Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable – Stig Dagerman
I lack faith, so I can never be happy. A happy person would not fear his life was a meaningless drift toward a certain death. I have inherited neither a god nor any fixed point on this earth where I can attract a god’s notice. Nor am I graced with the skeptic’s well-concealed rage, the rationality’s barren mind, the atheist’s burning innocence. So who am I to cast stones at those who believe in what I doubt? Much less at those who worship doubt as if it weren’t shrouded in a darkness all its own? The stone would only come back to strike me. For there is one thing of which I am firmly convinced: our need for consolation is insatiable.
[…]
I can sit before a fire in the safest of rooms and suddenly sense death all around me. It’s there in the flames, in every sharp object at hand, in the weight of the ceiling and the mass of the walls. It’s in the water, the snow, the heat, and in my blood. What then is human refuge but a consolation that death is so near to life? And what a meager consolation that is, causing us to dwell on the very thing it is meant to help us forget.
[…] And when depression finally sets in I become a slave to that as well. Holding onto it becomes my greatest ambition. I become incapable of recognizing anything of worth in myself, except the one thing that I dread has already been lost: the ability to squeeze beauty out of my despair, my anxieties, my weaknesses. In a kind of bitter delight I long to be snowed under, into oblivion, to see my houses fall to ruins.
But depression is a chamber with seven views, and from the last of these I can make out a knife, a razor, a vial of poison, a pool of immeasurable depth and the ledge of a tall building. In the end I become a slave to all these instruments of death. They hound me like a pack of dogs. Or am I the dog stalking them? And I begin to sense that suicide may be the only real proof of human freedom.
[…]
As I stand by the sea, so can I learn from the sea. No one has the right to demand of the sea that it bear an infinite number of boats, nor of the wind that it continually fill every sail. By the same token I can hardly be expected to hold my life captive to the performance of certain tasks. It is not a question of “Duty above all else!” but of life above everything. Just as anyone else, I should be permitted moments when I may step aside from that mass that we call the earth’s population, when I may experience myself not merely as a part of that collective identity but as a distinct and independent being.
[…] However, I can consider the demands human beings must face and distinguish between those that are unreasonable and those that are inevitable. I recognize that one kind of freedom is long, perhaps forever, past—the freedom that is part of belonging to a particular element. The fish has its own. So does the fowl. So in fact does the terrestrial creature. The human being moves with the perils of a stranger through them all. True enough, Thoreau had his woods at Walden. But in what woods can humankind now test the possibilities of a life lived in freedom beyond the rigid structures of society?
I can only answer: nowhere. […] And on that day when all that remains to safeguard my integrity is my own silence, then my power will have no bounds, for no axe can penetrate a living silence.