But my self-imposed exile from life’s actions and objectives and my attempt to break off all contact with things led precisely to what I tried to escape. I didn’t want to feel life or to touch anything real, for the experience of my temperament in contact with the world had taught me that the sensation of life was always painful to me. But in isolating myself to avoid that contact, I exacerbated my already overwrought sensibility. If it were possible to cut off completely all contact with things, then my sensibility would pose no problem. But this total isolation cannot be achieved. However little I do, I still breathe; however little I act, I still move. And so, having exacerbated my sensibility through isolation, I found that the tiniest things, which even for me had been perfectly innocuous, began to wrack me like catastrophes. I chose the wrong method of escape. I fled via an uncomfortable and roundabout route to end up at the same place I’d started from, with the fatigue of my journey added to the horror of living there.

I’ve never seen suicide as a solution, because my hatred of life is due to my love of life. It took me a long time to be convinced of this unfortunate mistake in how I live with myself. Convinced of it, I felt frustrated, which is what I always feel when I convince myself of something, since for me each new conviction means another lost illusion. I killed my will by analysing it. If only I could return to my childhood before analysis, even if it would have to be before I had a will!

My parks are all a dead slumber, their pools stagnating under the midday sun, when the drone of insects swells and life oppresses me, not like a grief but like a persistent physical pain.

Far-away palaces, pensive parks, narrow paths in the distance, the dead charm of stone benches where no one sits any more – perished splendours, vanished charm, lost glitter. O my forgotten yearning, if I could only recover the grief with which I dreamed you!