A short story found among the things of John Smith. Origin and authorship unknown. If you know who wrote this, please mail us at blackrider@gmx.de
To Shake Off the Mortal Coils
Last entry into a diary
A permanent solution to a temporary problem - that
is what the wise and good people state to help. The way they make suicide
look like a decision based on cowardice is remarkable, when in the end
it is a clear statement of one's strength - at least mine. I cannot speak
for all those others.
For all those others that take sleeping pills to attract attention.
For those that wait on the roof of a skyscraper until someone notices them
to call the cops.
I can only speak for myself, and my decision is not based on weakness but
on absolute power. Hamlet said it, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre
considered the question.
It is not based on weakness but on a free will, the
liberty to contemplate the unthinkable. It is a question only the strongest
can face.
They say it is easy to escape life but hard to go on
with it. What fools. How many people can hold a gun to their head and pull
the trigger?
How many can cut a knife into their arms to pierce
arteries and veins?
How many can make the little step off a skyscraper?
How many can swallow the cyanide pill?
Small movements, a jerk of an index finger, a cut,
a step, a swallow.
How many think they can do that but have to face their
weakness on the doorsteps of a mysterious, scaring new existence?
How many have the mental strength to deal with such
a decision?
How many can question their lives?
How many can face the fact that all they have done
is useless and that there is no use apart from procreation -and what kind
of a goal is that? Fucking, as the meaning of life. A goal for rabbits,
for sheep, not for humans. And yet it is good enough for most.
To wait, to wait for something to come, to save them, something that does
not exist, something that does not come. And so they keep on giving birth
while standing on their graves, waiting like sheep.
How many can ask those questions?
How many can draw the consequences?
Those mentioned philosophers did not. None of them
did agree to it in the end. None of them. Because suicide is wrong? Because
as Nietzsche stated, the philosopher has to live his thoughts and hence
set an example in dying. None of them were strong enough to do that. Whimps.
Intellectual wankers, smart asses, suckers. Unworthy to have been read
by me.
It is easy to live, to go on with it, to stand the
treatmill. All you have to do is switch off your brains, not think, do
what you are told and expected to and you will get old. There is nothing
easier than living. Man is built to endure pain. He can easily bear the
whips and scorns of time as long as he doesn't question them, and as long
as he is not confident enough to wonder whether it is worth suffering.
All it takes is to stick to the routine. There is nothing simpler than
that.
Yeah, sure they will find reasons when they dig in
my past. They will say:
He could not stand the pressure his profession had
put on him, he had always suffered from depression, he was suffering from
a broken heart when his girlfriend left him. He could not stand loneliness,
unrequited love of all sorts. He was too sensitive.
Those would be their words.
Bullshit.
And they will be feigning sympathy and compassion,
they will look at the art, the literature and state how great it was, what
a loss it is, what a great future lay ahead of him.
The sympathy of the deaf, dumb and blind, the braindead,
the sympathy of the hens in the battery.
This is not the reason.
Sure, I am bleeding all over the place, sure I am suffering from pressure,
sure I have always been depressed, sure all of this is true. But it is
not the reason. I am not doing this out of pain. This is a decision based
on positivity. Lust for life. But not that stale and dull life. Real life,
genuine emotions.
To shake off this mortal coil,
To step up to the Gods and to spit in their faces,
To make the final decision, the only one that cannot be undone.
Knowing that it might be a terrible mistake, a Faustian mistake, a bargain
with the devil.
A voluntary step into something unknown.
Emptyness?
Heaven?
Hell?
Suicide is not based on weakness, it is based on absolute
power - at least in my case.
Imagine:
To stand on top of the highest cliff.
To feel the wind tearing at my clothes, the elements.
The only truth left in a world of lies and hypocrisy.
The beauty of the abyss.
The anticipation, like anticipating the greatest sex, an existential foreplay.
Looking down into oblivion and voidness.
The ground far, far away as it seems from here, but in reality only a couple
of seconds away.
Standing there.
Feeling eternity in a restricted world.
Feeling a decision in a prefabricated existence.
To draw the final breath,
To make that little step,
To know, that for once a decision was made,
To feel one foot above the abyss,
To think for a split second you can float in the air like the cartoon characters
on TV,
To feel losing balance,
To fall,
To gain speed,
To have the air tear at your hair and clothes,
To feel the cold wind violently caress you,
To see the ground coming closer,
To scream in orgiastic excitement,
To know what you have done,
To know that you have done something for once.
Maybe even: To doubt,
To regret,
To wish yourself back to the top of the peak that you are pacing away from.
Mercilessly
To fly into annihilation,
To see the truth, whether it is a beautiful or an unbearable truth for
the fraction of a second only.
Those 10 seconds would be - must be - will be much
more revealing than 10 years of most other people,
Than the whole life of most other people. More true, essential, focused,
divine. Purer. 70 years forced into seconds. Refined into pure knowledge
and truth.
Those 10 seconds would be - must be - will be worth
a lifetime.
A worthy payment for endless agony
No more endless, unbearable pain.
No more routine.
No more repetition.
No more
-- Peace.
To sleep, perchance to dream.
To give in to the tiredness.
To fall asleep.
To find solace.
No more agony.
To end.
The end.
|