Knowing how easily the littlest things can torture me, I deliberately avoid contact with the littlest things. If I suffer when a cloud passes in front of the sun, how will I not suffer from the darkness of the forever overcast day that’s my life?

My isolation isn’t a search for happiness (which my soul wouldn’t know how to feel), nor for tranquillity (which no one obtains unless he never really lost it), but for sleep, for effacement, for a modest renunciation.

The four walls of my squalid room are at once a cell and a wilderness, a bed and a coffin. My happiest moments are those when I think nothing, want nothing and dream nothing, being lost in a torpor like some accidental plant, like mere moss growing on life’s surface. I savour without bitterness this absurd awareness of being nothing, this foretaste of death and extinction.

I’ve never had anyone I could call ‘Master’. No Christ died for me. No Buddha showed me the way. No Apollo or Athena, in my loftiest dreams, ever appeared to enlighten my soul.