"I don't care enough to save myself just yet," you say slowly, with a hint of satisfaction. You look forward to the time, unimaginably distant, when you will care enough to save yourself. This is why it's wrong to call you a martyr, because you don't try to deny yourself anything. Rather, this state in which you find yourself is simply a consequence of your indifference. And it isn't even that you've renounced the belief in things; it's just that you don't believe in anything particular just now. You are waiting for something which will be worthy of your involvement, your attention, the gesture of faith you know you have it within you still to make.

The apathetic man puts faith in things, and then puts a world-weariness between himself and that faith. But you are simply indifferent; you deny yourself things because there is nothing you really care to have, and you know therefore that this is really not denial at all. You don't go out; you don't meet people; you don't even open the door when someone comes knocking, since you regard such acts as pointless. It surprises you how you can even declare all this without passion, and you are even slightly afraid of the equanimity with which you view your life, as though something had died within you.

You wish you could justify this indifference by trying to explain why you feel indifferent. It seems logical to you that there must be arguments here to be raised and sustained. And yet, indifference almost seems to be an argument in itself. You accept the basic facts of life - that you must eat and sleep to stay alive. And so you do, renouncing ascetism in the same way you renounce all other irrelevant things.

You decide that you must be unhappy, but is there any way to prove this unhappiness? How can you prove that something exists which you do not feel? It's as if your writing came between you and your unhappiness. You know that you should be unhappy if you didn't write, but you are too terrified not to write; you are too terrified of the acceptance you would have to make if you stopped writing. And so you never experience your unhappiness; you believe in it, but you don't dare to touch it. You don't dare to let it touch you.

And when you choose to save yourself, will it be so easy? You don't even need to consider it, because you don't know for certain if it will happen. It's a bridge which might need to be crossed; but not just yet. For now you don't need to imagine the river; you don't need to imagine the country it divides into two. You don't need to imagine anything at all.