Page for page, one of my favourite pieces of writing ever.
I am a ridiculous man. Nowadays they call me mad.
All of a sudden, I realised that it would not matter to me whether the world existed or whether there was nothing at all anywhere. I began to intuit and sense with all my being, that there was nothing around me.
Suddenly, I noticed in one of these spaces a tiny star and began watching it intently. That was because that tiny star had given me an idea: I decided to kill myself that night.
One might go so far as to say that the world was created for me alone, as it were: I will shoot myself and the world will cease to exist, at least for me.
Now they were burying me in the earth. Everyone went away and I was alone.
It may have been a dream, but it cannot be that it did not take place.
Like a foul trichina*, like a pestilential germ bringing contagion to whole countries, I infected that earth, happy and sinless before my arrival. They learned how to lie, and grew to love lying and perceive its beauty.
When they tookup criminality, they invented justice and enacted whole codes of law to preserve it, while for the maintenance of the codes they set up the guillotine.
I won’t accept, and refuse to believe that evil is the normal condition of men.
Dream? What’s a dream? Isn’t this life of ours a dream? I’ll go further: suppose it never, ever comes true, and there is no paradise (now that I do understand!), well, I’ll still go on preaching. And yet how simple a matter it is: in one day, in one hour it could all be brought about at once!
The chief thing is to love others as oneself, that’s the main thing, and that’s it—absolutely nothing more is necessary.
A parasitic nematode worm.