Now I am alone, with no more brothers, no more relatives and friends, and I am alone, independent of the earth. Ben was the most sociable and affectionate person in mankind, but he was banished by the world. They searched intently in the depths of their hatred, insisting on finding ways to inflict the most cruel torture on my sensitive mind, and they smashed hard all the bonds that bound me to them. Even though the world has done this, I will still love them. Only by stopping being human can they avoid this emotion of mine. However, for me, they eventually became foreigners, strangers, useless, and since they insisted on going their own way, they had to do so. But what do I have left with myself after getting rid of them and everything? That's exactly what I'm looking for. Unfortunately, before this exploration, it was necessary to first take a glimpse of my situation. I definitely had to think through that to get from them to myself. I've been in this strange situation for more than fifteen years, and it still seems like a dream to me. I still imagined that it was just an indigestible accumulation of food in my stomach that was tossing me around and making me sleep so restlessly, and I would wake up and stay with my friends again, easily getting rid of that discomfort. Yes, there is no doubt that I must have done that unconsciously, falling from awakening to sleep, or rather from life to death. I don't know how I was dragged out of the order of everything in the world, and rushed into an incomprehensible chaos in which I didn't notice anything; and the more I thought about my current situation, the more I couldn't understand where I was.
ay! How could I have foreseen the fate that awaited me? How could I imagine it, since I had encountered it coldly today? At that time, how could I guess with common sense that I, a man who had always been the same, who had always been and is still the same, would one day become, would undoubtedly be regarded as a demon, a poisoner, a murderer, I would become a scourge to mankind, a rogue toy, could I imagine that passers-by would only greet me with spit, and that the whole generation would think the same thing and bury me alive as if they were playing? When this strange change happened, I was caught off guard and was shocked at once. My irritability, my anger, plunged me into a kind of delirium for ten years, and I could not extricate myself, and in this stage, I was wrong again and again, wrong again and again, foolish and stupid, and I took the liberty of providing so many weapons for those who manipulated my destiny, so that they could use them flexibly and freely, and finally I was fixed in the sad fate of eternal doom.
I struggled for a long time, but to no avail. Without scheming, without skill, without the city government, without prudence, I was blunt, frank, anxious, impatient, and pointlessly struggling, only to sink deeper and deeper into the mire, constantly giving them new handles, and they would never let go of this. In the end, I felt that all my efforts had been in vain, that I was simply torturing myself hopelessly, and I made up my mind to submit to my fate and not to rebel against necessity, which I thought was probably the only thing I could do. In this obedience I found compensation for all my suffering, which brought me peace of mind that a difficult and fruitless constant resistance could not provide for me.
Another thing contributed to this tranquility. My persecutors, in their overly elaborate hatred, have overlooked one thing, and it is hostility that makes them forget it; that is, it must always give me some new blow, to constantly maintain and renew my suffering, and thus to strengthen the effect of persecution. If they still know how to play a trick and leave me with a glimmer of hope, then they can still hold me there. They can still play with me in the palm of their hands with a small trap, and then, with a whole new kind of torture, make me wait, fall into disappointment, and fall into despair. But they exhausted all their schemes in advance; they left me nothing, and at the same time they deprived themselves of everything. Rumor-mongering, slander, ridicule, humiliation, they all inflicted on me, it can be said that it is useless, it is difficult to alleviate it; as a result, we are all the same, all powerless, in them, can not be more severe, and in me, there is no escape. They were so desperate to bring my suffering to the peak that even exhausting the entire human power, plus all the cunning means of hell, would probably not add anything more. However, the pain of the flesh itself, far from increasing my suffering, relieved me of my boredom and distraction. It might have made me scream loudly, but it spared me from moaning bitterly, and the painful tearing of my skin suspended the trauma inside me.
Now that everything is a foregone conclusion, what am I afraid of about them? Since my state is no worse, they will not cause me panic anymore. The pain of uneasiness and panic, which they have freed me once and for all: this has always been a consolation. The pain of reality doesn't matter to me; I can easily bear the pain I suffer, but I can't bear the pain I worry about. My bird-like imagination went back and forth to string them together, weighing them, showing them, increasing them. The long wait for them inflicted a hundred times more torture on me than their actual presence, and the potential threat to me was far more terrifying than the blow of reality. Once the calamity comes, the events themselves are nakedly stripped of the elements of the imagination, confining them to their inherent values. At that time, I found that they were much less than I had imagined them, and even in the most painful moments, I would feel even a little relieved. In this state, I broke free from any new fears, freed from the anxiety of anticipation, the only habit that was enough for me to become more tolerant of a situation that could not be worse day by day, and as the emotions gradually declined over time, they could no longer make it come alive. This is what my persecutors could not have imagined, and they did everything in their power to hate me, but they did not expect it to benefit me. They could no longer embarrass me, and from then on I could laugh at them.
