Part 1

I am a ridiculous person. Now they call me a madman. That would be a

promotion if it were not that I remain as ridiculous in their eyes as before.

But now I do not resent it, they are all dear to me now, even when they

laugh at me - and, indeed, it is just then that they are particularly dear to

me. I could join in their laughter - not exactly at myself, but through

affection for them, if I did not feel so sad as I look at them. Sad because

they do not know the truth and I do know it. Oh, how hard it is to be the

only one who knows the truth! But they won't understand that. No, they

won't understand it.

In old days I used to be miserable at seeming ridiculous. Not seeming,

but being. I have always been ridiculous, and I have known it, perhaps,

from the hour I was born. Perhaps from the time I was seven years old I

knew I was ridiculous. Afterwards I went to school, studied at the

university, and, do you know, the more I learned, the more thoroughly I

understood that I was ridiculous. So that it seemed in the end as though

all the sciences I studied at the university existed only to prove and make

evident to me as I went more deeply into them that I was ridiculous. It

was the same with life as it was with science. With every year the same

consciousness of the ridiculous figure I cut in every relation grew and

strengthened. Everyone always laughed at me. But not one of them knew

or guessed that if there were one man on earth who knew better than

anybody else that I was absurd, it was myself, and what I resented most

of all was that they did not know that. But that was my own fault; I was

so proud that nothing would have ever induced me to tell it to anyone.

This pride grew in me with the years; and if it had happened that I

allowed myself to confess to anyone that I was ridiculous, I believe that I should have blown out my brains the same evening. Oh, how I suffered in

my early youth from the fear that I might give way and confess it to my

schoolfellows. But since I grew to manhood, I have for some unknown

reason become calmer, though I realised my awful characteristic more

fully every year. I say unknown, for to this day I cannot tell why it was.

Perhaps it was owing to the terrible misery that was growing in my soul

through something which was of more consequence than anything else

about me: that something was the conviction that had come upon me

that nothing in the world mattered. I had long had an inkling of it, but the

full realisation came last year almost suddenly. I suddenly felt that it was

all the same to me whether the world existed or whether there had never

been anything at all: I began to feel with all my being that there was

nothing existing. At first I fancied that many things had existed in the

past, but afterwards I guessed that there never had been anything in the

past either, but that it had only seemed so for some reason. Little by little

I guessed that there would be nothing in the future either. Then I left off

being angry with people and almost ceased to notice them. Indeed this

showed itself even in the pettiest trifles: I used, for instance, to knock

against people in the street. And not so much from being lost in thought:

what had I to think about? I had almost given up thinking by that time;

nothing mattered to me. If at least I had solved my problems! Oh, I had

not settled one of them, and how many there were! But I gave up caring

about anything, and all the problems disappeared.

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