...of self-analysis

...I was just such an old person who was already more dead than alive. I must have made a pitiful, indeed pitiable impression on an observer, though there was none - unless I'm going to say that I am an observer of myself, which is stupid, since I am my own observer anyway: I've actually been observing myself for years, if not for decades; my life now consists only of self-observation and self-contemplation, which naturally leads to self-condemnation, self-abnegation and self-mockery, in which ultimately I always have to take refuge in order to save myself. But all the time I ask myself what I have to save myself from. Is what I constantly wish to save myself from really as bad as all that? No, it isn't, I told myself, and immediately resumed my self-observation, self-calumniation and self-mockery. All I want to do is to prolong my present state, which leads directly out of the world, I thought, though I dared not actually say it to myself. I'm playing with this state, and I'll go on playing with it as long as I please. As long as I please, I now said to myself, and I listened, but couldn't hear anything...

[Concrete, Bernhard, T.]