Now I can broach the notion of suicide. It has already been felt what solution might be given. At this point the problem is reversed. It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning. Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully. Now, no one will live this fate, knowing it to be absurd, unless he does everything to keep before him that absurd brought to light by consciousness.
I know positively_ that each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth, is free from it. And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody__ face and fasten the infection on him. What__ natural is the microbe. All the rest _ health, integrity, purity (if you like) _ is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will power, a never ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses. Yes_ it__ a wearying business, being plague-stricken. But it__ still more wearying to refuse to be it. That__ why everybody in the world today looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is also why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of our systems, feel such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free, except death.
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I know positively_ that each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth, is free from it. And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody__ face and fasten the infection on him. What__ natural is the microbe. All the rest _ health, integrity, purity (if you like) _ is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will power, a never ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses. Yes_ it__ a wearying business, being plague-stricken. But it__ still more wearying to refuse to be it. That__ why everybody in the world today looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is also why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of our systems, feel such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free, except death.
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Was it possible to feel nostalgic about something that had never happened to him, possible for nostalgia to be taken in by the body as a free pathogen to infect the consciousness with stray sentiments? Perhaps, in his dreams, he had traveled back in time, or even drifted into another dimension of space-time and inhabited the body, experiences, and nostalgia of another. To even envisage so allowed the trauma of those lost moments, though not his own, to draw from him a certain envy for the entity in whose memories he had basked vicariously. . .Perhaps, nostalgia was a microorganism. . .the bacterium that infected. . . Yes. . .maybe he was sick.
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