IT IS NEVER ideas we should speak of, only sensations and visions — for ideas do not proceed from our entrails; ideas are never truly ours.
Glum sky: my mind masquerading as the firmament.
Ravaged by boredom, that cyclone in slow motion.
There exists, I grant you, a clinical depression, upon which certain remedies occasionally have an effect; but there exists another kind, a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself.
I assure this foreign poet, who after hesitating among several capitals has decided on ours, that he has chosen well, that here he will find, among other advantages, that of starving to death without troubling a single soul. To encourage him further, I explain that here failure is so normal that it is a kind of Open Sesame. This detail provided the finishing touchy judging from the gleam I detected in his eyes.
“The very fact that you have reached the age you have proves that life has a meaning,” I was told by a friend I hadn’t seen in over thirty years. This remark often comes back to me, more striking each time, though it was made by someone who has always found a meaning in everything.
For Mallarmé, who claimed he was doomed to permanent insomnia, sleep was not a “real need” but a “favor.” Only a great poet could allow himself the luxury of such an insanity.
Insomnia appears to spare the animals. If we kept them from sleeping for a few weeks, a radical change would occur in their nature and their behavior. They would experience hitherto unknown sensations, the kind that seemed to be specifically human. Let us wreck the animal kingdom, if we want it to overtake and replace us.
In each letter I send to a Japanese friend, I have got into the habit of recommending one or another work by Brahms, She has just written that she is leaving a Tokyo clinic where she was taken by ambulance for having excessively sacrificed to my idol, I wonder which trio, which sonata was responsible. It doesn’t matter. Whatever induces collapse is thereby deserving of being listened to.
There is no speculation about Knowledge, no Erkenntnistheorie in which so many philosophers, German or otherwise, revel that offers the slightest homage to Fatigue as such — the state likeliest to lead us to the heart of the matter. This neglect or this ingratitude definitively discredits our philosophy.
A stroll through Montparnasse Cemetery. All, young or old, made plans. They make no more. Strengthened by their example, I swear as a good pupil, returning, never to make any myself — ever. Undeniably beneficial outing.
I ponder C., for whom drinking in a café was the sole reason to exist. One day when I was eloquently vaunting Buddhism to him, he replied, “Well, yes, nirvana, all right, but not without a café.” We all have some mania or other that keeps us from unconditionally accepting supreme happiness.
Reading Madame Périer’s testimony — specifically, the passage in which she tells how her brother Pascal, from the age of eighteen, by his own admission never spent a single day without suffering — I was so astounded that I stuffed my fist into my mouth to keep from crying out. This was in a public library. I was, it is worth noting, eighteen myself. What a presentiment, but also what madness, and what presumption!
To rid oneself of life is to deprive oneself of the pleasure of deriding it. (The one possible answer to someone who informs you of his intention to be done with it all.)
“Being never disappoints,” declares a philosopher. Then what does? Certainly not nonbeing, by definition incapable of disappointing. This advantage, so irritating to our philosopher, must have led him to promulgate so flagrant a countertruth.
The interesting thing about friendship is that it is — almost as much as love — an inexhaustible source of disappointment and outrage, thereby of fruitful surprises it would be madness to try to do without.
The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so . . .
He offers me an unconscious hand. I ask him many questions and lose my courage in the face of his outrageously laconic replies. Not a single one of those useless words so necessary to dialogue. Dialogue indeed! Speech is a sign of life, and that is why the chattering lunatic is closer to us than the tongue-tied half-wit.
No possible defense against a flatterer. You cannot agree with him without absurdity; nor can you contradict him and turn your back. You act as if he were telling the truth, you let yourself be sent up because you don’t know how to react. He of course believes you are taken in, that he has you where he wants you, and enjoys his triumph without your being able to open his eyes. Generally he is a future enemy who will take his revenge for having prostrated himself before you — a disguised aggressor who ponders his blows while he pours out his hyperboles.
The most effective method for making loyal friends is to congratulate them upon their failures.
