Not yet to have digested the affront of being born

 If instead of expanding you, putting you in a state of energetic euphoria, your ordeals depress and embitter you, you can be sure you have no spiritual vocation.

To live in expectation, to count on the future or on a simulacrum of the future: we are so accustomed to it that we have conceived the idea of immortality only out of a need to wait out eternity.Every friendship is an inconspicuous drama, a series of subtle wounds.

Luther Dead by Lucas Fortnagel. A plebeian, aggressive, terrifying mask, as of some sublime hog … which perfectly renders the features of the man we cannot sufficiently praise for having declared: “Dreams are liars; if you shit in your bed, that’s true.”

The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.

At twenty, those nights when for hours at a time I would stand, forehead pressed against the pane, staring into the dark….

No autocrat wields a power comparable to that enjoyed by a poor devil planning to kill himself.

Educating yourself not to leave traces is a moment-by-momcnt war against yourself, solely to prove that you could, if you chose, become a sage….

To exist is a state as little conceivable as its contrary. No, still more inconceivable.

In Antiquity, “books” were so costly that one could not accumulate them unless one was a king, a tyrant, or … Aristotle, the first to possess a library worthy of the name.

One more incriminating item in the dossier of a philosopher already so catastrophic in so many regards.

If I were to conform to my most intimate convictions, I should cease to take any action whatever, to react in any way. But I am still capable of sensations….

A monster, however horrible, secretly attracts us, pursues us, haunts us. He represents, enlarged, our advantages and our miseries, he proclaims us, he is our standard-bearer.

Over the centuries, man has slaved to believe, passing from dogma to dogma, illusion to illusion, and has given very little time to doubts, short intervals between his epochs of blindness. Indeed they were not doubts but pauses, moments of respite following the fatigue of faith, of any faith.

Innocence being the perfect state, perhaps the only one, it is incomprehensible that a man enjoying it should seek to leave it. Yet history from its beginnings down to ourselves is only that and nothing but that.

I draw the curtains, and I wait. Actually, I am not waiting for anything, I am merely making myself absent. Scoured, if only for a few minutes, of the impurities which dim and clog the mind, I accede to a state of consciousness from which the self is evacuated, and I am as soothed as if I were resting outside the universe.

In one medieval exorcism, all the parts of the body, even the smallest, are listed from which the demon is ordered to depart: a kind of lunatic anatomy treatise, fascinating for its hypertrophy of precision, its profusion of unexpected details. A scrupulous incantation. Leave the nails! Fanatic but not without poetic effect. For authentic poetry has nothing in common with “poetry.”

In all our dreams, even if they deal with the Flood, there Is always, if only for a fraction of a second, some minuscule Incident we witnessed the day before. This regularity, which I have verified for years, is the only constant, the only law or semblance of law I have been able to discern In night’s incredible chaos.

The dissolving power of conversation. One realizes why both meditation and action require silence.

The certainty of being only an accident has accompanied me on all occasions, propitious or injurious, and if it has saved me from the temptation to believe myself necessary, it has not on the other hand entirely cured me of a certain vainglory inherent in the loss of illusions.

Rare to come upon a free mind, and when you do, you realize that the best of such a mind is not revealed in its works (when we write we bear, mysteriously, chains) but in those confidences where, released from conviction and pose, as from all concern with rigor or standing, it displays its weaknesses. And where it behaves as a heretic to itself.

If the foreigner is not a creator in the matter of language, it is because he wants to do as well as the natives: whether or not he succeeds, this ambition is his downfall.

I begin a letter over and over again, I get nowhere: what to say and how to say it? I don’t even remember whom I was writing to. Only passion or profit find at once the right tone. Unfortunately detachment is indifference to language, insensitivity to words. Yet It is by losing contact with words that we lose contact with human beings.

Everyone has had, at a given moment, an extraordinary experience which will be for him, because of the memory of it he preserves, the crucial obstacle to his Inner metamorphosis.

I know peace only when my ambitions sleep. Once they waken, anxiety repossesses me. Life is a state of ambition. The mole digging his tunnels Is ambitious. Ambition is in effect everywhere, and we see its traces on the faces of the dead themselves.

Going to India because of the Vedanta or Buddhism is about the same as going to France because of Jansenism. Moreover the latter is more recent, since it vanished only three centuries ago.

Not the slightest trace of reality anywhere—except in my sensations of unreality.

Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.

Why docs the Gita rank “renunciation of the fruit of actions” so high? Because such renunciation is rare, impracticable, contrary to our nature, and because achieving it is destroying the man one has been and one is, killing in oneself the entire past, the work of millennia—in a word, freeing oneself of the Species, that hideous and immemorial riffraff.

We should have abided by our larval condition, dispensed with evolution, remained incomplete, delighting in the elemental siesta and calmly consuming ourselves in an embryonic ecstasy.

Truth abides in the individual drama. If I suffer authentically, I suffer much more than an individual, I transcend the sphere of my selfhood, I rejoin the essence of others. The only way to proceed toward the universal is to concern ourselves exclusively with what concerns ourselves.

When we are fixated on doubt, we take more pleasure in lavishing speculations upon it than in practicing it.

If you want to know a nation, frequent its second-order writers: they alone reflect its true nature. The others denounce or transfigure the nullity of their compatriots, and neither can nor will put themselves on the same level. They are suspect witnesses.

In my youth there would be weeks during which I never closed my eyes. I lived in the unlived world, I had the sense that Time, with all its moments, had concentrated itself within me, where it culminated, where it triumphed. I moved it onward, of course, I was its promoter and bearer, its cause and substance, and it was as an agent and accomplice that I participated in its apotheosis. When sleep departs from us, the unheard-of becomes everyday, easy: we enter it without preparations, inhabit it, wallow in it.

Astounding, the number of hours I have wasted on ? the “meaning” of what exists, of what happens…. But that “what” has no meaning, as all serious minds know. Hence they devote their time and their energy to more useful undertakings.

My affinities with Russian Byronism, from Pechorin to Stavro-gin, my boredom and my passion for boredom.

X, whom I do not particularly appreciate, was telling a story so stupid that I wakened with a start: those we don’t like rarely shine in our dreams.

For lack of occupation, the old seem to be trying to solve something very complicated, devoting to it all the capacities they still possess. Perhaps this is why they do not commit suicide en masse, as they ought were they even a trifle less absorbed.

Love at its most impassioned does not bring two human beings so close together as calumny. Inseparable, slanderer and slandered constitute a “transcendent” unity, forever welded one to the other. Nothing can separate them. One inflicts harm, the other endures it, but if he endures it, it is because he is accustomed to doing so, can no longer do without it, even insists upon it. He knows that his wishes will be gratified, that he will never be forgotten, that whatever happens he will be eternally present in the mind of his indefatigable benefactor.

The monk-errant, the wandering friar—so far, the supreme achievement. To reach the point of no longer having anything to renounce! Such must be the dream of any disabused mind.

Sobbing negation—the only tolerable form of negation.

Lucky Job, who was not obliged to annotate his lamentations!

Late at night I feel like falling into a frenzy, doing some unprecedented thing to release myself, but I don’t see against whom, against what …

Mme d’Heudicourt, Saint-Simon observes, had never spoken good of anyone In her life without adding some crushing “but’s.” A wonderful definition, not of backbiting but of conversation in general.

Everything that lives makes noise. What an argument for the mineral kingdom!

Bach was quarrelsome, litigious, self-serving, greedy for titles and honors, etc. So what! A musicologist listing the cantatas whose theme is death has remarked that no mortal ever had such a nostalgia for it. Which is all that counts. The rest has to do with biography.

The misfortune of being incapable of neutral states except by reflection and effort. What an idiot achieves at the outset, we must struggle night and day to attain, and only by fits and starts!

I have always lived with the vision of a host of moments marching against me. Time will have been my Birnam Wood.

Painful or wounding questions asked by the uncouth distress and anger us, and may have the same effect as certain techniques of Oriental meditation. Who knows if a dense, aggressive stupidity might not provoke illumination? It is certainly worth as much as a rap on the head with a stick.

Knowledge is not possible, and even if it were, would solve nothing. Such is the doubter’s position. What does he want, then—what is he looking for? Neither he nor anyone will ever know. Skepticism is the rapture of impasse.

Besieged by others, I try to make my escape, without much success, it must be confessed. Yet I manage to wangle myself, day by day, a few seconds’ audience with the man I would have liked to be.

By a certain age, we should change names and hide out somewhere, lost to the world, in no danger of seeing friends or enemies again, leading the peaceful life of an overworked malefactor.

