Non-Life

This is a chapter, a so-called moment in The Great Lamentation.

As the autumn flowers do in the fall, fall to the ground and die, so did I on the day you were forced from me. I yellowed like the leaves of the birch trees and went away with the wind, where I went, I knew no one. Where I went, loneliness was my only presence… perhaps it was necessary? Oh, how I hate this word: Necessity. Coercion and misery, no freedom but only non-life. Death carries with it a promise, but non-life carries nothing, there is no hope, no longing, no loss, for everything has ceased to be. There is no hope of life, it is like a dead plant lying on the frozen ground, torn up.

He can no longer escape, for there is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. He can no longer cry, for there is no longer anything to cry over, nor to cry with. He can no longer laugh, for there is nothing to rejoice over, nor one to rejoice with. He can no longer love, for there is no one to love, nor to be loved by, for non-life has no content, nothing of anything, it is an infinite and empty hole. A nothing in nowhere: a non-life. Nor can he despair, for what would he despair over? There is no hope, for nowhere is there a foothold to grasp.

His life: it is not anguish, for then there would be signs of life; not true, for then he would have lived, but he does not. He is not dead, for then would the promise be alive; he does not live, for he experiences nothing. He exists, however, as a non-life, where nothing stands before and above all that could be. Nothing exists, nothing appears, nothing is, and nothing is his being, because everything is nothing and nothing is his everything, it is non-life!