This thinker has taken refuge in prolixity as others do in stupor.
When you have circled around a subject for a certain amount of time, you can immediately offer a judgment on any work that relates to it. I have just opened a book on the gnostics, and I immediately perceived that it was quite unreliable. Yet I read only one sentence and am only a dilettante, an incompetent in such matters.
Now imagine an absolute specialist, a monster — God, for example: whatever we do must to Him seem botched, even our inimitable successes, even those that ought to humiliate and embarrass Him.
Between Genesis and Apocalypse imposture reigns. It is important to know this, for once assimilated, such dizzying evidence renders all formulas for wisdom superfluous.
If you have had the weakness to write a book, you will not fail to admire that Hasidic rabbi who abandoned the project of writing one since he was not sure he could do so exclusively for the pleasure of his Creator.
If the Hour of Disappointment were to sound for everyone at the same time, we should see an entirely new version, either of paradise or of hell.
Impossible to enter into a dialogue with physical pain.
To withdraw indefinitely into oneself, like God after the six days. Let us imitate Him, on this point at least.
The light of dawn is the true, primordial light. Each time I observe it, I bless my sleepless nights, which afford me an occasion to witness the spectacle of the Beginning. Yeats calls it “sensuous” — a fine discovery, and anything but obvious.
Learning that he was going to marry soon, I decided to conceal my amazement by a generality: “Everything is compatible with everything.” To which he replied, “You’re right, since man is compatible with woman,”
A flame traverses the blood. To go over to the other side, circumventing death.
That favorable look one assumes on the occasion of a blow of fate. . . .
At the climax of a performance superfluous to specify, one longs to exclaim “Consummatum est.” The clichés of the Gospels, and singularly of the Passion, are always good to have at hand for those moments when you might imagine you could do without them.
Skeptical observations, so rare in the Fathers of the Church, are today regarded as modern. Obviously, since Christianity, having played its part — which at its beginnings heralded its end — is now a subject of delectation.
Each time I see a filthy, raving, drunken bum, prostrate with his bottle in the gutter, I think of a future humanity experimenting with its future, and pulling it off.
Though seriously deranged, he utters nothing but banalities. Occasionally a remark that borders on cretinism and genius. Dislocation of the mind must indeed serve some purpose.
When you imagine you have reached a certain degree of detachment, you regard as histrionic all zealots, including the founders of .religions. But doesn’t detachment, too, have a histrionics of its own? If actions are mummery, the very refusal of action is one as well. Yet a noble mummery.
His nonchalance leaves me perplexed and admiring. He shows no haste, follows no direction, generates enthusiasm for no subject. As if at birth he had swallowed a tran-quilizer whose effect has never worn off, and which allows him to preserve his indestructible smile.
Pity the man who, having exhausted his reserves of scorn, no longer knows what to feel about others, about himself!
Cut off from the world, having broken with all his friends, he read me — with an almost indispensable Russian accent, given the situation — the beginning of the Book of Books. Reaching the moment where Adam gets himself expelled from paradise, he fell silent, dreamily staring into the distance while I thought to myself, more or less distinctly, that after millennia of false hopes, humanity, furious at having cheated, would finally receive the meaning of the curse and thereby make itself worthy of its first ancestor.
If Meister Eckhart is the only “scholastic” who is still readable, it is because in him profundity is matched by charm, by glamour— an advantage rare in periods of intense faith.
Listening to some oratorio, how can we admit that such beseechings, such poignant effusions, conceal no reality and concern no one, that there is nothing behind them, and that they must vanish forever into thin air?
In a Hindu village where the inhabitants wove cashmere shawls, a European manufacturer made an extended stay while examining the weavers’ unconscious methods. Having studied them thoroughly, he revealed them to these simple souls, who thereupon lost all spontaneity and became, indeed, very poor workers. Excess of deliberation frustrates all actions. To expatiate upon sexuality is to sabotage it altogether. Eroticism, scourge of deliquescent societies, is an offense against instinct, an organized impotence. We do not reflect with impunity upon exploits that dispense with reflection. Orgasm has never been a philosophical event.
