I note down this conversation because everything relating to suicide has become of interest to me, and the old gunsmith’s words appeared to contain a bit of philosophy worth preserving.

27 June.

Now and then I remind myself that Aniela loved me, that I could have married her, that my life might have been made bright and happy, that it merely depended upon me, and that I wasted all that through my incapacity for action.  Then I put to myself the question:  “Is there any sign of insanity in me, and is it indeed true that I could have had Aniela forever?” It must be true, for how could I otherwise recall all the incidents from the time I met her first up to the present moment?  And to think that she might have been mine, and as faithful and loyal to me as she is to that other one!—­a hundred times more faithful, because she would love me from her whole soul.  Innate incapacity?—­yes, that is it.  But even if it justifies me in my own eyes, what matters it to me, since it does not give me any comfort?  The only thought that gives me comfort is that the descendants of decayed as well as of the most buoyant races have to go the same way,—­to dust and ashes.  This makes the difference between the weak and the strong a great deal less.  The whole misfortune of beings like me is their isolation.  What erroneous ideas have our novelists, and for the matter of that even our physiologists, about the decaying races.  They fancy that inward incapacity must invariably correspond with physical deterioration, small build, weak muscles, anaemic brain, and weak intelligence.  This may be the case now and then, but to regard it as a general principle is a mistake and a pedantic repetition of the same thing over and over again.  The descendants of worn-out races have no lack of vital powers, but they lack harmony among these powers.  I myself am physically a powerful man, and never was a fool.  I knew people of my sphere built like Greek statues, clever, gifted, and yet they did not know how to fit themselves into life, and ended badly, exactly through that want of even balance in their otherwise luxuriant vital powers.  They exist among us as in a badly organized society where nobody knows where the rights of the one begin and those of another cease.  We live in anarchy, and it is a known fact that in anarchy society cannot exist.  Each of the powers drags its own way, often pulling all the others with it; and this produces a tragic exclusiveness.  I am now suffering from this exclusiveness, by reason of which nothing interests me beyond Aniela, nothing matters to me, and there is nothing else to which I can attach my life.  But people do not understand that such a want of even balance, such anarchy of the vital powers, is a far greater disease than physical or moral anaemia.  This is the solution of the problem.