A 35-year-old man, who shot himself near Harvard University a week ago, has left behind a 1905-page suicide note, an online document he had been working on for the last five years.
Mitchell Heisman shot himself at Harvard Yard on September 18. His family and about 400 friends received the 1,905-page suicide note in a posthumous e-mail.
In the note Heisman wrote that he took his life as part of a philosophical exploration he called "an experiment in nihilism." The lengthy document included 1,433 footnotes, a 20-page bibliography, over 1,700 references to God and 200 references to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
Heisman wrote, "Every word, every thought and every emotion come back to one core problem: life is meaningless... The experiment in nihilism is to seek out and expose every illusion and every myth, wherever it may lead, no matter what, even if it kills us. If life is truly meaningless and there is no rational basis for choosing among fundamental alternatives, then all choices are equal and there is no fundamental ground for choosing life over death."
Heisman's friends described him as being "cordial, considerate and quiet."

据《印度时报》28日报道，美国一名35岁男子一周前在哈佛大学附近开枪自尽，并留下了一份他写了5年的长达1905页的“电子遗书”。
据报道，米切尔-黑斯曼于9月18日在哈佛园自杀，随后他的家人和大约400个朋友均收到了一封长达1905页的电子邮件——他的遗书。
他在遗书中写道，他之所以结束自己的生命，为的是一项“虚无主义实验”的哲学研究。遗书包括1433条脚注、20页参考书目，其中1700条书目与“上帝”有关，200条书目与德国哲学家尼采有关。
他这么写道：“每一个词、每一个思想以及每一种情感都归于一个核心问题：生命没有意义......此项虚无主义实验旨在寻求和披露每一种幻想以及每一个神话，无论实验走向如何，哪怕它将我们陷于死地。如果生命真得毫无意义，而且在终极选择中并没有理性依据，那么所有的选择都是一样的，选择生而不是死也就失去了根本依据。”

据悉，他的朋友形容米切尔“热情友好、体贴周到、喜欢安静”。