No Longer Human ( PDFDrive )

68
attitudes in which I have gone on living. People
also commonly speak of the "wound of a guilty conscience."
In my case, the wound appeared of itself
when I was an infant, and with the passage of time,
far from healing it has grown only the deeper, until
now it has reached the bone. The agonies I have
suffered night after night have made for a hell composed
of an infinite diversity of tortures, hut—though
this is a very strange way to put it—the wound has
gradually become dearer to me than my own flesh
and blood, and I have thought its pain to he the
emotion of the wound as it lived or even its murmur
of affection.
For Buch a person as myself the atmosphere of an
underground movement was curiously soothing and
agreeable. What appealed to me, in other words, was
not so much its basic aims as its personality. The
movement served Horiki merely as a pretext for idiotic
banter. The only meeting he attended was the
one where he introduced me. He gave as his reason
for not coming again the stupid joke that Marxists
should study not only the productive aspects of society
but the consumptive ones. At any rate the consumptive
aspects were the only ones we observed
together. When I think back on it now, in those
days there were Marxists of every variety. Some, like
Horiki, called themselves such out of an empty