0NCE you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos¹. From the beginning it was never anything but chaos: it was a fluid which enveloped² me, which I breathed in through the gills. In the sub-strata, where the moon shone steady and opaque³, it was smooth and fecundating; above it was a jangle and a discord⁴. In everything I quickly saw the opposite, the contradiction, and between the real and the unreal the irony⁵, the paradox⁶. I was my own worst enemy. There was nothing I wished to do which I could just as well not do. Even as a child, when I lacked for nothing, I wanted to die: I wanted to surrender because I saw no sense in struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated⁷, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had not asked for. Everybody around me was a failure, or if not a failure, ridiculous. Especially the successful ones. The successful ones bored me to tears. I was sympathetic to a fault, but it was not sympathy that made me so. It was a purely⁸ negative quality, a weakness which blossomed at the mere⁹ sight of human misery¹⁰. I never helped any one expecting that it would do any good; I helped because I was helpless to do otherwise. To want to change the condition of affairs seemed futile¹¹ to me; nothing would be altered, I was convinced, except by a change of heart, and who could change the hearts of men? Now and then a friend was converted; it was something to make me puke. I had no more need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often said to myself, I would meet Him calmly and spit in His face.

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