We cannot reflect and be modest. Once the mind is set to work, it replaces God and anything else. It is indiscretion, encroachment, profanation. It does not build, it dislocates. The tension its methods betray reveals its brutal, implacable character: without a good dose of ferocity, we could not follow a thought to its conclusion.

Most subverters, visionaries, and saviors have been either epileptics or dyspeptics. There is unanimity as to the virtues of epilepsy; gastric upheavals are regarded, on the other hand, as less meritorious. Yet nothing is more conducive to subversion than a digestion which refuses to be forgotten.

My mission Is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

Each time Time torments me, I tell myself that one of us must back down, that it is impossible for this cruel confrontation to go on indefinitely.

When we are in the depths of depression, everything which feeds it, affords it further substance, also raises it to a level where we can no longer follow and thereby renders it too great, excessive: scarcely surprising that we should reach the point of no longer regarding it as our own.

A foretold misfortune, when at last it occurs, is ten, is a hundred times harder to endure than one we did not expect. All during our apprehensions, we lived through it in advance, and when it happens these past torments are added to the present ones, and together they form a mass whose weight is intolerable.

Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory will ever be found again.

I shall never utterly admire anyone except a man dishonored—and happy. There is a man, I should say, who defies the opinion of his fellows and who finds consolation and happiness in himself alone.

The man of the Rubicon, after Pharsalus, had forgiven too many. Such magnanimity seemed offensive to those of his friends who had betrayed him and whom he had humiliated by treating them without rancor. They felt diminished, flouted, and punished him for his clemency or for his disdain: he had refused to stoop to resentment! Had he behaved as a tyrant, they would have spared him. But they could not forgive him, since he had not deigned to frighten them enough.

Everything that is engenders, sooner or later, nightmares. Let us try, therefore, to invent something better than being.

Philosophy, which had made it its business to undermine beliefs, when it saw Christianity spreading and on the point of prevailing, made common cause with paganism, whose superstitions seemed preferable to the triumphant insanities. By attacking and demolishing the gods, philosophy had intended to free men’s minds; in reality, it handed them over to a new servitude, worse than the old one, for the god who was to replace the gods had no particular weakness for either tolerance or irony.

Philosophy, it will be objected, is not responsible for the advent of this god, indeed this was not the god philosophy recommended. No doubt, but it should have suspected that we do not subvert the gods with impunity, that others would come to take their place, and that it had nothing to gain by the exchange.

Fanaticism is the death of conversation. We do not gossip with a candidate for martyrdom. What are we to say to someone who refuses to penetrate our reasons and who, the moment we do not bow to his, would rather die than yield? Give us dilettantes and sophists, who at least espouse all reasons….

We invest ourselves with an abusive superiority when we tell someone what we think of him and of what he does. Frankness is not compatible with a delicate sentiment, nor even with an ethical exigency.

More than all others, our relatives are ready to doubt our merits. It is a universal rule: Buddha himself did not escape it—one of his cousins opposed him the most, and only afterward Mara, the devil.

For the victim of anxiety, there is no difference between success and fiasco. His reaction to the one is the same as to the other: both trouble him equally.

When I torment myself a little too much for not working, I tell myself that I might just as well be dead and that then I would be working still less….

Rather in a gutter than on a pedestal.

The advantages of a state of eternal potentiality seem to me so considerable that when I begin listing them, I can’t get over the fact that the transition to Being could ever have occurred.

Existence = Torment. The equation seems obvious to me, but not to one of my friends. How to convince him? I cannot lend him my sensations; yet only they would have the power to persuade him, to give him that additional dose of ill-being he has so insistently asked for all this time.

If we see things black, it is because we weigh them in the dark, because thoughts are generally the fruit of sleeplessness, consequently of darkness. They cannot adapt to life because they have not been thought with a view to life. The notion of the consequences they might involve doesn’t even occur to the mind. We are beyond all human calculation, beyond any notion of salvation or perdition, of being or non-being, we are in a particular silence, a superior modality of the void.

Not yet to have digested the affront of being born.

To expend oneself in conversations as much as an epileptic in his fits.

In order to conquer panic or some tenacious anxiety, there is nothing like imagining your own burial. An effective method, readily available to all In order not to have to resort to it too often in the course of a day, best to experience its benefit straight off, when you get up. Or else use It only at exceptional moments, like Pope Innocent IX, who, having commissioned a painting in which he was shown on his deathbed, glanced at It each time he had to make some important decision.

