The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 74 of 125
The death instinct and the Nirvana Principle
I leaned back against the tree and tried to relax. Let go, I told myself. Let go, and let it take you where it wants . . . the trouble was, I liked the look of where it wanted to take me less and less. There was growing pressure on my chest, and I was finding it hard to breathe. Then I seemed to catch sight of something inside myself that made me freeze with incredulity. I saw that I wanted to die. Deep down, I didn’t want to live at all. No, no, I thought. That can’t be so. That doesn’t make any kind of sense. Then I remembered Freud’s concept of the death instinct, and I wondered whether there could be some truth in that after all. Hadn’t Freud called it “the Nirvana Principle” at first? That would have quite different connotations. Returning to a state neither living nor dead . . . returning to the changeless, the unmanifest. Suddenly death was all around.