DEATH AND REVOLUTION
Within me, the malignantly damaged lymphatic cells have made me think about what is ill in my whole organism, body and soul. Within society, I am the malignant cell which contaminates the social organism. Seen from the sociological point of view, I am the molecule in the mass in which the decline of the West develops. In this sense, I see myself as a passive revolutionary, to the extent that through my story, my suffering, and perhaps also my death, I represent one of the many elements necessary for the mechanism of revolution to be set in motion.


THE BOURGEOIS AND THE BOURGEOISIE
(...) first of all, we are bumped off by an emotionally defective society, then nothing, silence. (...) as soon as someone is dead, we don't even say he is dead, we say he's "not here any more". That (...) is really bourgeois, how we don't dare mention the word "death". Everything has a name, even death. But everything leads to its punishment: that is the bourgeois fate, one fine day, to simply be "not here any more". But not me. I will never be "not here any more", I will be dead and I will know why.

I loath this bourgeois society because I myself am one of its products and I don't like this. But I sense that I am not only this sort of programmed product. I am a representative of the principle of life in general, that is of the force, in fact, which makes electrons revolve around the nucleus of the atom, the ants crawl and the sun rise. A part of me is also electron and ant and sun and that, even the most bourgeois education cannot spoil in any way. My misfortune is part of universal misfortune. My life is not only the groaning of an individual born into the bourgeoisie of Zurich and educated to death, it's also a part of the groaning of the whole universe where the sun didn't rise any more.


LOVE AND SEXUALITY
(...)I have always lacked the essential. What is this essential thing? It is immediately obvious: love, of course.

What is "love", I don't need to define it at length.
However, for the last two thousand years, the word "love" hasn't stopped being defiled and dragged in the mud by the disastrous sect which even today still enjoys being the main religion of what is called Western civilisation, so much so that, in fact, today we no longer know what is love. And yet everybody knows this. Just as we cannot dissociate the body and the soul, just as we cannot divide love into "spiritual" and "carnal" love. He who doesn't like the word "love", for whatever unknown reason, has only to say "sexuality" in its place, and he who finds fault in the word "sexuality", let him say "love", if he wants to. The difference between the two is only a pure question of style.

During my life, I did say some silly things when speaking of my "difficulties in love". When someone dies of hunger, we don't say that he had " nutritional difficulties", do we? We say he died of hunger. When I said that I had "difficulties in love", the expression was about as accurate as if I had said that someone had "difficulties of shape" after going under a steamroller.


THE ARGUMENT
In our house, a difference of opinion would have been almost the end of the world: we could not quarrel. What I mean is that we didn't know how to go about it, just like someone may not know how to play the trumpet or how to prepare a mayonnaise. We did not have the technique of arguing and that is why we refrained from doing it, in the same way as a non-trumpeter does not give trumpet concerts.

I don't think I learned the word "no" from my parents (perhaps it was at school one day that it entered my vocabulary), in fact, it wasn't used in our house, it was unnecessary. The fact that we said yes to everything was not perceived as an awkward necessity, or a constraint, it was a need rooted in flesh and blood, felt as the most natural thing in the world. It was the expression of complete harmony.
Today, it is difficult for me to measure to what point, for us, this eternally unexpressed no was seen as a skeleton in the cupboard.

This must have had something to do with the fact that it was also extremely difficult for us to say anything at all. Whoever said anything had to more or less remember that the others should and always wished to answer yes to his words, to the extent that, out of politeness, we used to avoid all the words that the other conformists would have had difficulty approving naturally. When giving a judgement on our enjoyment of something, for example a book, it was like playing cards, we had to consider the others' possible reactions before playing our own.

I am young and rich and cultivated, and I am unhappy, neurotic and alone.

Will I survive this illness? Today, I have no idea. In case I die of it, you'll be able to say I was educated to death.







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