Hunger (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Once out in the fjord I straightened up, wet with fever and fatigue, looked in toward the shore and said goodbye for now to the city, to Kristiania, where the windows shone so brightly in every home.

Rotten patches were beginning to appear in my inner being, black spongy growths that were spreading more and more. And God sat up in his heaven keeping a watchful eye on me, making sure that my destruction took place according to all the rules of the game, slowly and steadily, with no letup.

The consciousness of being honest went to my head, filling me with the glorious sensation that I was a man of character, a white beacon in the midst of a turbid human sea with floating wreckage everywhere.

I felt I was myself a crawling insect doomed to perish, seized by destruction in the midst of a whole world ready to go to sleep.

Fall has arrived and has already begun to put everything into a deep sleep; flies and other insects have suffered their first setback, and up in the trees and down on the ground you can hear the sounds of struggling life, puttering, ceaselessly rustling, laboring not to perish.

It’s fall, the very carnival of transience; the roses have an inflamed flush, their blood-red color tinged with a wonderfully hectic hue.

However estranged I was from myself in that moment, so completely at the mercy of invisible influences, nothing that was taking place around me escaped my perception.

All at once my thoughts, by a fanciful whim, take an odd direction—I’m seized by a strange desire to frighten this lady, to follow her and hurt her in some way.

Autumn had arrived, that lovely, cool time of year when everything turns color and dies.