My Superior was right: I suffer from an incurable need to understand. I do not want to die without understanding why I have lived. And you, have you ever been afraid of death?”

I rummaged among my memories in silence, among the deepest memories which had not yet been put into words. And I said, with some difficulty:

“Yes. Around the age of six I heard something about flies that sting people while they sleep. Someone had joked that ‘when you wake up, you’re dead.’ This phrase haunted me. In the evenings in bed, with the light out, I tried to picture death to myself, the ‘most nothing of all.’ In imagination I suppressed all the circumstances of my life, and I felt gripped in ever tighter circles of panic. There was no longer any ‘I’—What is it after all, ‘I’? I was not able to grasp it, ‘I’ slipped from my thought like a fish from the hands of a blind man. I couldn’t sleep. For three years, these nights of interrogation in the dark frequently returned. Then, one particular night, a marvelous idea came to me: instead of just submitting to this panic, I would try to observe it, to see where it is, what it is. I perceived then that it was connected to a contraction in my stomach, a little under my ribs, and also in my throat; I recall that I was subject to irregular heartbeats. I forced myself to unclench, to relax my stomach. The panic disappeared. In this state, when I tried to think again about death, instead of being gripped by the claws of panic I was filled by an entirely new feeling, whose name I did not know, something between mystery and hope …”

“And then you grew up, went to school, and began to philosophize, didn’t you? We’re all like that. It seems that around the age of adolescence, the inner life of the young human being is suddenly weakened, its natural courage neutered. His thought no longer dares to confront reality or mystery face to face, directly; but endeavors to regard them through the opinions of ‘grown-ups,’ through the books and courses of professors. Yet the small inner voice is not entirely extinguished, and sometimes it cries out when it can, whenever a jolt of existence loosens the gag. It cries out its question, but we immediately stifle it. Well, we already understand each other a little. I can tell you, then, that I am afraid of death. Not of what we imagine about death, for this fear is itself imaginary. Not of my death whose date will be recorded in the civic registers of the state. But of that death I suffer every moment, of the death of that voice which, out of the depths of my childhood keeps asking, as yours does: ‘What am I?’ and which everything within us and around us seems bent on stifling. When this voice does not speak—and it does not speak often!—I am an empty carcass, a restless cadaver. I am afraid that one day it will fall silent forever; or that it will wake up too late—as in your story of the flies: when you wake up, you’re dead.

“And there you have it!” he said, almost violently. “I’ve told you the main thing. All the rest is details. I’ve waited for years to be able to say this to someone.”

He sat down, and I saw that this man must have a mind of steel to resist the pressure of madness that was boiling up inside him. He was now fairly relaxed, and seemed relieved.

“My only good moments,” he went on after changing position, “were when I took my hiking boots, my rucksack, and my ice axe to climb the mountains.