A 35-year-old US man shot himself to death in Harvard Yard after penning an epic 1,905-page suicide note.

Mitchell Heisman, 35, quoted Thomas Jefferson, Friedrich Nietzsche and Albert Einstein as he attempted to explain his motives in the rambling missive, which included a lengthy preface and 1,433 footnotes.

Heisman put the encyclopedia-sized note online and asked that the Web page be kept up after his death, so that everyone could know his feelings about life and the universe.

"I propose opening your mind towards the liberation of death; towards exposing the blind faith in life as a myth, a bias, and an error," he wrote.

Heisman arranged to send delayed e-mails to about 400 friends with a link to the rambling farewell before he fired a bullet from a silver revolver into his head at Memorial Church in the Harvard Yard in front of about 20 people touring the campus on September 25.

The massive document contains little information about his life, but includes many long passages touching on issues such as Jesus, the Battle of Hastings in 1066, sociology and the First Amendment. "If my hypothesis is correct, this work will be repressed," he surmised on the first page.

The note ends with a 19-page list of sources and the comment, "What good suicide note would be complete without a bibliography?"

New York Post