My Suicide

by Henri Roorda

Our heart is not a perfect thermos that conserves the ardor of our youth until the end, without losing anything.

Every now and then, the prospect of my very probable and imminent suicide takes away what is left of my good humor.

But if I remained on earth, I would not have this easy life that so tempts me. To repair the mistakes I have made, I would need to carry out monotonous tasks and bear terrible privations for a long time to come. I would rather go.

No matter how you conceive of it, lasting happiness is impossible.

But must man wish for life to continue? Society defends itself against the egotism of the individual because it wants to go on. Why go on? Toward what desirable future are we going? The Creator, who appears to be very intelligent, must say to himself every so often that his work is pointless.

God surely says nothing at all.

The rich man can change his life. The poor man cannot hope to. If the profession he has engaged in for some years suddenly repulses him, he must continue anyway. To take on a new apprenticeship, to begin in a new direction, all of this would require money.

If I had money, I would not inflict the death penalty on myself, and I could console the one whom I harmed so much.

I imagine the faces the rich would make if the poor made a habit of killing themselves to shorten their gray existences. They would surely say that it is immoral. And what wouldn’t they do to keep their prisoners from escaping!

As for the poor man, he is exposed to humiliations every day.

Separation is not in every budget.

Ethics teachers are civil servants (among the professionals there are, by the way, many amateurs) paid by the state to intimidate the individual while he is still young, so that later he will be ashamed to show himself as he is.

The gentleman who speaks for God tells me, “God had the goodness to give you the freedom and ability to distinguish good from evil.” I respond to him, “God forgot to give me enough will to resist temptation.” The man retorts, “You were free. If you had wanted to, you could have.” I reply, “Why didn’t I have enough will to want to?”

By instilling a feeling of duty in the individual, the state is cleverer and less brutal than if it contented itself by invoking the law of the strongest in case of conflict.

So our social duty is to frustrate our underlying nature; the individual must become what he physiologically is not.

Excellent commentary on the need for a more individualistic form of public education. Each student demands a different sort of education—not all are made for academics.

Regardless of the essential differences that already distinguish us from each other when we come into the world, the educators show us all the same model and

tell us, “Here are the virtues that you must acquire.”

They will speak harshly of my horrible egotism and my lack of morals. But there are many ways of being egotistic and there are also many ways to be moral. I would like to be judged by a physiologist-psychologist who has carefully studied the little mechanism that controls my soul’s movements. I am inclined to think that a transmission belt has been broken for a while in my little internal machine. In the beginning, it is this belt that communicated to the cog of my will the movements of my emotions. Now my generous thoughts (I have them sometimes) do not have the power to make me act.

But I do not understand these old, poor, and unhappy beings who absolutely want to go on.

Many times, going to school in the morning, I was depressed because I was beginning another day in which there would be nothing, nothing but the accomplishment of a professional duty.

I am not happy except when I adore something. I do not understand the indifference with which so many people endure these empty hours every day in which they do nothing but wait.

For life to continue, men must consent to be machines for long hours every day. But the machine is not everything.

The state does not give those who teach schoolchildren the chance to change their work and thus rejuvenate their thoughts. What about young people’s enthusiasm? No, enthusiasm is dangerous.

The school is at fault for teaching everyone too many things that are interesting only to certain specialists.

The child, we say, must learn to obey. Fine! But adults must learn to command reasonably.

I need to be moved by the truths that I teach.

(It is true that emotion comes easily to me – I have a taste for tears.)

I feel the need to defend the egotistic individual against the demands of morality.

It is staid people, the friends of order, who maintain the stability of the social edifice. So it is important that their numbers be considerable. It is they who start families. They make little ones in their image, and these, in turn, reproduce, and life continues. They are told, “Grow and multiply!” And they obey.

Must we unreservedly admire these respectful beings who are so good at playing their role of good citizen? What would life’s appeal be if society were composed only of such beings? It is perhaps their lack of imagination that lets them be so uniformly virtuous.

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Would we begin a task if first of all we were not moved by the beauty of what we will create?

For me, normal life is joyous life.

I was not made to live in a world where a person must consecrate his youth to preparing for old age.

There is an age in which our need for love is explained by the species’ will to live. But, a long time after that, when he can no longer play a useful role, man can again become obsessed by desires that serve no purpose.

“Think of how many furtive looks men and women exchange when they see each other in the street or in some public place. Too moral or too timid, they repress their instincts. In the world, millions of hearts are going hungry.

I want to madly hold in my arms a woman who would feel the same way I do.

“It’s impossible. We are all condemned to solitude. A French doctor could say, ‘Most men die of sorrow.’ This doesn’t stop life from going on. Nature only wants a momentary coming together of the sexes, and it is in vain that the individual searches for lasting happiness in love.

There are hearts that our stupid morality condemns to a youth that is too short and an old age that is too long. Old age is useless. If I had created the world, I would have put love at the end of life. People would have been sustained until the end by a great and confused hope.”

To keep me in this life, my friends offered to help. But I am so used to the idea of my imminent death that I refused.