The Pessimist Is An Imperfect Pessimist by Carlo Michelstaedter

Life is will-to-live, will is a lack, lack is pain, all life is pain.

But everything that lives, believes to be alive and to have life; and pain is mute and continuous for all things so they don't call it pain - they call pain the revelations of the non-essence of their believed possession, the loss of what they believed to possess. So her pain is also said according to the same illusion: she complains that she can't complain in advance like she used to in relation with that thing, since that complaining is called enjoyment. She laments the loss of a thing, not its ability to be lost: The unreality of its possession. And in order to live she turns back to new things similar to those that have expired, and from that apparent possession she feeds herself, still suffering obscurely.

But he who truly wants life rejects living in relation to things that make the vain happiness and the vain pain of the others - and not being satisfied with an illusory possession, demand true possession, so that it may take shape and reveal all the dark and mute sufferings that in him take place. His life is the refusal and the struggle against all the temptations of illusory fulfillments, and not dispersing himself in the act of continuous correlations (illusory possessions) he affirms himself and takes shape and creates himself: this is art.

Art is therefore the strongest pain and the strongest life and gives the strongest joy in the affirmation of itself.

But those artists who can not bear all the weight of pain and take joy and life from this weight, but ask from life things like rewards and joy - those are the shameless: the men who come out on the street undressed.- In them the disillusionment, the pain, does not take life and form by itself by telling everyone the happy gospel of "health"; but because of its weakening, because of its request for relief and reward for the things of the way, each step is darkened and renewed with regard to everything. They give us the image of torment, the materiality of sorrows, of disillusionments, not the life of disillusionment, the voice of health and truth.

But as men do not understand more than what they in their materiality materially feel:  these imperfect artists, imperfect sorrowful souls, imperfect pessimists, are commonly called the poets of pain: the "pessimists".

In fact, men call pain not their continuous pain, which is life which they call joy, but these individual pains. The revelation of continual pain can only be done by those who do not adapt to it, continuing to delude themselves into other things, but take the person of this pain in act: in order for the true activity that leads to health, to inertia - [through activity towards peace] [originally in Greek].

The true pessimists are [Energetic] [word originally in Greek] in their pain, so they are healthy: id est they go towards health; the others are inert in pain, they want to rest, so they are sick: they gravitate towards "madness". They congratulate themselves for their life, educating themselves in their pains, taking from their wounds the person they are exposing to others with no purpose other than their "vanity". Going back to each section to see the profile itself in the shadow are "caught by vertigo".

True pessimists: Christ, Aeschylus, Ibsen, Beethoven, Petrarch, Parmenides. 

Imperfect pessimist: Lenau, Schumann, Amiel, etc.

A Young Man by Carlo Michelstaedter

The following is a short story by Carlo Michelstaedter:

A young man, educated in a religious college, is educated by how much he knows of rebellion towards human law and matures his brain in speculations about the human psyche and the mysteries of nature. He sees too much and in his bitter mood that fountain of feeling dries up. He feels it and he experiences pain, and so he, because of it, wants to throw himself into life in order to stimulate the paralyzed fibers of his mood with the strongest of sensations. And he does so. But he cannot recover his lost spontaneity and he realizes that all his enthusiasms are fictitious, he realizes tat they are always the same. And with the usual cruel honesty towards himself, he examines his own self, analyzing it and then, with a calm and reasoned resolution, he kills himself, thus restitutioning the energies that were uselessly fighting in him to Mother Earth.

Very likely a metaphor for his own life, Michelstaedter would go on to write his book Persuasion And Rhetoric, a bleak philosophical treatise in the Schopenhauerian tradition. He would deliver the book as his dissertation, killing himself with a firearm immediately after, without even bothering to defend his thesis.