But I know better. I know the promise of peaceful death lingering just below the prospect of escape is a false one, for I exist and live now only because the person I was before is dead, which means I cannot exist without having superseded someone, even if that someone is who I once was. And if that is true, then conversely, like the caterpillar that surrenders itself to the moth, suicide must be seen as a life-giving act. The day they helped me figure this out is the day I found the faith to become myself.

Most people think that faith has to do with religion and religion with divinity, but I tell you, most assuredly, that any man who has the courage to take his own life, any man who can choose the hour of his own death, any man who can stand at the very threshold of himself and step through, that man stands as close as any ever will to divinity. For if death is not a prelude to another life, then this time now is nothing more than a cruel mockery.

At times, I wonder if my increased acumen has afforded me too close a scrutiny at my own edges. But secretly I know the fact that I have resolved myself to this end matters not, for I am at this end and realize that such resolution is but a pale preface to the eventual eventualities. What matters now is the doing, not the petty preamblings of forethought. I have been in the minority of extant men long enough and now long to slip into the welcoming arms of mankind's silent majority, if only they would have me.

Reginald is being released in two days and he has agreed to take the notebooks with him. It occurred to me to have him contact Ramsay for me once he is outside, but the oath of secrecy I adopted with this tattoo precludes me from exposing him to the truth. Because of that oath, I have written the notebooks in Bulgarian so that he won't know. I have asked him to hang on to them, in the hopes that some stranger might come for them in around eighteen years. That person, I will tell him, might not even know exactly why they are at his door, but he is to give that young man or woman the three notebooks and tell them about me if they ask. As I pen these last words to whomever I will be, I am no longer able to fight it as it comes to me slowly and faintly, the low, steady, maddening sound of my own heartbeats as they echo back to me from the walls of this fatal room.

From The Progress of the Soul

I sing the song of a deathless soul,

Whom Fate, which God made, but doth not control,

Placed in most shapes...

For though through many straits and lands I roam,