My dependence on climate will forever keep me from acknowledging the autonomy of the will Meteorology determines the color of my thoughts. One cannot be more crudely determinist than I am, but I am helpless to alter the case. . . . Once I forget I have a body, I believe in freedom, but I immediately abandon such belief when my body calls me back to order and imposes its miseries and its whims. Montesquieu belongs here: “Happiness or misery consists in a certain arrangement of organs.”
Had I done what I intended, would I be happier today? Certainly not. Having set out to travel far, toward the extremity of myself, I have begun, on the way, to doubt my task, all tasks.
It is under the effect of a suicidal mood that one usually becomes infatuated by a person, an idea. What a light cast upon the essence of love and of fanaticism!
No greater obstacle to deliverance than the need for failure.
To know, in vulgar terms, is to get over something; to know, in absolute terms, is to get over everything. Illumination represents one further step: the certainty that henceforth we will never again be taken in, a last glance at illusion.
I strive to conceive the cosmos without . . . myself. Fortunately death is here to remedy my imagination’s inadequacy.
Since our defects are not surface accidents but the very basis of our nature, we cannot correct them without deforming that nature, without perverting it still more.
What dates most is rebellion — that is, the most vital of our reactions.
In Marx’s entire oeuvre, I don’t think there is a single disinterested reflection on death. . . . I was pondering this at his grave in Highgate.
I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.
In Vedic mythology, anyone raising himself by knowledge upsets the comfort of Heaven. The gods, ever watchful, live in terror of being outclassed. Did the Boss of Genesis behave any differently? Did he not spy on man because he feared him? Because he saw him as a rival? Under these conditions, one understands the great mystics, desire to lee God, His limits and His woes, in order to seek boundlessness in the Godhead.
By dying, one becomes the despot of the world.
When you get over an infatuation, to fall for someone ever again seems so inconceivable that you imagine no one, not even a bug, that is not mired in disappointment.
My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.
Coming from a country where failure constituted an obligation and where “I couldn’t fulfill myself” was the leitmotif of all confidences . . .
No fate to which I could have adjusted myself. I was made to exist before my birth and after my deaths not during my very existence.
Those nights when you convince yourself that everyone has evacuated this universe, even the dead, and that you are the last living being here, the last ghost.
In order to reach compassion, you must carry self-concern to the saturation point, to nausea, such paroxysms of disgust being a symptom of healthy a necessary condition for looking beyond one’s own trials and tribulations.
The true? Nowhere; everywhere effigies, from which nothing is to be expected. So why add to an initial disappointment all those that follow and that confirm it with diabolic regularity, day after day?
“The Holy Ghost,” Luther instructs us, “is not a skeptic,” Not everyone can be — and that is really too bad.
Discouragement, ever at the service of knowledge, hides the other side, the inner shadow, of persons and things — hence the sensation of infallibility it gives.
The pure passing of time, naked time, reduced to an essence of flux, without the discontinuity of the moments, is realized in our sleepless nights. Everything vanishes. Silence invades — everywhere. We listen; we hear nothing. The senses no longer turn toward the world outside. What outside? Engulfment survived by that pure passage through us that is ourselves, and that will come to an end only with sleep or daylight. . . .
Seriousness is not involved in the definition of existence; tragedy is, since it implies a notion of risk, of gratuitous disaster, whereas what is serious postulates a goal. Now, the great originality of existence is to have nothing to do with such a thing.
When you love someone, you hope — the more closely to be attached — that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.
No longer to be tempted save by what lies beyond . . . extremes.
If I were to obey my first impulse, I should spend my days writing letters of insult and adieu.
There is a certain shamelessness in dying. Indeed, there is something indecent about death. This aspect, understandably, is the last that comes to mind.
I have wasted hour after hour ruminating upon what seemed to me eminently worthy of being explored — upon the vanity of all things, upon what does not deserve a second’s reflection, since one does not see what there is still to be said for or against what is obvious.
