cause. But what is to be done if I have not even spite (I began with that
just now, you know). In consequence again of those accursed laws of
consciousness, anger in me is subject to chemical disintegration. You
look into it, the object flies off into air, your reasons evaporate, the
criminal is not to be found, the wrong becomes not a wrong but a
phantom, something like the toothache, for which no one is to blame,
and consequently there is only the same outlet left again--that is, to beat
the wall as hard as you can. So you give it up with a wave of the hand
because you have not found a fundamental cause. And try letting yourself
be carried away by your feelings, blindly, without reflection, without a
primary cause, repelling consciousness at least for a time; hate or love, if
only not to sit with your hands folded. The day after tomorrow, at the
latest, you will begin despising yourself for having knowingly deceived
yourself. Result: a soap-bubble and inertia. Oh, gentlemen, do you
know, perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my
life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything. Granted I am
a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be
done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble,
that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?
VI
Oh, if I had done nothing simply from laziness! Heavens, how I should
have respected myself, then. I should have respected myself because I
should at least have been capable of being lazy; there would at least have
been one quality, as it were, positive in me, in which I could have believed
myself. Question: What is he? Answer: A sluggard; how very pleasant it
would have been to hear that of oneself! It would mean that I was positively
defined, it would mean that there was something to say about me.
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