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For fear? For death? For suicide? For murder? For theft? Freedom for what?
One of the existentialist novels says that a young man is brought before a court because he has killed a stranger on the beach, someone whose face he has not even seen. He came up behind this man, who was sitting looking at the sunset, pushed a knife in his back and killed him. And he has not even seen who he was.
It was a very strange case. You don't kill unless you have some enmity, some anger, some revengefulness. But they were not even known to each other, they were not even friends. You can kill friends -- friends are always killing each other -- but he was not even a friend, what to say about an enemy? You can make somebody an enemy only if you make him first your friend. That step is necessary: first friend, then enemy. You cannot make somebody an enemy directly. Some acquaintance, some friendship is needed to create an enemy.
The court was at a loss. The judge asked the man, "Why did you kill a stranger whose face you had not seen, whose name you did not know?"
The man said, "It does not matter. I was feeling so bored I wanted to do something, something that would get my photograph in all the newspapers. It has happened; I feel a little less bored. And anyway there is no meaning in life. What was that idiot doing? What was he going to do if I had not killed him? Just repeat the same things that he has done already many times. So what is the fuss? Why have I been brought into the court?"
The magistrate seemed absolutely puzzled: there is no eyewitness, except this man himself who says, `I have killed that man, but without witnesses you cannot punish me. I may be lying, who knows? There are no witnesses."
Then circumstantial witnesses were brought into the court. One neighbor said, "This man is strange. His mother died on Sunday, and when he was informed he said, `That woman would always create trouble -- and inevitably on a Sunday. Sunday is a holiday, could she not die on Saturday or Friday? But I knew perfectly well from the very beginning that that woman, who has been a torture my whole life, was going to destroy one of my holidays. And
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