In my relations to city, to family, to profession, to society, to love, to the existent or prospective community of our people, in all these relations I have not acquitted myself well, and moreover I have failed in such a fashion -I know from close observation- as has no one else around me. At bottom it is only that child’s idea: “No one is as bad as I am,” which later, when corrected, only produces a new pain. But here we are no longer dealing with badness and self-reproach, but with the patent psychological fact of not acquitting oneself. Nonetheless this idea persists and will persist.
I don’t want to make much of the suffering associated with the unlived life, for in retrospect this suffering seems (and has always seemed so at all the small stages along the way) all too undeservedly mild compared to the facts whose pressure it has had to withstand. Still and all it was often too great to be borne much longer, or if it was not too great, was too meaningless. (In these morasses, the question of meaning is perhaps admissible.)
The most obvious escape from all this was, from childhood on, perhaps, not suicide but the thought of suicide. In my case what deterred me from suicide was no particular cowardice, but only the thought, which similarly ended in meaninglessness, “What, you, who can’t do anything, imagine you can do this? How dare you think so? If you could kill yourself, you more or less don’t have to.” And so on. Later more understanding slowly followed. I stopped thinking of suicide. What now lay before me, when I was able to think clearly, over and beyond the confused hopes, the lonely raptures, the swollen vanities (this ‘over and beyond’ that I was able to achieve only very rarely, as rarely as my staying alive permitted) -what lay before me was a wretched life and a wretched death. “It was as if the shame of it must outlive him” are more or less the closing words of my Trial.
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