I chose going to pieces: I no longer know when it is day and when it is night: when things are too bad, when it becomes unbearable, I gulp down spirits, tranquilizers or sleeping pills. When things are a little better I take stimulants and plunge into a detective story—I have laid in a stock. When the silence stifles me I turn on the radio and from a remote planet there come voices that I can hardly understand: that world has a time, set hours, laws, speech, anxieties and amusements that are essentially foreign to me. How far one can let oneself go, when one is entirely alone and shut in! The bedroom stinks of stale tobacco and spirits; there is ash everywhere; I am filthy; the sheets are filthy; the sky is filthy behind the filthy windows: this filth is a shell that protects me; I shall never leave it again. It would be easy to slide just a little further into the void, as far as the point of no return. I have all that is needed in my drawer. But I won’t, I won’t! I’m forty-four; it’s too early to die—it’s unfair! I can’t live any longer. I don’t want to die.