A complete tranquility had returned to my heart less than two full months. For a long time I was no longer afraid of anything, but I still hoped, and this hope, which was sometimes comforted and sometimes deprived, was a kind of bait through which thousands of different passions constantly shook me. However, a sad and unexpected event finally erased this faint ray of hope from my heart, and let me see my fate of doom. Since then, I have obediently resigned myself to my fate and returned to peace of mind. Once I began to glimpse the intrigues that were unfolding in the web of destiny, I discarded once and for all the idea of bringing the public back to me in my lifetime, and even if there had been such a return, it would have been of no use to me ever since, because it could not be based on mutual trust. Even if people could come back, it would be in vain, and they would never find me again. All they provoked in my heart was contempt, and when dealing with them, I only felt that the taste was the same as chewing wax, adding to the burden, and I would be a hundred times happier in loneliness than living with them. They stole all the tenderness of social interaction from my heart. That tenderness will never sprout again at my age; it's too late. Whatever they do to me in the future, whether they do good or evil, it doesn't matter to me, my contemporaries will never be meaningless to me.
But I have always had illusions about the future, and I hope that the future generation will be better, that they will have better appreciation, that they will judge me more reasonably, that they will treat me better, that they will easily identify the machinations of those who control public opinion, and that they will finally see me as I am. It was this kind of hope that led me to write The Dialogues and to generate a thousand crazy desires for this work to be passed on to future generations. This hope, though distant and faint, stirred my heart like the one I sought in the middle of the century, and although I have thrown my hopes far behind me, they still make me the object of teasing today. I said in the Dialogues what the basis of this expectation is. I'm mistaken. But thankfully, I realized this in time to find a time of complete peace and absolute rest before the last moment of my life. This period began at the stage I said, and I have reason to believe that it will not be interrupted again.
I had hoped that sooner or later, even in another age, the public would change its mind, but hardly a day would not come with new ideas that would prove that I was wrong; since it was the group of guides who always expressed a strong hatred for me, even though in the group their individuals were constantly changing. Individual people die, but collective gangs don't die at all. The same passion perpetuates the group forever, and their intense hatred, like the demons that inspire hatred, never dies, always has the same vitality. When all my enemies are dead, the psychic doctors, the Oratoly monks, will live, and even when only these two gangs remain of my persecutors, I should be sure that when I die, they will not leave more peace in my memory, and in any case no more peace than they have left for me before I was alive. Perhaps, with the passage of time, the psychiatrists whom I have really offended will cease: but the Oratoly monks whom I have loved, respected, and trusted very much, the Oratoly monks whom I have never offended, these half-monks of the Church, will never give up; their own great injustice has become my sin, their self-esteem determines their unforgiveness of me, and they spare no effort to draw and agitate the public, Nor would they be more inclined than they were to stop their hostility toward me.
Everything in the world is over for me. People can no longer bring me joy or pain. In this world, I have nothing more to hope for, nothing to fear, and I am so quietly in the abyss, my unfortunate and poor mortal son, but I am as indifferent as God.
From then on, everything outside my body had nothing to do with me. In this world, I have no more relatives, no kind, no brothers. I was on a strange planet on earth, and I only occasionally fell there from the planet I had originally inhabited. If I recognize something around me, it is nothing more than something that breaks my heart, and around me, where my eyes fall, I will always encounter some kind of object that makes me despise and makes me angry, or some kind of pain that annoys me. So let me stay away from all those unbearable objects, because dealing with them is too painful and too futile. The rest of my life is destined to be spent alone, because I can only find solace, hope and peace in my own heart, and what I should and am willing to take care of is only myself from now on. It was in this state that I continued to engage in the kind of serious and sincere inner introspection that I had previously called my Confessions. I spend my last days studying myself, preparing a list in advance that I wouldn't have delayed for too long, and taking stock of my life. Let me devote myself wholeheartedly to the tenderness of dialogue with my heart, since it is the only thing I cannot be deprived of. If, through inner reflection, I succeed in organizing them and calming down the pain that may exist, then my contemplation will not be completely useless, and even though I have accomplished nothing in this world, I will not completely waste my last days. My daily strolls are often filled with fascinating reverie, but unfortunately, most of my memories of them have been lost. Through writing, I will fix the reverie of the memories that still come to my heart on the paper; every time I reread them, I will be endlessly enjoyed. The thought of this praise that my soul deserves, I will forget my misfortunes, my persecutors, my shame.
