INFERNO - AUGUST STRINDBERG

After having made up my mind that I would wander about until day broke, I went out. The night was dark, the village was asleep, but the dogs were not, and, at a summons from one, the whole pack swarmed around me, their gaping jaws and gleaming eyes forcing me to beat a retreat.

When I got back and opened the door of my room it seems to me that the whole place was filled by animate an hostile beings. There was not a bit of room anywhere, and I felt as if I were pushing my way through a crowd of people as I tried to reach my bed.

Resigned, and resolved to die, I sank upon it. But at the last moment, just as I was suffocating in the drip of the invisible vulture, someone pulled me from my bed and the hunt of the furies was on again. Defeated, all my courage gone, driven frantic, I yielded to the Unseen and abandoned the battlefield of this unequal struggle.

I tapped on the door of the sitting-room on the other side of the passage. My mother who was still up and rapt in prayer, opened it. The expression that came on to her face as soon as she saw me gave me a feeling of deep aversion for myself.

ʻWhat is i you want my child?ʼ
ʻI want to die and then to be burned, or rather to be burned alive.ʼ

Not another word did I need to utter. She had understood me, but even as she struggled against her feeling of dread, compassion and pious mercy got the upper hand and she herself made the sofa ready for me, before retiring to the inner room where she slept with the child.

By chance, always the same satanic chance, the sofa was exactly opposite the the window and, as the same chance would have it, the window had no blind. The black window, giving on to the dar of night, stared me in the face, and, what was more, it was through this very window that the gust of wind had whistled that evening as we sat at table.

At the end of my tether, I sank on to my couch, cursing this omnipresent, inescapable chance that pursued me with the obvious intention of making me the victim of persecution mania.

For five minutes I was allowed to rest, my eyes fixed on the square of black. Then the unseen spectre came creeping upon my body and I got up. I remained standing in the middle of the room like a statue for I do not know how long, transformed into a stylite, sleeping and waking by turns.

Who was it who ha given me the strength with which to suffer?
Who was it who denied me death, which would deliver me from my tortures?

Was it He, the Lord over life and death, to whom I had given offense when, after reading the work ʻOn the Delight of Dyingʼ, I had experimented with suicide, believing myself ripe for eternal life?