If each event consisted of its beginning, its becoming real, and its completion, you would prefer the beginning because there desire wins out over pleasure. In their beginnings, events preserve the potential that they lose in their completion. Desire prolongs itself so long as it is not achieved. As for pleasure, it signals the death of desire, and soon of pleasure itself. It’s strange that while loving beginnings, you terminated yourself: suicide is an end. Did you consider it a beginning?
You used to play tennis, squash, and ping-pong. You went horseback riding. You swam. You went running. You went sailing. You would walk through town and countryside. You did not play team sports. You preferred to expend your energy alone, without depending on teammates. You liked playing against an opponent, less in order to beat him than to motivate your own efforts. When you would ride on horseback alone in the countryside, or when you swam in the sea, in rivers, in swimming pools, it sometimes happened that you would, in the middle of your exertions, be discouraged by the absurdity of what you were in the process of doing: athletic exertion was vanity. You engaged in it less for the joy of the act than in order to exhaust yourself. Your body, like that of an animal, produced more energy than necessary. The overabundance of force you accumulated would turn against you if it wasn’t depleted. If a week went by without your expending yourself, you would stamp your feet; your muscles would be tense from the moment you woke up and wouldn’t relax until nightfall.