I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. I do not consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I respect medicine and doctors. I know very well that by not consulting a doctor I am injuring only myself, but still I will not go—out of spite. I understand this, and yet I persist in it. Let my liver grow worse. I have been living like that for a long time—twenty years. I am forty now. I once served in an office, but no longer. I was a rude official and enjoyed being so. I took pleasure in making people uncomfortable, in grinding my teeth at them, in feeling myself superior for a brief, bitter moment. I knew even then that my behavior was ridiculous, but I continued all the same, clinging to it like a habit.
I was lying to myself when I called this spite. It was not spite but a kind of empty playacting. Deep down I was ashamed, constantly aware that I was not what I pretended to be. *** I felt opposite impulses swarming within me, demanding expression, yet I deliberately suppressed them. This inner contradiction tormented me, made me sick, and finally exhausted me. I write this not to be admired. I know very well I sound absurd. I write because I feel an urge to confess, to set things straight for myself at least. I do not expect sympathy. I am only attempting to explain how a man can take pleasure in his own degradation, how he can cherish it as if it were a secret treasure.
I say let the world go to hell, but let me have my tea. There is a whole philosophy in that phrase. Tea is comfort, habit, a small warm refuge. And yet even this I manage to spoil for myself with thought. I sit and think until thought itself becomes a disease. Excessive consciousness—that is my curse. I envy the man who can act without reflection, who can be simple, who can live without dissecting every movement of his soul.
I am convinced that consciousness is a sickness. A man of action is limited, but he accepts his limitation as something whole and final. I cannot. I analyze endlessly and remain motionless. I take a strange pleasure in this paralysis, in knowing my own baseness and weakness, and I return to it again and again as if it were a habit I cannot abandon.
Enough—I will stop here. I have said too much and yet not the most important thing. But that, too, is characteristic. Let it remain unsaid.