found them full of meaning. I understood that I had erred, and why I erred.
I had erred not so much because I thought incorrectly as because I lived
badly. I understood that it was not an error in my thought that had hid truth
from me as much as my life itself in the exceptional conditions of epicurean
gratification of desires in which I passed it. I understood that my question
as to what my life is, and the answer -- and evil -- was quite correct. The
only mistake was that the answer referred only to my life, while I had
referred it to life in general. I asked myself what my life is, and got the
reply: An evil and an absurdity. and really my life -- a life of indulgence of
desires -- was senseless and evil, and therefore the reply, "Life is evil and
an absurdity", referred only to my life, but not to human life in general. I
understood the truth which I afterwards found in the Gospels, "that men
loved darkness rather than the light, for their works were evil. For everyone
that doeth ill hateth the light, and cometh not to the light, lest his works
should be reproved." I perceived that to understand the meaning of life it is
necessary first that life should not be meaningless and evil, then we can
apply reason to explain it. I understood why I had so long wandered round
so evident a truth, and that if one is to think and speak of the life of
mankind, one must think and speak of that life and not of the life of some
of life's parasites. That truth was always as true as that two and two are
four, but I had not acknowledged it, because on admitting two and two to
be four I had also to admit that I was bad; and to feel myself to be good was
for me more important and necessary than for two and two to be four. I
came to love good people, hated myself, and confessed the truth. Now all
became clear to me.
What if an executioner passing his whole life in torturing people and
cutting off their heads, or a hopeless drunkard, or a madman settled for life
in a dark room which he has fouled and imagines that he would perish if he
left -- what if he asked himself: "What is life?" Evidently he could not other
reply to that question than that life is the greatest evil, and the madman's
answer would be perfectly correct, but only as applied to himself. What if I
am such a madman? What if all we rich and leisured people are such
madmen? and I understood that we really are such madmen. I at any rate
was certainly such.