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

 We pursue whatever we pursue out of torment—a need for torment. Our very quest for salvation is a torment, the subtlest, the best camoulaged of all

If it is true that by death we once more become what we were before being, would it not have been tetter to abide by that pure possibility, not to stir from it? What use was this detour, when we might have remained forever in an unrealized plenitude?

Once my body gives me the slip, how, I wonder, with such carrion on my hands, will I combat the capitulation of my organs?

The ancient gods ridiculed men, envied them, hunted them down on occasion, harried them. The God of the Gospels was less mocking and less jealous, and mortal men did not even enjoy, in their miseries, the consolation of being able to accuse Him. Which accounts for the absence or the impossibility of a Christian Aeschylus. A good God has killed tragedy. Zeus deserved differently of literature.

Haunted, obsessed by abdication, as far back as I can remember. But abdication of what? If I once longed to be “someone,” it was only for the satisfaction of someday being able to say, like Charles V at Yuste: “I am no longer anything.”

Some of the Provincial Letters were rewritten as many as seventeen times. Astounding that Pascal could have expended so much time and energy whose interest seems minimal to us now. Every polemic dates—every polemic with men. In the Pensées, the debate was with God. This still concerns us somewhat.

Saint Seraphim of Sarov, in his fifteen years of complete seclusion, opened his cell door to no one, not even to the bishop who occasionally visited the hermitage. “Silence,” he would say, “brings man closer to God and makes him, on earth, like unto the angels.”

What the saint should have added is that silence is never deeper than in the impossibility of prayer….

Modern man has lost the sense of fate and thereby the savor of lamentation. In the theater we should reinstate the chorus at once, and at funerals, the mourners….

In anxiety, a man clings to whatever can reinforce, can stimulate his providential discomfort: to try to cure him of it is to destroy his equilibrium, anxiety being the basis of his existence and his prosperity. The cunning confessor knows it is necessary, knows that we cannot do without anxiety once we have known it. Since he dares not proclaim its benefits, he employs a detour—he vaunts remorse, an admitted, an honorable anxiety. His customers are grateful; hence he manages to keep them readily enough, whereas his lay colleagues struggle and grovel to keep theirs.

You once told me death did not exist. Agreed, provided you add that nothing exists. To grant reality to anything and to deny it to what seems so manifestly real is sheer extravagance.

When we have committed the folly of confiding a secret to someone, the only way of being sure he will keep it to himself is to kill him on the spot.

“Sicknesses, some by day, others by night, in their fashion, visit men, bearing suffering to mortals—in silence, for wise Zeus has denied them speech” (Hesiod).

Fortunately, for, being mute, they are already excruciating—what would they be if they were garrulous as well? Can we imagine even one proclaiming itself? Instead of symptoms, declarations! Zeus, for once, has shown signs of delicacy.

In periods of sterility, one should hibernate, sleep day and night to preserve one’s strength, instead of wasting it in mortification and rage.

We can admire someone only if he is three-quarters irresponsible—admiration has nothing to do with respect.

The not at all negligible advantage of having greatly hated men is that one comes to endure them by the exhaustion of this very hatred.

Once the shutters are closed, I stretch out in the dark. The outer world, a fading murmur, dissolves. All that is left is myself and … there’s the rub. Hermits have spent their lives in dialogue with what was most hidden within them. If only, following their example, I could give myself up to that extreme exercise, in which one unites with the intimacy of one’s own being! It is this self-interview, this inward transition which matters, and which has no value unless continually renewed, so that the self is finally absorbed by its essential version.

Even in God’s company, discontent was brewing, as the revolt of the angels testifies—the first on record. Apparently on every level of creation, no one is forgiven his superiority. We might even conceive of an envious flower.

The virtues have no face. Impersonal, abstract, conventional, they wear out faster than the vices, which, more powerfully charged with vitality, define themselves and become accentuated with age.

“Everything is filled with gods,” said Thaïes, at the dawn of philosophy; at the other end, at this twilight we have come to, we can proclaim, not only out of a need for symmetry but even more out of respect for the evidence, that “everything is emptied of gods,” ‘

I was alone in that cemetery overlooking the village when a pregnant woman came in. I left at once, in order not to look at this corpse-bearer at close range, nor to ruminate upon the contrast between an aggressive womb and the time-worn tombs—between a false promise and the end of all promises.

The desire to pray has nothing to do with faith. It emanates from a special despondency, and lasts as long, even while the gods and their very memory may vanish away forever.

“No language can hope for anything but its own defeat” (Gregory Palamas).

So radical a condemnation of all literature could come only from a mystic—from a professional of the Inexpressible.

