as he reached the point of utter exhaustion, he happened to read Raymond Radiguet’s dying words, ‘God’s soldiers are coming to get me,’ and sensed once again the laughter of the gods. He tried to fight against his own superstitions and sentimentalism, but he was physically incapable of putting up any kind of struggle.

As he thought about his life, he felt both tears and mockery welling up inside him. All that lay before him was madness or suicide. He walked down the darkening street alone, determined now to wait for the destiny that would come to annihilate him.

With the last of his strength, he tried to write his autobiography, but it did not come together as easily as he had hoped. This was because of his remaining pride and skepticism, and a calculation of what was in his own best interest. He couldn’t help despising these qualities in himself; but neither could he help feeling that ‘Everyone is the same under the skin.’ He tended to think that Goethe’s title ‘Poetry and Truth’ could serve for anyone’s autobiography, but he knew that not everyone is moved by literature. His own works were unlikely to appeal to people who were not like him and had not lived a life like his – this was another feeling that worked upon him. And so he decided to write his own brief ‘Poetry and Truth’.

She did once give him a bottle of cyanide with the remark, ‘As long as we have this, it will give us both strength.’

And it did indeed give him strength. Sitting in a rattan chair, observing the new growth of a shii tree, he often thought of the peace that death would give him.

He did not die with her, but he took a certain satisfaction in his never having touched her.

She had a radiant face, like the morning sun on a thin sheet of ice. He was fond of her, but he did not love her, nor had he ever laid a finger on her.

‘I’ve heard you want to die,’ she said.

‘Yes – or rather, it’s not so much that I want to die as that I’m tired of living.’

This dialogue led to a vow to die together.

‘It would be a Platonic suicide, I suppose,’ she said.

‘A Platonic double suicide.’

He was amazed at his own sangfroid.

Taking advantage of his sleeping alone, he tried to hang himself with a sash tied over the window lattice. When he slipped his head into the sash, however, he suddenly became afraid of death. Not that he feared the suffering he would have to experience at the moment of dying. He decided to try it again, using his pocket watch to see how long it would take. This time, everything began to cloud over after a short interval of pain. He was sure that once he got past that, he would enter death. Checking the hands of his watch, he discovered that the pain lasted one minute and twenty-some seconds. It was pitch dark outside the lattices, but the wild clucking of chickens echoed in the darkness.

At thirty-five, he was walking through a pinewood with the spring sun beating down on it. He was recalling, too, the words he had written a few years earlier: ‘It is unfortunate for the gods that, unlike us, they cannot commit suicide.’

It is unfortunate for the gods that, unlike us, they cannot commit suicide.’