Born in a prison, with bundles on our backs and our thoughts, we could not reach the end of a single if the possibility of finishing does not incited us to begin the following day...The shackles and the unbreathable air of this world take off us everything, except the freedom for killing us; and this freedom insufflates us a force and a pride such that they triumph over the weights that flatten us.

Making use of oneself and refusing it: is there a more mysterious virtue? The consolation for the possible suicide widens infinitely this mansion where we drown. The idea of destroying us, means multiplicity to obtain it, their easiness and proximity gladden us and frighten us; since there is anything else more simple and more terrible than the act by which we irrevocably decide on ourselves. In one instant, we suppress all instants; neither God would know how to make it the same. But, bluffer demons, we defer our end: how would we resign our freedom's deployment, our arrogance's game?...

The one who had not ever conceived his own annulment, who had not foreseen the resource of the cord, the bullet, the poison or the sea, is a debased prisoner or a crawling worm on the cosmic carrion. This world can take off us everything, it can forbid us everything, but nobody can't prevent us our self-abolition. All the equipment help us, all our abysses invite us; but all our instincts are opposed. This contradiction develops in the spirit a conflict without exit. When we begin to reflect on life, to discover in it an emptiness infinite, our instincts have already been erected in guides and abettors of our acts; they curb our inspiration flight and our detaching lightness. If, in the moment of our birth, we were so conscious as we are upon leaving the adolescence, it is very probable that at five years suicide would be a habitual phenomenon or even an honour issue. But we awake too late: we have against us the fertilized years only by the instincts presence, that should be remain stupefied of the conclusions to those which lead our meditations and deceptions. And they react; however, as we have acquired our freedom conscience, we are owners of a resolution a bit attractive as we can not practice it. It makes us sustain every day and, more yet, the nights: we are no longer poor, neither oppressed by adversity: we have supreme resources. And though we didn't never exploit them, and we finished in the traditional expiration, we might have had a treasure within our abandonments: is there a greater wealth than the suicide that eachone carries in itself?

If the religions have forbidden us to die by our own hand, it is because they saw in this a rebelliousness example that humiliated temples and gods. Certain council considered suicide as a more serious sin than the crime, because the assassin can always repents, be saved, while the one who has been killed himself has cleared the salvation limits. But the act of killing himself does not start from a radical salvation formulation? And nothing-ness, does not worth as much as eternity? Only the existing one does not need to make the war to the universe; it's to itself to who sends the ultimatum. It does not longer aspire to be forever, if in a matchless act has been absolutely himself. He rejects the sky and the land as itself is rejected. At least, he will have reached an inaccessible freedom fullness to which it indefinitely seeks in the futur...

No church, no mayoralty has invented until the present any valid argument against suicide. The one who can not stands life, what is answered to him? Nobody is worthy of taking on himself the other one's bundles. And what force dialectical has against the indisputable penalties assault and thousand of disconsolate evidences? Suicide is one of man's distinctive features, one of his discoveries; no animal is capable of it and the angels have hardly guessed it; without it, the human reality would be less curious and less picturesque: it would lack a strange climate and a series of untoward possibilities, that have their strategic value, though it is not more than introducing new solutions and a variety of conclusions into the tragedy .

Old scholars, who killed theirselves as a test of their maturity, had created a discipline of suicide that the modern ones have unlearned. Bent over backwards to an agony without genius, we are not neither authors of our twilights, nor umpires of our good-byes: the end is not our end: we lack the excellence of a sole initiative - for which we would rescue a tasteless and without talent life-, as we lack the sublime cynicism, art's ancient pomp perishing. Desperation unimaginative persons, corpses that are accepted, we all survive and die just to fulfil a useless formality. It is as if our life was more busy postponing the moment in which we could liberate us of it.

Taken from: "Breviario de podredumbre", E. M. Cioran, Taurus Ediciones, 1991