How is it that all his thoughts circle around suicide? Is it permissible for suicide to be a sort of secret pleasure to a man? What is suicide anyway? Self-extinction. Rightly or wrongly. By what right? Why not? I tried to focus my thoughts on the one point: is suicide permissible? I had no answer. None. Because people are no answer, and can't be, nor is anything living, and not the dead either. By committing suicide, I am destroying something for which I am not to blame. Something entrusted to me, then? By whom? When? Did I realize it at the time? No. But an unignorable voice tells me that suicide is a sin. Sin? As easy as that? It's something that will bring the whole edifice to collapse, says the voice. Edifice? What edifice? His watchword, whether asleep or awake: suicide! It will choke him. He is bricking up one window after another. Before long, he'll have walled himself up. Then, once he can't see out anymore, because he can't breathe anymore, he'll be persuasive: because he'll be dead. I have the sense of standing in the shadow of a thought of his that is very close to me: the thought of his suicide.