Pessoa - Detachment

...I was free from having to feel. It was in a certain sense home – the place, that is, where one doesn’t feel.
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Sovereign King of Detachment and Renunciation, Emperor of Death and Shipwreck, living dream that grandly wanders among the world’s ruins and wastes!
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The only aristocracy is never to touch. Avoid getting close – that’s true nobility.
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May your acts be the statue of renunciation, your gestures the pedestal of indifference, and your words the stained-glass windows of denial.
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The nocturnal glory of being great without being anything! The sombre majesty of splendours no one knows… And I suddenly experience the sublime feeling of a monk in the wilderness or of a hermit in his retreat, acquainted with the substance of Christ in the sands and in the caves of withdrawal from the world.
And at this table in my absurd room, I, a pathetic and anonymous office clerk, write words as if they were the soul’s salvation, and I gild myself with the impossible sunset of high and vast hills in the distance, with the statue I received in exchange for life’s pleasures, and with the ring of renunciation on my evangelical finger, the stagnant jewel of my ecstatic disdain.
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I don’t feel my soul, just peace. External things, all of them distinct and now perfectly still, even if they’re moving, are to me as the world must have been to Christ when, looking down at everything, Satan tempted him. They are nothing, and I can understand why Christ wasn’t tempted. They are nothing, and I can’t understand why clever old Satan thought they would be tempting.
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Peace at last. All that was dross and residue vanishes from my soul as if it had never been. I’m alone and calm. It’s like the moment when I could theoretically convert to a religion. But although I’m no longer attracted to anything down here, I’m also not attracted to anything up above. I feel free, as if I’d ceased to exist and were conscious of that fact.
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Once we’re able to see this world as an illusion and a phantasm, then we can see everything that happens to us as a dream, as something that pretended to exist while we were sleeping. And we will become subtly and profoundly indifferent towards all of life’s setbacks and calamities. Those who die turned a corner, which is why we’ve stopped seeing them; those who suffer pass before us like a nightmare, if we feel, or like an unpleasant daydream, if we think. And even our own suffering won’t be more than this nothingness. In this world we sleep on our left side, hearing even in our dreams the heart’s oppressed existence.
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‘To have occasion to…’ In this space the statue of renunciation will be raised.
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To be something, anything, that doesn’t feel the weight of the rain outside, nor the anguish of inner emptiness… To wander without thought or soul – sensation without sensation – along mountain roads and through valleys hidden between steep slopes, into the far distance, irrevocably immersed…
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To live a dispassionate and cultured life in the open air of ideas, reading, dreaming and thinking of writing – a life so slow it constantly verges on tedium, but pondered enough never to find itself there. To live this life far from emotions and thought, living it only in the thought of emotions and in the emotion of thoughts. To goldenly stagnate in the sun, like a murky pond surrounded by flowers. To possess, in the shade, that nobility of spirit that makes no demands on life. To be in the whirl of the worlds like dust of flowers, sailing through the afternoon air on an unknown wind and falling, in the torpor of dusk, wherever it falls, lost among larger things. To be this with a sure understanding, neither happy nor sad, grateful to the sun for its brilliance and to the stars for their remoteness. To be no more, have no more, want no more… The music of the hungry beggar, the song of the blind man, the relic of the unknown wayfarer, the tracks in the desert of the camel without burden or destination…
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My happiest moments are those when I think nothing, want nothing and dream nothing, being lost in a torpor like some accidental plant, like mere moss growing on life’s surface. I savour without bitterness this absurd awareness of being nothing, this foretaste of death and extinction.
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If I contemplate, I don’t think. ...Happy the man who doesn’t think...
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Thinking is still a form of acting. Only in sheer reverie, where nothing active intervenes and even our self-awareness gets stuck in the mud – only there, in this warm and damp state of non-being, can total renunciation of action be achieved.
To stop trying to understand, to stop analysing… To see ourselves as we see nature, to view our impressions as we view a field – that is true wisdom.
