The Ravings

One. Ever since I stopped taking life seriously, my happiness has returned.

Ever since I began thinking that no one in this world means anything to me, I've been sleeping well at night.

Ever since I quit worrying about my career, I've started feeling light as a bird.

Now I think, good Lord! What earthly good came from running breathless in that suffocating style?

Now I'm nobody to anyone, and no one in the world is anybody to me. Let everyone die however they please!

I see my days passing quite well.

The dreams of happiness we see, thinking we'll live for many days, fade away one day. Only then can we truly live.

Two. Why, why do people have only sixty or seventy years to live? I'd need a solid hundred years just to lie on green grass with arms and legs spread wide, staring open-mouthed at the sky!

Even lying quietly with my head on Mother's lap would take four hundred and sixty years, and that still wouldn't be enough!

Why, why do people have such short lives?

Just to keep gazing at how lovely it looks when the person you love smiles—that alone would take at least ninety years!

To remember, drenched in moonlight at midnight, the stories of a life three thousand years old—that would take a person twenty-eight billion years!

Why, God, why did You send people into the world with such brief lives? Born today, and tomorrow death comes knocking, takes you by the hand and says, "You've lived enough, come on, your train has arrived."

Why do I suddenly want to live for a thousand billion years today, God? I hear that people want to keep living like this before they leave. Am I then also...