The third escape is that of strength and energy. It consists in understanding that life is an evil and an absurdity, and in destroying it. It is a way adopted by a few exceptionally strong and consistent people. I saw that it was the worthiest way of escape, and I wished to adopt it.
The fourth escape is that of weakness. It consists in seeing the truth of the situation, and yet clinging to life as though one still hoped something from it; and I found myself in that category.
To live like Solomon and Schopenhauer, knowing that life is a stupid joke played upon us, and still to go on living: washing oneself, dressing, dining, talking and even writing books, was to me repulsive and tormenting, but I remained in that position.
I now see that if I did not kill myself, it was due to some dim consciousness of the invalidity of my thoughts. And I began to feel, rather than argue, in this way: 'I, my reason, has acknowledged life to be unreasonable. If there be no higher reason (and there is not: nothing can prove that there is) then reason is the creator of life for me. If reason did not exist, there would be for me no life. How can reason deny life, when it is the creator of life? Or to put it the other way: were there no life, my reason would not exist; therefore reason is life's son. Life is all. Reason is its fruit, yet reason denies life itself!' I felt that there was something wrong here.
Nothing prevents our denying life by suicide. Well then, kill yourself, and cease discussing. If life displeases you, kill yourself! You live, and cannot understand the meaning of life—then finish it; and do not fool about in life, saying and writing that you do not understand it. You have come into good company, where people are contented and like what they are doing: if you find it dull and repulsive—go away!
Indeed, what are we who are convinced of the necessity of suicide yet do not decide to commit it, but the weakest, most inconsistent, and to put it plainly, the stupidest of men, fussing about with our own stupidity as a fool fusses about with a painted hussy?
'There is something wrong,' said I to myself; but what was wrong, I could in no way make out. It was long before the fog began to clear, and I began to be able to restate my position.
It had seemed to me that the narrow circle of rich learned and leisured people to whom I belonged, formed the whole of humanity, and that the milliards of others who have lived and are living, were cattle of some sort—not real people.... And it was long before it dawned upon me to ask: 'But what meaning is, and has been, given to their lives by all the milliards of common folk who live and have lived in the world?'
I long lived in this state of lunacy, which in fact if not in words is particularly characteristic of us Liberal and learned people. But whether the strange physical affection I have for the real labouring people compelled me to understand them and to see that they are not so stupid as we suppose; or whether it was due to the sincerity of my conviction that I could know nothing beyond the fact that the best I could do was to hang myself, at any rate I instinctively felt that if I wished to live and understand the meaning of life, I must seek this meaning not among those who have lost it and wish to kill themselves, but among those milliards of the past and the present who know it, and who support the burden of their own lives and of ours also.
And on examining the matter I saw that the milliards of mankind always have had and still have a knowledge of the meaning of life, but that knowledge is their faith, which I could not but reject. 'It is God, one and three, the creation in six days, the devils and angels, and all the rest that I cannot accept as long as I retain my reason,' said I to myself.