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Since you seldom spoke, you were rarely wrong. You seldom spoke because you seldom went out. If you did go out, you listened and watched. Now, since you no longer speak, you will always be right.
Your suicide was the most important thing you ever said, but you’ll never be able to enjoy the fruits of this labor.
When I hear of a suicide, I think of you again. Yet, when I hear that someone died of cancer, I don’t think of my grandfather and grandmother, who also died of it. They share cancer with millions of others. You, however, own suicide.
The past belongs to libraries, the present to bookstores.
You refused to be prolific. You would do little, but well, or do nothing rather than do it poorly. You knew nothing of contemporary appetites.
He gave your eulogy. He said nothing true, nothing false. In his mouth, you could have been anyone.
One day you directed the violence you had inherited toward yourself. You dished it out like your father and you took it like your mother.
Isn’t it peculiar how this final gesture inverts your biography?
You are not among those who ended up sick and old, with withered ghostly bodies, resembling death before they’ve stopped living. Their demise is the fulfillment of their decrepitude. A ruin that dies: is this not deliverance, is it not the death of death?
For you, the past would be forever improving, the future would draw you forward, but the present would weigh you down.
You were not surprised to feel yourself ill adapted to the world, but it did surprise you that the world had produced a being who now lived in it as a foreigner. Do plants commit suicide?
Do animals die of hopelessness? They either function or disappear.
This was perhaps what you feared: to become inert in a body that still breathes, drinks, and feeds itself. To commit suicide in slow motion.
As my thoughts turn to you again, I do not suffer. I do not miss you. You are more present in my memory than you were in the life we shared. If you were still alive, you would perhaps have become a stranger to me. Dead, you are as alive as you are vivid. Your
