I see
infirmity and weakness close upon me, I feel I cannot do without
affection, and I know that I have no ambition, and that my faculties are
declining. I remember that I am forty-seven years old, and that all my
brood of youthful hopes has flown away. So that there is no deceiving
myself as to the fate which awaits me: increasing loneliness,
mortification of spirit, long-continued regret, melancholy neither to be
consoled nor confessed, a mournful old age, a slow decay, a death in the
desert!
Terrible dilemma! Whatever is still possible to me has lost its savor,
while all that I could still desire escapes me, and will always escape
me. Every impulse ends in weariness and disappointment. Discouragement,
depression, weakness, apathy; there is the dismal series which must be
forever begun and re-begun, while we are still rolling up the Sisyphean
rock of life. Is it not simpler and shorter to plunge head-foremost into
the gulf?
No, rebel as we may, there is but one solution--to submit to the general
order, to accept, to resign ourselves, and to do still what we can. It
is our self-will, our aspirations, our dreams, that must be sacrificed.
We must give up the hope of happiness once for all! Immolation of the
self--death to self--this is the only suicide which is either useful or
permitted.
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