to know nothing

"After this last letter, everything changed. After this last letter, Vicente wanted only to know nothing; to know nothing about anything. To be brutally, absolutely ignorant of everything. He wanted to learn what it meant not to know. He wanted to live in darkness. He wanted not to know any more, but more than that, he wanted to no longer know. To no longer know anything. Not even the things he already knew. He no longer wanted to know anything about what was already past and about what might happen in the future. Not to his mother, or to his brother—nor to his wife or his children, or himself."
~~ from The Ghetto Within by Santiago H. Amigorena