If I prefer women to men, it is because they have the advantage of being more off balance, hence more complex, more perspicacious, and more cynical — not to mention that mysterious superiority conferred by an age-old slavery.
Akhmatova, like Gogol, wanted to possess nothing. She gave away the presents given to her, and a few days later they would be found in other people’s houses. This characteristic recalls the behavior of nomads, compelled to the provisional by necessity and by choice. Joseph de Maistre cites the case of a Russian prince and his friends who would sleep anywhere in his palace and had, so to speak, no fixed bed, for they lived with the sentiment of being transitory there, of camping out until it was time to pull up stakes. . . . When Eastern Europe furnishes such models of detachment, why seek them out in India or elsewhere?
Letters one receives filled with nothing but internal debate, metaphysical interrogations, rapidly become tiresome. In everything there must be something petty if there is to be the impression of truth. If the angels were to write, they would be — except for the fallen ones — unreadable. Purity passes with difficulty because it is incompatible with breathing.
Out in the street, suddenly overcome by the “mystery” of Time, I told myself that Saint Augustine was quite right to deal with such a theme by addressing himself directly to God: with whom else to discuss it?
Everything that disturbs me I could have translated, had I been spared the shame of not being a musician.
A victim of crucial preoccupations, I had taken to my bed in the middle of the afternoon, an ideal position from which to ponder a nirvana without remainder, without the slightest trace of an ego, that obstacle to deliverance, to the state of non-thought. A sentiment of blessed extinction initially, then a blessed extinction without sentiment. I believed myself on the threshold of the final stage; it was only its parody, only the swerve into torpor, into the abyss of ... a nap.
According to Jewish tradition, the Torah — God’s work — preceded the world by two thousand years. Never has a people esteemed itself so highly. To attribute such priority to its sacred book, to believe it predates the Fiat Lux! Thus is created a destiny.
Having opened an anthology of religious texts, I came straight off upon this remark of the Buddha: “No object is worth being desired.” I closed the book at once, for after that, what else is there to read?
The older we grow, the more we lack character. Each time we manage to “have” such a thing, we are uncomfortable, we feel inauthentic — whence our uneasiness in the presence of those who smell of conviction.
The felicity of having frequented a Gascon, an authentic Gascon. The particular Gascon I am thinking of, I have never seen depressed. All his disasters — and they were considerable — he described to me as triumphs. The gap between him and Don Quixote was infinitesimal. Yet he tried, my Gascon, to see clearly from time to time, though his efforts came to nothing. He remained to the end a trifler in disappointment.
Had I listened to my impulses, I should be, today, unhinged or hanged.
I have noticed that following any internal shock, my reflections, after a brief flight, take a lamentable and even grotesque turn. This has been invariably the case in my crises, whether decisive or not. As soon as one makes any sort of leap outside of life, life takes its revenge and brings one down to its level.
Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it.
I had gone far in search of the sun, and the sun, found at last, was hostile to me. And if I were to fling myself off a cliff? While I was making such rather grim speculations, considering these pines, these rocks, these waves, I suddenly felt how bound I was to this lovely, accursed universe.
Quite unjustly, we grant depression only a minor status, well below that of anguish. Actually it is the more virulent affliction, but refractory to the manifestations it affects. More modest and yet more devastating, it can appear at any moment, whereas anguish, being remote, reserves itself for great occasions.
He comes as a tourist, and I always encounter him by chance. This time, being especially expansive, he confides to me that he is wonderfully healthy, that he is conscious of a sense of well-being at all times. I reply that his health seems suspect to me, that it is not normal to feel in continual possession of health, that true health is never felt. Watch out for your well-being, were my last words when I left him. Unnecessary to add that I have not encountered him since.
At the slightest vexation and, a fortiori, at the slightest affliction, hurry to the nearest cemetery, sudden distributor of a peace to be sought elsewhere in vain. A miracle cure, for once.
