what to do

"Despair is bottomless. You'll never get there, and that's why I know you'll never kill yourself. Not you. Only those attached to the trivial things take their own lives, but you never will. You see, a person who reveres life and family and all that stuff, he'll be the first to put his neck in a noose, but those who don't think too highly of their loves and possessions, those who know too well the lack of purpose of it all, they're the ones who can't do it. ... You don't have the resources to live a full life, yet you can't bring yourself to die. So what do you do?"

"I don't know! I'm fourteen!"

"You and me, we're in the same boat. Here in prison a man cannot live properly. ... So I, like you, can't live. And like you, I can't die. I ask you again, what's a man to do?"

"I don't know."

"You create!"

"Oh."

from

A Fraction of the Whole

Steve Toltz

2008