After such a promising start, it would not have been difficult for me to go on acting sensibly.
All kinds of options were available to people in my situation - scholarships, loans, work-study programs - but once I began to think about them, I found myself stricken with disgust.
It was a sudden, involuntary response, a jolting attack of nausea.
I wanted no part of those things, I realized, and therefore I rejected them all - sabotaged my only hope of surviving the crisis.
From that point on, in fact, I did nothing to.
help myself, refused even to lift a finger.
God knows why I behaved liked that.
I invented countless reasons at the time, but in the end it probably boiled down to despair.
I was in despair, and in the face of so much upheaval, I felt that drastic action of some sort was necessary.
I wanted to spit on the world, to do the most outlandish thing possible.
With all the fervor and idealism of a young man who had thought too much and read too many books, I decided that the thing I should do was nothing:
my action would consist of a militant refusal to take any action at all.
This was nihilism raised to the level of an aesthetic proposition.
I would turn my life into a work of art, sacrificing myself to such exquisite paradoxes that every breath I took would teach me how to savor my own doom.
The signs pointed to a total eclipse, and grope as I did for another reading, the image of that darkness gradually lured me in, seduced me with the simplicity of its design.
I would do nothing to thwart the inevitable, but neither would I rush out to meet it.
If life could continue for the time being as it always had, so much the better.
I would be patient, I would hold fast.
It was simply that I knew what was in store for me, and whether it happened today, or whether it happened tomorrow, it would nevertheless happen.
Total eclipse.
The beast had been slain, its entrails had been decoded.
The moon would block the sun, and at that point I would vanish.
I would be dead broke, a flotsam of flesh and bone without a farthing to my name.
All kinds of options were available to people in my situation - scholarships, loans, work-study programs - but once I began to think about them, I found myself stricken with disgust.
It was a sudden, involuntary response, a jolting attack of nausea.
I wanted no part of those things, I realized, and therefore I rejected them all - sabotaged my only hope of surviving the crisis.
From that point on, in fact, I did nothing to.
help myself, refused even to lift a finger.
God knows why I behaved liked that.
I invented countless reasons at the time, but in the end it probably boiled down to despair.
I was in despair, and in the face of so much upheaval, I felt that drastic action of some sort was necessary.
I wanted to spit on the world, to do the most outlandish thing possible.
With all the fervor and idealism of a young man who had thought too much and read too many books, I decided that the thing I should do was nothing:
my action would consist of a militant refusal to take any action at all.
This was nihilism raised to the level of an aesthetic proposition.
I would turn my life into a work of art, sacrificing myself to such exquisite paradoxes that every breath I took would teach me how to savor my own doom.
The signs pointed to a total eclipse, and grope as I did for another reading, the image of that darkness gradually lured me in, seduced me with the simplicity of its design.
I would do nothing to thwart the inevitable, but neither would I rush out to meet it.
If life could continue for the time being as it always had, so much the better.
I would be patient, I would hold fast.
It was simply that I knew what was in store for me, and whether it happened today, or whether it happened tomorrow, it would nevertheless happen.
Total eclipse.
The beast had been slain, its entrails had been decoded.
The moon would block the sun, and at that point I would vanish.
I would be dead broke, a flotsam of flesh and bone without a farthing to my name.
