How do you live?

I know only that I know nothing.

I have made up my mind, dear reader, that by the third act of this strange composition, I will either have achieved something that could only be called enlightenment, or I will have shot myself. It does not matter to me which comes first.

As you begin to read this, I want you to resolve yourself to not seek absolution for any sins that you might have committed, nor to look for guidance as to how to find meaning in your life, in the words that I am writing here. For it is a fool’s endeavor to attach value to the advice of a man as disgraceful as I. I am incapable of being a teacher of any sort. Nor do I have any wisdom to impart from the thirty years I have lived inside this miserable body. I torment myself over the slightest misgivings while playing with the bigger stakes of my future as if they were a deck of cards. The only reason I could justify having lived all this time is that I am aware of these escapist tendencies of mine. I do not delude myself otherwise.

Reader, I once thought myself to contain great potential, too, as is common amongst folks with a certain level of intellect and self-awareness. So, as is common, I waited for it to materialize out of me. I believed the pen to be my means to this end. I believed that, within myself, existed boundless potential to furnish out something so sublime, so beautiful a craft, that it would justify the years of torment preceding it. That all of my life would become an aftermath under the shadow of this brilliant work, etched by my own wretched hands.

Men that are devoid of hope and burdened with consciousness do not live under the guise of this illusion for long, reader. I have lived my whole life trying to escape my own mediocrity by vying for something that was exceptional. Never did I consider an alternative to this means of living. Until now, at thirty years of age, when I have been made aware of all the time I have wasted in the pursuit of something that ceases to come to me. If I were to be born again in the body of a cockroach, I am certain I would find more to give to this world than I have in all the years in this human body. Yet I could not even become a mere insect, and there I see with lucidity the action I must take moving forward.

I am not a utilitarian by nature. In truth, I am nothing by nature and thus could not adhere to any principles of living. Even smoking to me comes not for the pleasure of numbness but as an act of self-destruction. I smoke to rot myself, and yet, that too escapes me (for my lungs refuse to fail me, despite however many checkups I have done). Thus, I make my assessment that is, as my final act, both giving and selfless (hence completing the utilitarian criteria): I will see my own conclusion to its end. Or find myself enlightened to a degree that means not having to pull the trigger. Both, to me, seem equally worthy conclusions.

In the days I have lived preceding complete submission to this reality, I selfishly found myself thinking about having a lover. Yes, reader, I have lived all this while not having felt love. But I am not so contemptuous as to deny having never felt the sensation to love another. That is another potential I have wasted in seeing an illusory greatness to its end.

At twenty, I once fell into correspondence with a woman who seemed to me a saint. I felt as if I could absolve myself of all sin just by being in her presence. That something existed inside of her that could cure me of all despair. But, foolishly, I believed love to break the clarity with which I could rake in this absurd existence. I believed that love was merely a way to escape from the mundanity of daily life and thus never pursued anything with her, fearing it would diminish my craft. I have grown up since. I know now that to love someone, to choose another every day, is a confrontation with the absurd. If absurdism is a rebellion, then love is the greatest revolutionist.

Here, then, is where I seek enlightenment. Not in the act of completion of this work, but to awaken myself to the absurdity of living—and daring to revel in it. But the past burdens me, and the future seems void. How does a man go on living under such circumstances? How do I birth a rebellion out of such despair?

People do come to grief somewhere, reader. I believed that I would succumb to this truth only when I lay on my deathbed. An odd realization has now hit me that I have been dying all along. Perhaps that is an incorrect assessment to make here. But what better suited a term here for a man who had merely been waiting all his life for some definitive moment where he could wake up not despising himself every day? When I could wake up without having to worry about how to manage my own life. I have been living for some time estranged from myself, and I do not know what medicine there exists for such a malady.

When I look at these people, who seem to me to be aliens in possession of some absolute truth—this fundamental truth that I have been deprived of—that could drive them to wake up every day and live mundane lives, these people who could work and provide for their families without complaint, without this gnawing feeling that something is amiss, I cannot help but feel a great deal of shame. I feel as if I am merely a rat, looking at the stars from a sewer, wishing for nothing more than to be human. But I cannot reconcile myself with this life. How does one even begin to live like this? That, I do not know.

I feel neither an impulse to pull the trigger nor to remain bound to this life of mine. Life has become akin to limbo. All logical reasoning aside, I find myself paralyzed seeing the gun sitting next to the paper on which I write. In this room that smells more of smoke than ink now, I find myself frozen with reason.

However, the third act of this piece is fast approaching, reader. I cannot estrange myself from the words I have written. I am not one to deceive someone. Thus, my only rebellion now remains in pulling the trigger and hoping that the bullet shall miss me. That, by some miracle, the gun may jam of its own accord, forsaking its own narrative for mine. I shall open myself to the universe’s judgment now.

Here I am left with only the realization that I haven’t been living the way that was intended of me, and only a singular question now echoes through my depraved mind: How do you live, indeed?

Leonid Pasternak (1862–1945) - The Torments of Creative Work