❦ I am a sick man…
I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though.
Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well—let it get worse!
❦ On Consciousness
I swear to you, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness—a real, thorough-going illness. For man's everyday needs, it would have been quite enough to have the ordinary human consciousness, that is, half or a quarter of the amount which falls to the lot of a cultivated man of our unhappy nineteenth century.
It would have been quite enough, for instance, to have the consciousness by which all so-called direct persons and men of action live. I'll bet you think I am writing all this from affectation, to be witty at the expense of men of action; and what is more, that from ill-bred affectation, I am clanking a sword like my officer. But, gentlemen, whoever can pride himself on his diseases and even swagger over them?
❦ A Vocation
But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of man is to prove to himself that he is a man and not an organ-stop? To prove it, even if it means causing himself pain, even if it means turning into a troglodyte? And after all, can it be that the whole purpose of humanity on earth is contained in this one goal? Can it be that humanity has striven for so long just to record that it is, indeed, a species of reasoning animal?
I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.