90% done with The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

He’s reading Crime and Punishment, but not THAT one – the Italian’s Cesare Beccaria. In that book, on suicide, it says “Mankind love life too well; the objects that surround them, the seducing phantom of pleasure, and hope, that sweetest error of mortals, which makes men swallow such large draughts of evil, mingled with a very few drops of good, allure them too strongly”.

Kill the Buddha, indeed.