A Confession

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

see that life is an evil and yet con­tinue to live.

The con­cep­tion of an in­fin­ite god, the di­vin­ity of the soul, the con­nex­ion of hu­man af­fairs with God, the unity and ex­ist­ence of the soul, man’s con­cep­tion of moral good­ness and evil—are con­cep­tions for­mu­lated in the hid­den in­fin­ity of hu­man thought

Were it not so ter­rible it would be ludicrous with what pride and self-sat­is­fac­tion we, like chil­dren, pull the watch to pieces, take out the spring, make a toy of it, and are then sur­prised that the watch does not go.

the reply is merely in­def­in­ite, or an iden­tity: o equals o, life is noth­ing. So that philo­sophic know­ledge denies noth­ing, but only replies that the ques­tion can­not be solved by it—that for it the solu­tion re­mains in­def­in­ite.

But on ex­amin­ing the mat­ter I un­der­stood that the reply is not pos­it­ive, it was only my feel­ing that so ex­pressed it.

When it does not know some­thing, it says that what it does not know is stu­pid.

third way, hav­ing un­der­stood that life is evil and stu­pid, was to end it by killing one­self. I un­der­stood that, but some­how still did not kill my­self. The fourth way was to live like So­lomon and Schopen­hauer—know­ing that life is a stu­pid joke played upon us, and still to go on liv­ing, wash­ing one­self, dress­ing, din­ing, talk­ing, and even writ­ing books. This was to me re­puls­ive and tor­ment­ing, but I re­mained in that po­s­i­tion.

third way, hav­ing un­der­stood that life is evil and stu­pid, was to end it by killing one­self. I un­der­stood that, but some­how still did not kill my­self. The fourth way was to live like So­lomon and Schopen­hauer—know­ing that life is a stu­pid joke played upon us, and still to go on liv­ing, wash­ing one­self, dress­ing, din­ing, talk­ing, and even writ­ing books. This was to me re­puls­ive and tor­ment­ing, but I re­mained in that po­s­i­tion.

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