To live is to lose ground

 Appealing, that Hindu notion of entrusting our salvation to someone else, to a chosen “saint,” and permitting him to pray in our place, to do anything in order to save us. Selling our soul to God….

“Does talent have any need of passions? Yes, of many passions—repressed” (Joubert). Not one moralist we cannot convert into a precursor of Freud.

It is always surprising to discover that the great mystics produced so much, that they left so many treatises. Undoubtedly their intention was to celebrate God and nothing else. This is true in part, but only in part.

We do not create a body of work without attaching ourselves to it, without subjugating ourselves to it. Writing is the least ascetic of all actions.

When I lie awake far into the night, I am visited by my evil genius, as Brutus was by his before the battle of Philippi.

“Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?” —That’s what I’d like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

It has teen said that a metaphor “must be able to te drawn.” Whatever is original and lasting in literature for at lost a century contradicts this remark. For if anything has outlived its usefulness it is “coherent” metaphor, one with explicit contours. It is against such metaphor that poetry has unceasingly rebelled, to the point where a dead poetry is a poetry afflicted with coherence.

Listening to the weather report, I feel a strong response to the words “scattered rain.” Which certainly proves that poetry is in ourselves and not in the expression, though scattered is an adjective capable of setting up a certain vibration.

Once I formulate a doubt, or more exactly, once I feel the need to formulate a doubt, I experience a curious, disturbing well-being. It would be far easier for me to live without a trace of belief than without a trace of doubt. Devasting doubt, nourishing doubt!

There is no fake sensation.

Withdraw into yourself, perceive there a silence as old as being, even older….

If I detest man, I could not say with the same case: I detest the human being, for in spite of everything there is something more, something enigmatic and engaging in that word being which suggests qualities alien to the idea of man.

In the Dhammapada, it is suggested that, in order to achieve deliverance, we must be rid of the double yoke of Good and Evil. That Good itself should be one of our fetters we are too spiritually retarded to be able to admit. And so we shall not be delivered.

Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.

I believe with that madman Calvin that we are predestined to salvation or damnation in our mother’s womb. We have already lived our life before being born.

A free man is one who has discerned the inanity of all points of view; a liberated man is one who has drawn the consequences of such discernment.

We had nothing to say to one another, and while I was manufacturing my phrases I felt that the earth was falling through space and that I was falling with it at a speed that made me dizzy.

Years and years to waken from that sleep in which the others loll; then years and years to escape that awakening …

A task to be done, something I have undertaken out of necessity or choice: no sooner have I started in than everything seems important, everything attracts me, except that.

Think about those who haven’t long to live, who know that everything is over and done with, except the time in which the thought of their end unrolls. Deal with that time. Write for gladiators….Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying?—that void is consciousness itself.

Moral disintegration when we spend time in a place that is too beautiful: the self dissolves upon contact with paradise. No doubt it was to avoid this danger that the first man made the choice he did.

All things considered, there have teen more affirmations than negations—at least till now. So we may deny without remorse. Beliefs will always weigh more in the scales.

The substance of a work is the impossible—what we have not been able to attain, what could not te given to us: the sum of all the things which were refused us.

Gogol, in hopes of a “regeneration,” journeys to Nazareth and discovers he is as bored there as “in a Russian railroad station”—this is what happens to us all when we look outside ourselves for what can exist only inside.

Kill yourself because you are what you are, yes, but not because all humanity would spit in your face!

Why fear the nothing in store for us when it is no different from the nothing which preceded us: this argument of the Ancients against the fear of death is unacceptable as consolation. Before, we had the luck not to exist; now we exist, and it is this particle of existence, hence of misfortune, which dreads death. Particle is not the word, since each of us prefers himself to the universe, at any rate considers himself equal to it.

When we discern the unreality of everything, we ourselves become unreal, we begin to survive ourselves, however powerful our vitality, however imperious our instincts. But they are no longer anything but false instincts, and false vitality.

If you are doomed to devour yourself, nothing can keep you from it: a trifle will impel you as much as a tragedy. Resign yourself to erosion at all times: your fate wills it so.

To live is to lose ground.

To think that so many have succeeded in dying!

Impossible not to resent those who write us overwhelming letters.

In a remote province of India, everything was explained by dreams, and what is more important, dreams were used to cure diseases as well. It was according to dreams that business was conducted and matters of life and death decided. Until the English came. Since then, one native said, “We no longer dream.”

In what we have agreed to call “civilization,” there resides, undeniably, a diabolic principle man has become conscious of too late, when it was no longer possible to remedy it.

Lucidity without the corrective of ambition leads to stagnation. It is essential that the one sustain the other, that the one combat the other without winning, for a work, for a life to be possible.

We cannot forgive those we have praised to the skies, we are impatient to break with them, to snap the most delicate chain of all: the chain of admiration …, not out of insolence, but out of an aspiration to find our bearings, to be free, to be … ourselves. Which we manage only by an act of injustice.

The problem of responsibility would have a meaning only if we had been consulted before our birth and had consented to be precisely who we are.

The energy and virulence of my taedium vitae continue to astound me. So much vigor in a disease so decrepit! To this paradox I owe my present incapacity to choose my final hour.

For our actions, for our vitality itself, the claim to lucidity is as ruinous as lucidity itself.

Children turn, and must turn, against their parents, and the parents can do nothing about it, for they are subject to a law which decrees the relations among all the living: i.e., that each engenders his own enemy.

So carefully have we been taught to cling to things that when we would be free of them, we do not know how to go about it. And if death did not come to our aid, our stubbornness in subsisting would make us find a recipe for existence beyond wearing out, beyond senility itself

Everything is wonderfully clear if we admit that birth is a disastrous or at least an inopportune event; but if we think otherwise, we must resign ourselves to the unintelligible, or else cheat like everyone else.

In a Gnostic work of the second century of our era, we read: “The prayer of a melancholy man will never have the strength to rise unto God.” … Since man prays only in despondency, we may deduce that no prayer has ever reached its destination.

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

In ancient China, women suffering from anger or grief would climb onto platforms specially constructed for them in the street, and there would give free rein to their fury or their lamentations. Such confessionals should be revived and adopted the world over, if only to replace the obsolete ones of the Church, or the ineffectual ones of various therapeutics.

This philosopher lacks keeping or, to use the jargon, “internal form.” He is too fabricated to be alive or even “real”—a sinister puppet. What bliss to know I shall never open his books again!

No one exclaims he is feeling well and that he is free, yet this is what all who know this double blessing should do. Nothing condemns us more than our incapacity to shout our good luck.

To have failed in everything, always, out of a love of discouragement!

The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.

A book is a postponed suicide.

Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral. …

Cioran 

The Trouble With Being Born