VI

I don’t know why, tonight in particular, the fact that I am a dead man occurs to me very insistently. I had forgotten this for two whole days. If anyone very dear to you has ever been in extremis at a distance and you have journeyed to be at the last bedside, you will know how possible this is⁠—how for hours at a time the mind will go wandering away from the main fact that is drawing you onwards, till suddenly it comes back: someone is dying at a distance. And I suppose one’s I is the nearest friend that one has⁠—and my I is dying at a distance. At the end of a certain number of days is the deathbed towards which I am hurrying⁠—it is a fact which I cannot grasp. But one aspect grows more clear to me every time I return to this subject.

You remember that, when we have discussed suicide, we have agreed that to the man of action death is a solution: to the man of thoughts it is none. For the man of action expresses himself in action, and death is the negation of action: the man of thought sees the world only in thoughts, and over thought death exercises no solution of continuity. If one dies one’s actions cease, one’s problem continues. For that reason it is only in so far as I am a man of action that I shall be dying. You understand what I mean⁠—for I do not mean that it is my actions that have killed me. It is simply because I have taken refuge from my thoughts in action, and because after April 5 that refuge will be closed to me, that I take refuge in a final action which, properly speaking, is neither action nor refuge.

And perhaps I am no man of action at all, since the action in which I have taken refuge is properly speaking no action at all, but merely the expression of a frame of mind. I have gambled, that is to say I have not speculated. For the speculator acts for gain: the gambler in order to interest himself. I have gambled⁠—to escape from you: I have tried to