Strindberg’s Inferno

August Strindberg, portrait by Richard Bergh (1905)

I had been reading the delightful little pamphlet La joie de mourir and it aroused within me a longing to leave this world. In order to investigate the borderland between life and death, I lie down on bed, uncork a bottle of cyanide and let its deadly fumes fill the room. He is coming closer, the Grim Reaper, he is so mild and seductive, but at the last moment someone always appears or something happens that cuts everything off; the waiter has an errand, a wasp flies in through the window. The powers refuse me this one and only happiness, and I bow to their will.

–Johan August Strindberg, Inferno, ch vi (Purgatorio), p. 141 (1897)(S.H. transl.)