“I thought, he would have been happy, happy in his sense of the word, but he lacked the courage for such a decision, was incapable of performing the small about-face that I had often spoken of in his presence but that he never attempted. He wanted to be an artist, an artist of life wasn’t enough for him, although precisely this concept provides everything we need to be happy if we think about it, I thought. Ultimately he was enamored of failure, if not even a little smitten, I thought, had clung to this failure of his until the end.”

—Narrator