Craving

If only I could say with that Hasidic rabbi: “The blessing of my life is that I have never needed a thing before I possessed it!”

*
He was above all others, and had had nothing to do with it: he had simply forgotten to desire….

*
Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.

*

Years now without coffee, without alcohol, without tobacco, … Luckily, there is anxiety, which usefully replaces the strongest stimulants.

*
It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.

*

Better than anyone I know the danger of being born with a thirst for everything. A poisoned gift, a vengeance of Providence. Thus encumbered, I could get nowhere, on the spiritual level, of course, the only one that matters.
Anything but accidental, my failure is identified with my essence.

*

Lucidity does not extirpate the desire to live—far from it, lucidity merely makes us unsuited to life.

*

The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.

*

This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity.
Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs—something, anything…. Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

*

One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.

*

Some diabolic thirst keeps me from exposing my pact with breathing.

*
What still attaches me to things is a thirst inherited from ancestors who carried the curiosity to exist to the point of ignominy.

*
Since day after day I have lived in the company of Suicide, it would be unjust and ungrateful on my part to denigrate it. What could be healthier, what could be more natural? What is neither healthy nor natural is the frantic appetite to exist — a grave flaw, a law par excellence, my flaw.

*

Remaining consistent: to this end, according to the Zohar, God created man and recommended frequentation of the Tree of Life. Man, however, preferred the other tree, located in the “region of variations.” His fall? A craving for change, fruit of curiosity, that source of all misfortunes. Thus what was only a whim in the first among us was to become law for us all.
*
while we live, we have desires, and desire presupposeth a further end. Seeing all delight is appetite, and desire of something further, there can be no contentment but in proceeding, and therefore we are not to marvel, when we see that as men attain to more riches, honour, or other power, so their appetite continually groweth more and more; and when they are come to the utmost degree of some kind of power they pursue some other, as long as in any kind they think themselves behind any other.
Hobbes
*
The wise men teach us well to save ourselves from our treacherous appetites and to distinguish true wholesome pleasures from pleasures diluted and crisscrossed by pain. Most pleasures, they say, tickle and embrace us only to throttle us, like those thieves whom the Egyptians called Philistae.  If a hangover came before we got drunk we would see that we never drank to excess: but pleasure, to deceive us, walks in front and hides her train. Montaigne