In Antiquity, one resorted readily, especially among the philosophers, to voluntary asphyxia—one held one’s breath until … one died. So elegant and yet so practical a mode of being done with it has completely disappeared, and it is anything but certain it can ever reappear.

It has been said and said again: the concept of destiny, which supposes change, history, does not apply to an immutable being. Hence we cannot speak of God’s “destiny.”

Doubtless we cannot, in theory. In practice, we do nothing but, particularly in the periods when beliefs are dissolving, when faith is shaky, when nothing seems able to withstand time, when God Himself is swept into the general deliquescence.

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

Life is nothing; death, everything. Yet there is nothing which is death, independent of life. It is precisely this absence of autonomous, distinct reality which makes death universal; it has no realm of its own, it is omnipresent, like everything which lacks identity, limit, and bearing: an indecent infinitude.

Euphoria. Incapable of articulating my habitual moods and the reflections they engender, impelled by some unknown power, I exulted without motive, and it is just such jubilation, of unknown origin, I reminded myself, which is the experience of those who do and strive, those who produce. They neither can nor will reflect on what denies them. And if they did, it would be of no consequence, as was the case for me that memorable day.

Why embroider upon what excludes commentary? A text explained is no longer a text. We live with an idea, we don’t dissect it; we struggle with it, we don’t describe the stages of the conflict. The history of philosophy is the negation of philosophy.

A suspect scrapie led me to wonder exactly what it was by which I was fatigued, and I began drawing up the list: though incomplete, it appeared so long, and so depressing, that I decided to fall back on fatigue in itself a flattering formula which, thanks to its philosophical ingredient, might restore a plague victim.

Destruction and explosion of syntax, victory of ambiguity and approximation. All very well. But just try to draw up a will, and you’ll see if the defunct rigor was so contemptible.

An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.

Even if I were to lose my reason, I could never bring myself to that “uninterrupted prayer” advocated by the Hesychasts. All I understand about piety is its excesses, its suspect outrages, and askesis would not interest me a moment if one did not encounter there all those things which are the lot of the bad monk: indolence, gluttony, the thirst for desolation, greed, and aversion for the world, vacillation between tragedy and the equivocal, hope of an inner collapse….

I forget which Father recommends manual labor against acedia. Admirable advice, which I have always followed spontaneously: no depression, that secular acedia, can resist puttering.

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

The worst reproach to be made against police states is that they oblige—for prudence’s sake—the destruction of letters and diaries, i.e., what is least false in literature.

To keep the mind alert, slander turns out to be as effective as disease: the same vigilance, the same fixed attention, the same insecurity, the same flagellating hysteria, the same mortal enrichment

I am nothing, obviously, but since for so long I wanted to be something, I fail to smother that aspiration, that will: It exists because it has existed, it belabors me and prevails, though I reject it. Try as I do to relegate it to my past, it kicks up again and torments me: never having been satisfied, it has maintained itself Intact, and has no Intention of yielding to my orders. Caught between my will and myself, what can I do?

In bis Ladder of Paradise, Saint John Climacus notes that a proud monk has no need to be persecuted by the Devil—he is himself his own devil.

I think of X, whose life in the monastery was a failure. No one was tetter constituted to distinguish himself in the world and to shine there. Unsuited to humility, to obedience, he chose solitude and bogged down in it. There was nothing in him to become, according to the same saint’s expression, “the lover of God.” Out of irony one can neither create one’s own salvation nor help others create theirs; one can merely disguise one’s wounds, if not one’s distastes.

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.

The blank time of meditation is, in truth, the only “foil” time. We should never blush to accumulate vacant moments—vacant in appearance, filled in fact. To meditate is a supreme leisure, whose secret has been lost.

Noble gestures are always suspect. Each time, we regret having committed them. Something false about them, something theatrical, attitudinizing. It is true that we regret ignoble gestures almost as much.

If I reflect on any moment of my life, the most feverish or the most neutral, what remains?—and what difference is there now between them? Everything having become the same, without relief and without reality, it is when I felt nothing that I was closest to the truth, I mean to my present state in which I am recapitulating my experiences. What is the use of having felt anything at all? There is no “ecstasy” which either memory or imagination can resuscitate!

No one, before his last moment, manages to use up his death altogether: even for the born moribund, death has a touch of novelty.

According to the Cabbala, God created souls at the beginning, and they were all before him in the form they would later take in their incarnation. Each soul, when its time has come, receives the order to join the body destined for it, but each to no avail implores its Creator to spare it this bondage and this corruption.

The more I think of what could not have failed to happen when my own soul’s turn came, the more I realize that if there was one soul which more than the rest must have resisted incarnation, it was mine.

We dismiss the skeptic, we speak of an “automatism of doubt,” while we never say of a believer that he has fallen into an “automatism of faith.” Yet faith is much more mechanical than doubt, which has the excuse of proceeding from surprise to surprise—inside perplexity, it is true.

