THEY SAY THAT NEAR THE END, NOT LONG BEFORE HIS death at the age of forty-three, Guy de Maupassant felt and saw his melting, dissolving brain flowing from his nostrils. He hallucinated, saw ghosts. Before he was put in a straitjacket, he declared himself to be suffering from “sheer madness.”

So much for the popular saying that tells us that if we think we’re crazy, we’re not. Then again, maybe Maupassant’s brains really were running out of his nose.

Maupassant’s story “The Diary of a Madman,” as it is called in English, is no longer available these days except as a Kindle e-book, an MP3 download, or an iPad app. To use the title of one of his final tales: “Qui Sait?”—“Who Knows?”

I had never felt that my brains were oozing out of my nose. I had never been put into a straitjacket. I had never purchased an e-book or an app.

Was I sane? Why did I so often suspect myself of being insane? Was it actually my brains that I had been blowing into my snot rag? Had anything I had written been turned into an iPad app behind my back? Who knows? More to the point: qui se soucie?—who cares?

It was true that I did not like the way I was thinking lately. But it was also true that I did not like a lot of the ragged, old, awkward winter clothes I was wearing lately. I would go to Modell’s, buy some new winter things to wear. I would go uptown to Orvis, get one of those shearling-lined ox hide leather coats, a nice warm cashmere turtleneck sweater and nice warm cashmere watch cap to match. And I would get some new thoughts, some new ways of thinking. Easy to find, in me, in the sky. And a lot cheaper than shearling, ox hide, and cashmere. Free, in fact. Yeah. That was all there was to it. All new shit. From brain to britches, britches to brains: all new shit. Hell, it was all the same. What shall it profit a man if he shall gain his own soul and lose out on a new set of Duofold thermal underwear and Wigwam socks?

The wisdom to know the difference? Fuck it. There was none. No wisdom. No difference. No acceptance. Let others weigh what could not be weighed in scales that did not exist. Let others compromise and fiddle-faddle with the fate they toyed with like a trifle in their idle hands. There was only change.

The festerings of the brain that we call thoughts could be cast away and forgotten as easily as old clothes.

Swift and resolute action leads to success; self-doubt is a prelude to disaster. He who hesitates is lost.