friend that in moments of depression I have sometimes pictured to
myself the hour of my death. My fancy invented thousands of the
gloomiest visions, and I have succeeded in working myself up to an
agonizing exaltation, to a state of nightmare, and I assure you
that that did not seem to me more terrible than reality. What I
mean is, apparitions are terrible, but life is terrible, too. I
don't understand life and I am afraid of it, my dear boy; I don't
know. Perhaps I am a morbid person, unhinged. It seems to a sound,
healthy man that he understands everything he sees and hears, but
that 'seeming' is lost to me, and from day to day I am poisoning
myself with terror. There is a disease, the fear of open spaces,
but my disease is the fear of life. When I lie on the grass and
watch a little beetle which was born yesterday and understands
nothing, it seems to me that its life consists of nothing else but
fear, and in it I see myself."

"What is it exactly you are frightened of?" I asked.

"I am afraid of everything. I am not by nature a profound thinker,
and I take little interest in such questions as the life beyond the
grave, the destiny of humanity, and, in fact, I am rarely carried
away to the heights. What chiefly frightens me is the common routine
of life from which none of us can escape. I am incapable of
distinguishing what is true and what is false in my actions, and
they worry me. I recognize that education and the conditions of
life have imprisoned me in a narrow circle of falsity, that my whole
life is nothing else than a daily effort to deceive myself and other
people, and to avoid noticing it; and I am frightened at the thought
that to the day of my death I shall not escape from this falsity.
To-day I do something and to-morrow I do not understand why I did