He discovered in this painter a poetry of which no one else was aware.

He discovered in himself a soul of which he himself had been unaware.

It was also a portrait of his vulnerable self.
The discovery only served to increase his melancholy.

Those whom God loves die young.

You who more than anyone burned with ideals


Are you who more than anyone knew reality.

You fellows still have a strong will to live, I suppose?'

'Yes, of course, but you, too...

'Not any more,' he said. He was telling the truth. At some point he had lost interest in life. 'I do have the will to create, though.'

'But surely the will to create is a form of the will to live...?'

- Why do you attack the present social system?

Because I see the evils that capitalism has engendered.

- Evils? I thought you recognized no difference between good and evil.

"Thinking how Gogol, too, had gone mad, he could not help feeling that there was a force governing all of them"

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
-the life of a stupid man

I've heard you want to die,' she said.

'Yes - or rather, it's not so much that I want to die as that I'm tired of living.'

This dialogue led to a vow to die together.

'It would be a Platonic suicide, I suppose,' she said.

'A Platonic double suicide.'

he was aware of all of his faults and weak points, every single one of them.

51. DEFEAT (the last short story he wrote)

The hand with the pen began to tremble, and before long he was even drooling. The only time his head ever cleared was after a sleep induced by eight-tenths of a gram of Veronal, and even then it never lasted more than thirty minutes or an hour. He barely made it through each day in the gloom, leaning as it were upon a chipped and narrow sword.

he was ashamed of himself and afraid of them, afraid of the society he so despised.

He suffered an onslaught of insomnia.
His physical strength began to fade as well.