But my resolve remains fixed and unshakeable. I can’t stay here in their ambience any longer. My bag is packed; in an hour or so I’ll be gone. Of course, if he wishes, Spector will find me quite easily. But why should he bother to persecute me, if I retire to the remote countryside to live the life of a recluse? Perhaps in time he will let me forget him, and his immense black shadow, which has darkened my whole existence, will fade at last. Already his image seems less formidable, as I see in it only the calamities I have wished myself.
As for Carla, if she has any separate identity in the concrete world, I can only hope to meet her again some time in the future when all this is forgotten and there is no need of deceit or misunderstanding. How easy it is to deceive trusting people with lies. But I must have required her to deceive me, and I’m no longer resentful, nor am I so unreasonable as to complain.
It all began, probably, with my trying to live in the city; that was my great mistake, for I’ve never felt my natural self when surrounded by crowds and buildings. Perhaps I’ll have a better chance of leading my own life in solitude, among the hills and valleys and woods where I was born and grew up. To understand the self is all that matters, and then all things become possible; perhaps there, in the neighbourhood where the crime was committed, I may even come to terms with my guilt.
In an hour or so I shall go to the station, take the first train to the part of the country where I used to live, getting out wherever it happens to stop, leaving everything to chance or, rather, following my instincts, prepared to accept whatever circumstances ensue. There’s a certain comfort at times like these in abandoning all conscious effort to control one’s destiny, and so I am making no plans. My suitcase is packed with only the barest necessities, for this period of my life is over, and I want to carry forward as little of it as possible into the next. A new beginning implies a new world as well as the end of an old one; in the depths of the country I may perhaps rediscover that mysterious sanctuary where I once used to take refuge from the world of facts and the harshness and misunderstanding I found among human beings.
‘That’s nothing but cowardly defeatism,’ I seem to hear some disapproving critic exclaim. ‘You’re just running away from life and from your problems.’ And I answer that this can’t be so, for the simple reason that it’s impossible to run away from what is within one. Granted, I may only be at the beginning of greater problems and difficulties; but at any rate I shall know that they are of my own making and not down to alien influence.
I wonder whether I’ve made it sound too easy, this course I am taking. Anybody who’s ever attempted to do it will know that it’s never easy to start life again, especially with very little money and without friends. Eternal regret is the price I must pay for the idyllic companionship I have known and lost. Now I’m more alone than I’ve ever been, not only because I no longer have any friends but because I know that, however closely another life may impinge upon mine, ultimately I exist in impenetrable isolation.
So I come to the end of my writing. I’ve often thought it was of no value, my ideas of no more significance than the aimless circling of flies in an empty room. And, if anyone else ever reads these words, he’ll probably endorse this opinion, saying these are trivial personal matters that tell him nothing he didn’t already know.
To such a person I must admit that I deserve his criticism, for communication was not my primary object. But my egotism seems justified by the understanding, to which the writing has led, of things that are of supreme importance to me, though possibly they are incommunicable.