Regret, that backward transmigration, by resuscitating our life at will, gives us the illusion of having lived several times.
My weakness for Talleyrand . . . when one has practiced cynicism exclusively in words, one is filled with admiration for someone who has so magisterially translated it into action.
If a government decreed in midsummer that vacations were to be indefinitely extended and that, on pain of death, no one was to leave the paradise in which he was sojourning, mass suicides would follow, and unprecedented carnage.
Happiness and misery make me equally wretched. Then why does it sometimes happen that I prefer the former?
The depth of a passion is measured by the low feelings it involves — feelings that guarantee its intensity and its continuance.
Grim Death, a “poor portraitist,” according to Goethe, gives faces something false, something outside of truth; it is assuredly not Goethe who, like Novalis, would identify death with the principle that “romanticizes” life. It must be said in his defense that having lived fifty years longer than the author of Hymnen an die Nacht, Goethe possessed all the time required to lose his illusions about death.
In the train, a middle-aged woman of a certain distinction; beside her, an idiot of thirty, her son, who occasionally took her arm and kissed it, then stared at her blissfully. She was radiant, and smiled back. What a petrified curiosity might be, I did not know. I know now, because I experienced it in the presence of this spectacle. A new variety of consternation was revealed to me.
Music exists only so long as hearing it lasts, just as God exists only so long as ecstasy lasts. The supreme art and the Supreme Being have this in common, that they depend entirely on ourselves.
For some — indeed, for the majority — music is stimulating and consoling. For others it is a longed-for dissolving agent, an unhoped-for means of losing themselves, of melting into what may be the best of themselves.
To break with one’s gods, with one’s ancestors, with one’s language and one’s country, to break tout court, is a terrible ordeal, that is certain; but it is also an exalting one, avidly sought by the defector and, even more, by the traitor.
Of all that makes us suffer, nothing — so much as disappointment — gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.
As soon as one begins to “fail,” instead of being upset about it, one should invoke the right of no longer being oneself.
We obtain almost everything, except what we secretly crave. No doubt it is fair that what we most desire should be unattainable, that the essential of ourselves and of our course through life should remain hidden and unrealized. Providence has managed things well; let each of us derive the pride and the prestige linked to intimate debacles.
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.
A touch of pity enters into any form of attachment, into love and even into friendship, though not into admiration.
To leave life unscathed — this could happen but doubtless never does.
A too-recent disaster has the disadvantage of keeping us from perceiving its good sides.
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, in the last century, spoke best of love and of music. Yet each frequented only brothels and — of all composers — the former adored Rossini, the latter Bizet.
Happening to encounter L., I remarked that the rivalry among the saints was the sharpest, and the most secret, of all. He asked me for examples; I found none at the moment, and find no more now. Nonetheless the fact seems to me established. . . .
Consciousness: summa of our discomforts from birth to the present. Such discomforts have vanished; consciousness remains — but it has lost its origins, it doesn’t even know what they were.
Melancholy feeds on itself, and that is why it cannot renew itself.
In the Talmud, a stupefying assertion: “The more men there are, the more images of the divine there are in nature,” This may have been true in the period when the remark was made, but it is belied today by all one sees and will be still further belied by all that will be seen.
I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the gods have been against me.
I am happy only when I contemplate renunciation and prepare myself for it. The rest is bitterness and agitation. To renounce is no easy thing, yet nothing but striving for it affords some peace. Striving? Merely thinking of it suffices to give me the illusion of being someone else, and this illusion is a victory — the most flattering one, and also the most fallacious.
No one had to the same degree as he a sense of the world’s absurdity. Each time I alluded to it, he would utter, with a smile of complicity, the Sanskrit word lila — absolute gratuitousness, according to the Vedanta, the creation of the world by divine caprice. How we laughed at everything together! And now, he — the most jovial of the disabused — here he is, cast into this slough by his own fault, since he has deigned, for once, to take nothingness seriously.
ANATHEMAS and ADMIRATIONS
Translated by
RICHARD HOWARD
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