That faint light in each of us which dates back to before our birth, to before all births, is what must be protected if we want to rejoin that remote glory from which we shall never know why we were separated.

I have never known a single sensation of fulfillment, of true happiness, without thinking that it was the moment when—now or never—I should disappear for good.

A moment comes when it seems futile to have to choose between metaphysics and amateurism, between the unfathomable and the anecdote.

To measure accurately the decline Christianity represents in relation to paganism, we need merely compare the pathetic remarks of the Church Fathers on suicide with the opinions offered on the same subject by a Pliny, a Seneca, and even a Cicero.

What is the point of what we say? Is there any meaning to this series of propositions which constitutes our talk? And do these propositions, taken one by one, have any object? We can talk only if we set aside this question, or if we raise it as infrequently as possible.

“To hell with everything’—if these words have been uttered, even only once, coldly, with complete awareness of what they mean, history is justified and, with it, all of us.

“Woe unto you, when all men speak well of you!” Christ was here foretelling his own end. All men now speak well of him, even the most hardened unbelievers—they above all. Jesus knew perfectly well that he would one day succumb to universal approbation.

Christianity is lost if it does not suffer persecutions as pitiless as those it was subjected to at its beginning. It must provoke enemies at all costs, prepare great calamities for itself. Only a new Nero might still be able to save it.

I believe speech to be a recent invention, and find it hard to imagine a dialogue that dates back beyond ten thousand years. And even harder, a dialogue that will occur in not ten thousand but even a thousand years from now.

In a work of psychiatry, only the patients’ remarks interest me; in a work of criticism, only the quotations.

No one can do anything for this Polish woman, who is beyond sickness and health, even beyond living and dying. A phantom cannot be cured, still less an enlightened mind. We can cure only those who belong to the earth and still have their roots in it, however superficial.

The periods of sterility we pass through coincide with an exacerbation of our discernment—with the eclipse of the madman in us.

To proceed to the extremities of one’s art and, even further, of one’s being: such is the law of any man who regards himself to any degree as chosen.

It is because of speech that men give the illusion of being free. If they did—without a word—what they do, we would take them for robots. By speaking, they deceive themselves, as they deceive others: because they say what they are going to do, who could suspect they are not masters of their actions?

Deep inside, each man feels—and believes—himself to be immortal, even if he knows he will perish the next moment. We can understand everything, admit everything, realize everything, except our death, even when we ponder it unremittingly and even when we are resigned to it.

In the slaughterhouse that morning, I watched the cattle being led to their death. Almost every animal, at the last moment, refused to move forward. To make them do so, a man hit them on the hind legs.

This scene often comes to mind when, ejected from sleep, I lack the strength to confront the daily torture of Time.

I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which has spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations.

Everyone expiates his first moment.

For an instant, I think I experienced what absorption into Brahma might signify for an adept of the Vedanta. How much I longed for that instant to be extensible—infinitely !

I sought in doubt a remedy for anxiety. The remedy ended by making common cause with the disease.

“If a doctrine spreads, it is because heaven has so desired” (Confucius).

… As I should like to believe each time that, faced with some victorious aberration, my rage borders on apoplexy.

The number of fanatics, extremists, and degenerates I have been able to admire! A relief bordering on orgasm at the notion that one will never again embrace a cause, any cause …

An acrobat? An orchestra conductor caught up by the idea? He rushes in, then calms down, alternates the allegro with the andante, a master of himself like the fakirs or the swindlers. While he is talking, he seems to be seeking something, but one never knows what: an expert in the art of counterfeiting the thinker. If he were to say a single thing that was perfectly clear, he would be lost. Since he is as ignorant as his hearers of what he wants to say or what he wants, he can go on for hours without exhausting the amazement of the puppets listening to him.

A privilege to live in conflict with one’s times. At every moment one is aware one does not think like the others. This state of acute dissimilarity, however indigent or sterile it appears, nonetheless possesses a philosophical status which one would be at a loss to seek in cogitations attuned to events.

“There’s no help for it,” the nonagenarian kept repeating to whatever I said, to whatever I shouted into her ear concerning the present, the future, the march of events….

In the hope of getting some other response from her, I went on with my apprehensions, my grievances, my complaints. Obtaining only the sempiternal “No help for it,” I came to the end of my patience and left, irritated with myself, irritated with her. What folly, to confide in an idiot!

Outside, complete reversal: “But the old woman’s right. How could I fail to realize right away that her refrain had a truth in it, doubtless the most important truth of all, since everything that happens proclaims it and everything in ourselves rejects it?”

Cioran 

The Trouble With Being Born