मेरा आजीवन कारावास / माझी जन्मठेप (स्वातंत्र्यवीर सावरकर - काले पानी का ऐतिहासिक संस्मरण)

stiffened; I supported myself against the wall; I shut my eyes and fell into a stupor. I do not know how long I was in that senseless condition. Suddenly I woke up from that deep state of unconsciousness. For a few minutes I knew not where I was, and what I was doing. I had lost all sense of time and space. Deep peace of nescience, state of perfect bliss, complete self-forgetfulness, body, mind and soul merged into one, and the sense of personality gone from them-this was what I seemed to experience in that happy mood which lasted but for a few minutes. Life in death and death in life, as it seemed to me then! And then I came to myself. Objects around me became clearer, one after another. And I resumed my work. My mind was ever goading me:-"Why don't you finish that work? Death is no torture. You have experienced it now,- complete self-forgetfulness and the peace of nescience. Thousands of prisoners have used the means to attain that nirvana. Why do you hold back? Don't, take a piece of string and strangle yourself. End all this trouble thus. Why not?"

The lure of Suicide

The whole day passed in this obsession of mind. Suicide-that one word was luring me on. Death was nothing but that indifferent state I had lately experienced. And it was, Indeed, better than my present. state. Twice did this mood come over me. Once when I was re-arrested at Marseilles and was proceeding through Aden to India. The sea was a blazing furnace of fire, so hot we felt round about Aden; I was then in the lock up on a cabin, distressed in mind and heated in body. And now irk the Andamans, working on 'Kolu', when the brain became dull and the body fabled me. A wrestle within me between reason and desire, when reason had almost gone under! The same was to happen to me twice in the future. That night as I lay on my bed, my eyes were rivetted on the barred window, where I had known that prisoners before me in the room had hanged themselves and taken leave of their lives. I listened to that controversy between reason and desire as a third person, and I wove it into a poem later on. Again and again the voice of reason would admonish the voice of desire in some such words: "Fool, how proud, how vain you are! Let us believe that you were meant to do great deeds of heroism and national uplift. But what of it now? The human machine is now useless for you; now you say May be, granted that it is true. Have not thousand such machines been completely shattered prior to this? Why not use the machine that God gave you for humbler ends? Why break it with your own hands? Silent, unknown tortures-to bear and endure them-is also a part of its work. In national work, on a stupendous scale, one has to fight and conquer from point to point, from stage to stage. This may be a stage in your onward march to success. This is, perhaps, the hardest stage, the tightest corner that you have to turn. Will you turn away from this part of duty? Rather stay on and fight, fight at bay if you must. That is also a compliment to the human machine which you will so recklessly destroy." And if you must die then