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.
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| 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. |
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