A deep hole had opened up in front of me. I looked in but the hole was so deep and so dark that I couldn’t see the bottom. I thought, What’s down there? So on purpose I fell in. I fell and I fell, over and over as if I were an old suitcase. On the sides of the deep hole I could see things written but perhaps it was in a foreign language because I couldn’t read them. Still I fell, for I don’t know how long. As I fell I began to see that I didn’t like the way falling made me feel. Falling made me feel sick and I missed all the people I had loved. I said, I don’t want to fall anymore and I reversed myself. I was standing again on the edge of the deep hole. I looked at the deep hole and I said, You can close up now and it did.
~Jamaica Kincaid, Paris Review
Posts tagged "sadness"
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No wonder. No wonder.
The attitudes and behaviors of people who succeed in long-term relationships.
Relinquishment
But if it is hard to fix the precise instant, the subtle step when the mind opted for death, it is easier to deduce from the act itself the consequences it implies. In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it. Let’s not go too far in such analogies, however, but rather return to everyday words. It is merely confessing that that “is not worth the trouble.” Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence, for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.
~Albert Camu, The Myth of Sisyphus