There is no negator who is not famished for some catastrophic yes.

We may be sure that man will never reach depths comparable to those he knew during the ages of egoistic colloquy with bis God.

Not one moment when I am not external to the universe! … No sooner have I lamented over myself, pitying my wretched condition, than I realize that the terms in which I described my misfortune were precisely those which define the first characteristic of the “supreme being.”

Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel—three enslavers of the mind. The worst form of despotism is the system, in philosophy and in everything.

God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.

When I was young, no pleasure compared with the pleasure of making enemies. Now, whenever I make one, my first thought is to be reconciled, so that I won’t have to bother about him. Having enemies is a heavy responsibility. My burden is sufficient, I no longer can carry that of others as well.

Joy is a light which devours itself, inexhaustibly; it is the sun early on.

A few days before he died, Claudel remarked that we should not call God infinite but inexhaustible. As if it did not come down to the same thing, or just about! All the same, this concern for exactitude, this verbal scruple at the moment that he was writing that his “lease” on life had nearly expired, is more inspiring than a “sublime” word or gesture.

The unusual is not a criterion. Paganini is more surprising and more unpredictable than Bach.

We should repeat to ourselves, every day: I am one of the billions dragging himself across the earth’s surface. One, and no more. This banality justifies any conclusion, any behavior or action: debauchery, chastity, suicide, work, crime, sloth, or rebellion, … Whence it follows that each man is right to do what he does.

Tsimtsum. This silly-sounding word designates a major concept of the Cabbala. For the world to exist, God, who was everything and everywhere, consented to shrink, to leave a vacant space not inhabited by Himself: it is in this “hole” that the world occurred.

Thus we occupy the wasteland He conceded to us out of pity or whim. For us to exist, He contracted, He limited His sovereignty. We are the product of His voluntary reduction, of His effacement, of His partial absence. In His madness He has actually amputated Himself for us. If only He had had the good sense and the good taste to remain whole!

In the “Gospel According to the Egyptians,” Jesus proclaims: “Men will be the victims of death so long as women give birth.” And he specifies: “I am come to destroy the works of woman.”

When we frequent the extreme truths of the Gnostics, we should like to go, if possible, still further, to say something never said, which petrifies or pulverizes history, something out of a cosmic Neronianism, out of a madness on the scale of matter.

To express an obsession is to project it outside yourself, to hunt it down, to exorcise it. Obsessions are the demons of a world without faith.

Man accepts death but not the hour of his death. To die any time, except when one has to die!

Once we step into a cemetery, a feeling of utter mockery does away with any metaphysical concern. Those who look for “mystery” everywhere do not necessarily get to the bottom of things. Most often “mystery,” like “the absolute,” corresponds only to a mannerism of the mind. It is a word we should use only when we cannot do otherwise, in really desperate cases.

If I recapitulate my plans which have remained plans and those which have worked out, I have every reason to regret that these latter have not suffered the fate of the former.

“He who is inclined to lust is merciful and tender-hearted; those who are inclined to purity are not so” (Saint John Climacus). It took a saint, neither more nor less, to denounce so distinctly and so vigorously not the lies but the very essence of Christian morality, and indeed of all morality.

We are not afraid to accept the notion of an uninterrupted sleep; on the other hand an eternal awakening (immortality, if it were conceivable, would be just that) plunges us into dread. Unconsciousness is a country, a fatherland; consciousness, an exile.

Any profound impression is voluptuous or funereal—or both at once.

No one has been so convinced as I of the futility of everything; and no one has taken so tragically so many futile things.

Ishi, the last American Indian of his tribe, after hiding for years in terror of the White Men, reduced to starvation, surrendered of his own free will to the exterminators of his people, believing that the same treatment was in store for himself. He was made much of. He had no posterity, he was truly the last.

Once humanity is destroyed or simply extinguished, we may imagine a sole survivor who would wander the earth, without even having anyone to surrender to….

Deep in his heart, man aspires to rejoin the condition he had before consciousness. History is merely the detour he takes to get there.

Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.

Every phenomenon is a corrupt version of another, larger phenomenon: time, a disease of eternity; history, a disease of time; life, again, a disease of matter.

Then what is normal, what is healthy? Eternity? Which itself is only an infirmity of God.

Cioran 

The Trouble With Being Born