ENCOUNTERS WITH SUICIDE

You kill yourself only if, in some respects, you have always been outside of it all. What is involved is an
original dispossession of which you cannot be conscious. A man called to kill himself belongs only
accidentally to this world; he is in fact answerable to no world at all.
You are not predisposed, you are predestined to suicide; you are committed to it before any
disappointment, before any experience: happiness impels you to it as much as misery does, even more, for
happinessamorphous, improbablerequires an exhausting effort of adaptation whereas misery offers
security and the rigor of a rite.

. . .

There are nights when the future cancels out, when only one of all its moments subsists, the one we
shall choose in order to exist no longer.

. . .

The further I go, the more I see my chances dwindle of dragging myself from one day to the next. To tell
the truth, it has always been like this: I have not lived in the possible, but in the inconceivable. My
memory accumulates prostrate horizons.

. . .

There exists in us a temptation, rather than a will, to die. For it were granted to us to will death, who
would not take advantage of it at the first vexation? Another obstacle also intervenes: the idea of killing
himself seems incredibly new to the man who is possessed by it; he therefore imagines himself
performing an action without precedent; this illusion fills and flatters him, and causes him to waste
precious time.

. . .

Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightninglike deliverance: it is nirvana by violence.

. . .

So simple a fact as looking at a knife and realizing that it depends only on yourself to make a certain
use of it gives you a sensation of sovereignty which can turn to megalomania.

. . .

When the idea of putting an end to it all takes hold of us, a space opens out before us, a vast possibility
outside of time and of eternity itself, a dizzying issue, a hope of dying beyond death.
To kill yourself is, thereby, to compete with death, to prove that you can do better than death, to put one
over on death andno negligible successto redeem yourself in your own eyes. You are reassured, you
thus convince yourself that you are not the worst, that you deserve some respect. You tell yourself: up to
now, incapable of taking any initiative, I had no self-esteem; now everything is changed: destroying
myself, I thereby destroy all the reasons I had to despise myself, I regain confidence, I am someone
forever. . . .