“Since that moment it is all up with me. My last remaining shreds of happiness and self-confidence have been blown to the winds, I can do no more. Yes, I am unhappy; I freely admit it, I seem a lamentable and absurd figure even to myself. And that I cannot bear. I shall make an end of it. Today, or tomorrow, or some time, I will shoot myself.
My first impulse, my first instinct, was a shrewd one: I would make copy of the situation, I would contribute my pathetic sickness to swell the literature of unhappy love. But that was all folly. One does not die of an unhappy love-affair. One revels in it. It is not such a bad pose. But what is destroying me is that hope has been destroyed with the destruction of all pleasure in myself.
[…]
I cease to write, fling the pen from me — full of disgust, full of disgust! I will make an end of it — alas, that is an attitude too heroic for a dilettante. In the end I shall go on living, eating, sleeping; I shall gradually get used to the idea that I am dull, that I cut a wretched and ridiculous figure.”
— Thomas Mann, The Dilettante