in a word, i behaved like a fool, and then, at that very same instant, i felt my ‘last conviction.’ i ask myself now how i could have waited six months for that conviction! i knew that i had a disease that spares no one, and i really had no illusions; but the more i realized my condition, the more i clung to life; i wanted to live at any price. i confess i might well have resented that blind, deaf fate, which, with no apparent reason, seemed to have decided to crush me like a fly; but why did i not stop at resentment? why did i begin to live, knowing that it was not worthwhile to begin? why did i attempt to do what i knew to be an impossibility? and yet i could not even read a book to the end; i had given up reading. what is the good of reading, what is the good of learning anything, for just six months? that thought has made me throw aside a book more than once.