In order to measure the effects of depriving yourself in this fashion, you refrained from exercising for a month. No tennis, no horseback riding, no boating, no swimming, no running, no walking. You became electric. Like an overcharged battery, you risked melting or exploding. Your gestures became faster. You felt clumsy manipulating everyday objects, as though you were handling a complex machine for the first time. Long forgotten nervous tics from childhood reappeared. You extended your arms for no reason ten times in a row, making your elbow joints crack. You stretched out your shoulders, forcing the joints to their limits. You breathed in and out exaggeratedly for five minutes. When you were on your feet, you would stand on tip-toes; you contorted your ankles when speaking to a friend who detained you for too long. In your room you felt the urge to box or kick the air. Your body was trying to cheat by expending its energy despite the immobility you were inflicting on it.
One winter morning, you left your house wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and cross-trainers. You took a path along a river that led away from town and snaked through the countryside. It was eight in the morning; dawn was breaking, mist evaporating. The cold pierced your meager clothing; your hands reddened; your ears were freezing. Your body was fragile, as if you were naked in a freezer. You wondered what masochism drove you to inflict this torture on yourself. But you ran fast and your body heated up again. Soon drops of sweat forming beads on your neck and your thighs irritated your skin. You became out of breath; the icy air penetrated into your lungs, which were spitting out the nicotine caked on their walls. But you persevered. After the painful first twenty minutes, you were overcome with euphoria. You forgot the cold then and the pain of the effort. You believed now that you were able to run without limits; your brain had been invaded by a natural drug secreted by your body. You ran for an hour and a half before thinking of turning back. You got home three hours later, drenched, indifferent to the cold and the pain. It was painful, in fact, for you to stop. You breathed hard in the vestibule, skipping on the spot in order to soften the abrupt end of the run. It was too hot in the house. To go out again would have been useless, your body in the process of reacclimatizing itself could not have withstood the outrageous cold. You moved from one room to another. You came across a mirror; your face was covered with red and yellow blotches. You approached the mirror; you recognized your physiognomy, but it seemed to belong to someone else. Fatigue disassociated you from yourself. You looked at the furniture and objects around you. They should have been familiar; they were strangers to you. You picked up a dictionary; you opened it at random and fell on the word Fraction, for which you read the definition. Words were abstract paintings. You recognized the letters; you put them together to make harmonious sounds, but no meaning emanated from the sentences you read. The text was opaque like a monochrome surface. You closed the dictionary again and picked up a piece of candy that had left itself on a shelf. You removed its wrapper and put it in your mouth. A strong taste of mint irrigated your palate and spread through your lungs. This pepperminty assault made you cough; you sat down in an armchair; you closed your eyes and lolled backwards to rest your head. Blood beat strong through your heart. Heavier than usual. Your veins and your arteries seemed too narrow. Your flesh was loud. It didn’t produce music, but a sickening pulsation, and you waited for the abatement of this rhythm. Your neck was sawed at by the wooden backrest it was resting on. You got up. Changing position made you dizzy. White spots gathered on the surface of your eyes. They masked the décor; the furniture disappeared. Just as you were about to faint, a chill ran down your spine. The white spots blurred, objects faded back in, like in a slideshow, but they felt no more real than the spots. You dropped onto the sofa; its velvet caressed you, but no memories accompanied this sensation. Your memory seemed to have been eradicated. You moved toward a photograph of your wife on a bookshelf. You looked at it with indifference, as if it were a portrait of a stranger put up in a photo booth. While you were worrying about your lack of feeling, you heard steps on the parquet. You turned around; it was your wife who was telling you about a dinner to which you had both been invited the following week, and which she supposed you would refuse to attend. A refusal fell out of your mouth before you had thought about what you wanted to say. Your wife showed astonishment at your abruptness, but all you could see was an abstract grimace. It really was her, you recognized her, but you wondered if you knew her. She was abstract like the other objects in the depths from which her silhouette emerged. She was looking at you, she was expecting a reaction from you, but your face remained inexpressive. The physical excess of the run had plunged you into a waking sleep from which you couldn’t wake. Whatever was happening between your temples and between your eyes and the back of your skull no longer belonged to you. You were guided by automatic physical reactions. You then headed toward the bathroom to take a shower. The cold of the tiles under your feet, the smell of soap, the hot water that streamed onto your skull didn’t succeed in bringing you out of your torpor. You lay down after the shower, but sleep didn’t come. You were separated from yourself, so relaxed as to be without sensation. Your indifference should have made you afraid, but you were indifferent to indifference. You got up, you dressed, and you rejoined your wife for lunch. At the table, you reacted to her conversation with vague, pat phrases that implied no response. You passed the day like a sleepwalker, till nightfall. When you turned on the lights, seven hours had passed since your run. You started to wake up. Your physical expenditure had exhausted you. You decided, in the future, to economize your efforts so that they wouldn’t backfire. You would have to feel out the right amount of exercise, so that it would relax you without annihilating you.
Your end was premeditated. You had conceived of a scenario where your body would be found immediately after your death. You didn’t want it to stay there decomposing for days, for it to be found rotten like that of some forgotten hermit. You did violence to your living body, but you didn’t want it to be found, in death, victim to degradations other than those you had inflicted on it yourself. You made sure to appear to your wife, and to those who would carry your body away, in the way you had planned.
You spoke little, but with precision, and with passion when speaking to someone you knew. You weren’t urbane. At a party, you wouldn’t head toward strangers to start up a conversation. You became acquainted with new people if they spoke to you. Though you knew how to speak with whomever you wanted, you preferred asking questions to making assertions. You could listen endlessly to someone answering your questions, or to several people speaking together on a subject that you had brought up. Not liking to speak about yourself in public, your questions allowed you to hide yourself behind the position of listener.
At night you perceived the flow of time less. Urbane duties were again put off until the next day. No social act needed to be undertaken; there was nothing to distract you from yourself any longer. You became contemplative without guilt, and without any limits beyond your fatigue.