Hunger (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

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

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.

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.

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.

But write—no, I couldn’t do it. After a few lines nothing more occurred to me; my thoughts were elsewhere and I couldn’t pull myself together to make any definite effort. I was acted on and distracted by everything around me, all that I saw gave me new impressions.

As soon as I opened my eyes I started wondering, by force of habit, whether I had anything to look forward to today.

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.

There was no doubt that here I found myself before a special kind of darkness, a desperate element which no one had previously been aware of. The most ludicrous ideas filled my mind, and every little thing frightened me.

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.