I've never heard a single person, since your death, tell your life story starting at the beginning. Your suicide has become the foundational act...
You don't make me sad, but solemn . . . I take advantage on your behalf of things you can no longer experience. Dead, you make me more alive...
You suffered real life in its continuous stream, but you controlled the flow of fictional life by reading at your own rhythm . . . As a reader, you had the power of a god: time submitted to you.
You died because you searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void... Your suicide was the most important thing you ever said.
Thus ends the novice's first day. The following days will be spent thus. To begin with he does not grasp. Novices a little more senior than he sometimes try to explain, to tell him what goes on, how things work, what he must do and what he mustn't do. But usually they can't do it. How can you explain that what he is seeing is not anything horrific, not a nightmare, not something he will suddenly wake from, something he can rid his mind of. How can you explain that this is life, real life, this is what there'll be every day, this is what there is, and nothing else, that it's pointless believing something else exists or to pretend to believe in something else, that it's not even worth your time trying to hide it, or to cloak it, it's not even worth your time pretending to believe there must be something behind it, or beneath it, or above it? That's what there is, and that's all... wherever you turn your eyes, that's what you will see, you will not see anything else, and that is the only thing that will turn out to be true.
There are sins or (let us call them as the world calls them) evil memories which are hidden away by man in the darkest places of the heart but they abide there and wait. He may suffer their memory to grow dim, let them be as though they had not been and all but persuade himself that they were not or at least were otherwise. Yet a chance word will call them forth suddenly and they will rise up to confront him in the most various circumstances, a vision or a dream, or while timbrel and harp soothe his senses or amid the cool silver tranquillity of the evening or at the feast at midnight when he is now filled with wine. Not to insult over him will the vision come as over one that lies under her wrath, not for vengeance to cut off from the living but shrouded in the piteous vesture of the past, silent, remote, reproachful.
