"I’m forever on the defensive. I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful – only then do I find myself and feel comforted. Life makes me cold. My existence is all damp cellars and lightless catacombs. I’m the disastrous defeat of the last army that sustained the last empire. Yes, I feel as if I were at the end of an ancient ruling civilization. I, who was used to commanding others, am now alone and forsaken. I, who always had advisers to guide me, now have no friend or guide. Something in me is always begging for compassion, and it weeps over itself as over a dead god whose altars were all destroyed when the white wave of young barbarians stormed the borders and life came and demanded to know what the empire had done with happiness. I’m always afraid others might talk about me. I’ve failed in everything. I didn’t dare think of being something; I didn’t even dream of thinking about being something, because even in my dreams – in my visionary state as a mere dreamer – I realized I was unfit for life. No feeling in the world can lift my head from the pillow where I’ve let it sink in desperation, unable to deal with my body or with the idea that I’m alive, or even with the abstract idea of life."