To be precise, these manuscripts will be nothing more than an unformed diary of my reverie. A considerable part of this thinking is about myself, because a contemplative loner is bound to pay more attention to himself. In addition, all the strange thoughts that passed through my mind during the stroll also had their place here. I will say what I was thinking exactly as they came to my mind, with little antecedent and consequential connection, unlike the thoughts of the first day and the thoughts of the day after. But I reflect on my emotions and thoughts every day, and in the peculiar state in which I find myself, this becomes my daily spiritual food, and through such reflection, a new understanding of my nature and temper will always arise. Thus, these manuscripts can be seen as an appendix to my Confessions, but I will not give them any more titles, for I feel that there is nothing worth mentioning any more. My heart was purified by the tempering of adversity and doom, and it was only on closer inspection that I barely found a trace of the old rules to be blamed. When all the emotions of the human world are stripped away, is there anything I have to repent of? I have nothing to show off, and I have nothing to blame myself for: Henceforth, among the people, I will be useless, and there is nothing more I can do than that, and there will be no real connection with them, no real interaction. No longer wanting to do good without ultimately turning to evil, no longer being able to do something without harming others or myself, restraint became the only thing I had to do, and I would fulfill this duty because it was always in my heart. But in this slackness of the body, my mind is still positive, it is still producing emotions, it is still producing thoughts, and its inner spiritual life seems to be enhanced by any earthly, temporary, interesting death. My flesh was just a drag on me, an obstacle, and I did everything I could to get rid of it in advance.
Such a peculiar situation is indeed worth examining and depicting well, and it is precisely to dedicate my spare time in my last days to this study. In order to achieve something, it is necessary to pay attention to order and method: but I can't control this kind of work at all, and it is a bit contrary to my original intentions, because my original idea was to find out the changes in my mind and their ins and outs. I'm going to do something to myself similar to what physicists do with the air to understand the weather. I would use a manometer on my mind, and these well-arranged and long-term repetitions of the experiments would have had the same credible effect as the physicists' experiments. But I didn't do my job. I will be content to record the experimental process faithfully and not to seek systematic induction of them. I did the same thing as Montaigne, but my purpose was the exact opposite of his: because his essays were only written for others, and my reverie was written only for myself. If, by the time I am dying of old age, I am still in my original state, as I hoped, then reading them reminds me of the tenderness I felt in my heart when I first wrote them down, and by reliving the past in this way, it can be said that my existence will be multiplied. No matter how others will treat me, I will still taste the charm of socializing with people, and I will firmly hold on to me in another era in my old age, just as I live with a friend who is not so old. When I first wrote the Confessions and Dialogues, I was always worried, always trying to get them out of the hands of my persecutors, and if possible, I wanted them to be passed on to future generations. And when I write these words in front of me, I no longer have the same anxiety, I know that it is always a kind of unfounded worry, and the desire to be better understood has been extinguished in my heart, and all that remains is a deep indifference, indifferent to the fate of my real works, to the historical monuments that can return my innocence, and those historical monuments, perhaps, have been completely destroyed. Let them spy on my behavior, let them pay attention to these documents, let them grab, delete, tamper with them, all this does not matter to me from now on. I neither hide them secretly nor show them in a hurry. If someone had snatched them away before I was alive, they would not have been able to deprive me of the pleasure of writing them, and of my recollection of their contents, much less of my lonely contemplation, which is the fruit of contemplation, and the source of which will only dry up with my soul. If, from the very beginning of my misfortune, I had learned the truth of never fighting against fate, and obediently made the decision I had only made today, then all the efforts of those people, all their appalling tricks, would have no effect on me, and they would not have been able to disturb my tranquility with all kinds of conspiracies and tricks, and they would not have been able to break the tranquility of my life even if the conspiracy succeeded; let them laugh at my shame to the fullest, and they would not be able to stop me from enjoying my innocence, no matter what they did. I will spend the rest of my life in peace.
Source: Reverie of the Lonely Wanderer