From A KIND OF TESTAMENT by Witold Gombrowicz

All on my own, without any support, racked by doubts, I didn’t know what to do. What could I do? I was only sure of one thing: it was solely by cutting it that I could escape from this Gordian knot. This idea of total intransigence, which had occurred to me, had existed somewhere inside me ever since my childhood. It was even connected with a certain optimism, at least as far as literature is concerned. Because I—and I was sure of that, immature though I was—had a right to speak. I had a right to express myself, like everything that exists, like everything that is. You see, I had what everyone has: I knew what one might call the language of fact.
What could I do? To start with, I told myself, I must acknowledge this state of affairs. I must acknowledge reality and bring it to light…
To break away! To keep one’s distance! The writer, the artist, or anyone who attaches importance to his spiritual development, must feel no more than a resident in Poland or the Argentine, and it is his duty to regard Poland or the Argentine as an obstacle, almost as an enemy. That is the only way to fell really free. And only those people for whom their country is an obstacle rather than an advantage will have a chance of becoming truly free spiritually, and, in the case of Europe, truly a European.
So, these were my views then, but I elaborated on them as time went by.
Well, I wanted to be like those young men one sees in the stations of small provincial towns, their packs in their hands. They are just about to leave, and when they see the train which is to take them away, they murmur: ‘Yes, I must leave my birthplace. It’s too small for me. Farewell! I may return, but not before the wide world has given birth to me again.’
‘After that I shall no longer be Polish! I shall be all on my own.’
‘On your own? But loneliness will deliver you up to your own misery!’
‘Give me a knife, then! I must perform a still more radical operation! I must amputate myself from myself!’
I suppose that Nietzsche might have formulated my dilemma in these terms. I proceeded to amputate. The following thought was the scalpel: accept, understand that you are not yourself, that no-one is ever himself with anyone, in any situation, that to be a man is to be artificial….
Blind obedience and blind faith had become essential, and not only in the barracks. People were artificially putting themselves into artificial states, and everything—even, and above all, reality—had to be sacrificed in order to obtain strength. What was all that? Glaring idiocies, cynical falsifications, the most obvious distortions of reality, a nightmarish atmosphere….Monstrous horror….
Where was I? I was in the darkest of nights, together with the whole of humanity. The old God was dying. The laws, the principles, the customs which had constituted the patrimony of humanity were suspended in space, despoiled of their authority. Man bereft of God, liberated and solitary, began to forge himself through other men…. It was Form and nothing else which was at the basis of these convulsions. Modern man was characterized by a new attitude toward Form. How much more easily he created himself, created as he was by it!