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... the absence of words, the unbroken silence of the soul that knows it is incapable of acting.
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Even the desire to sleep, remembered by the mind, has withered because mere yawning seems like too much of an effort. Even to stop seeing hurts the eyes. And in the soul’s complete and colourless renunciation, only external, distant sounds constitute what’s left of the impossible world.
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And it’s extraordinary to think that, if I were asked right now what I want for this short life, I could think of nothing better than these long, slow minutes, this absence of thought and emotion, of action and almost of sensation itself, this inner sunset of dissipated desire.
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I always live in the present. I don’t know the future and no longer have the past. The former oppresses me as the possibility of everything, the latter as the reality of nothing. I have no hopes and no nostalgia. Knowing what my life has been up till now – so often and so completely the opposite of what I wanted –, what can I assume about my life tomorrow, except that it will be what I don’t assume, what I don’t want, what happens to me from the outside, reaching me even via my  will? There’s nothing from my past that I recall with the futile wish to repeat it. I was never more than my own vestige or simulacrum. My past is everything I failed to be. I don’t even miss the feelings I had back then, because what is felt requires the present moment – once this has passed, there’s a turning of the page and the story continues, but with a different text.
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Today the only course left for the man of superior intelligence is abdication.
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I decided to abstain from everything, to go forward in nothing, to reduce action to a minimum, to make it hard for people and events to find me, to perfect the art of abstinence, and to take abdication to unprecedented heights.
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The best and most regal course is to abdicate. The supreme empire belongs to the emperor who abdicates from all normal life and from other men, for the preservation of his supremacy won’t weigh on him like a load of jewels.
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Renunciation is liberation. Not wanting is power.
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For those few like me who live without knowing how to have life, what’s left but renunciation as our way and contemplation as our destiny?
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...of those who didn’t have strength enough to conquer nor renunciation enough to conquer by not competing.
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[Road of ]total renunciation, formal and complete abstention, whereby it transfers to the sensible sphere whatever cannot be wholly possessed in the sphere of activity and energy; better to supremely not act than to act spottily, inadequately and in vain, like the superfluous, inane, vast majority of men.
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We were born into a world that has suffered from a century and a half of renunciation and violence – the renunciation of superior men and the violence of inferior men, which is their victory.
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If I could really convince myself that renunciation is beautiful, how dolefully happy I would always be!
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Splendour of nothing, name from the abyss, peace from the Beyond…
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This is my morality, or metaphysics, or me: passer-by of everything, even of my own soul, I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing – just an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a fallen sentient mirror reflecting the world’s diversity. I don’t know if I’m happy this way. Nor do I care.
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Let’s not even touch life with the tips of our fingers.
Let’s not even love in our minds.
May we never know the feel of a woman’s kiss, not even in our dreams.
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The higher a man rises, the more things he must do without.
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The truly wise man is the one who can keep external events from changing him in any way. To do this, he covers himself with an armour of realities closer to him than the world’s facts and through which the facts, modified accordingly, reach him.
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To oppose the brutal indifference that constitutes the manifest essence of things, the mystics discovered it was best to renounce. To deny the world, to turn our backs on it as on a swamp at whose edge we suddenly find ourselves standing. To deny, like the Buddha, its absolute reality; to deny, like Christ, its relative reality; to deny .....
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The total snuffing out of life and the soul, the complete banishment of all beings and people, the night without memory or illusion, the absence of past and future .....
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Horace said that the just man will remain undaunted, even if the world crumbles all around him. Although the image is absurd, the point is valid. Even if what we pretend to be (because we coexist with others) crumbles around us, we should remain undaunted – not because we’re just, but because we’re ourselves, and to be ourselves means having nothing to do with external things that crumble, even if they crumble right on top of what for them we are.
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For superior men, life should be a dream that spurns confrontations.
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We have what we renounce.
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Enthusiasm is a vulgarity.
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... not being more nor wanting to be more than a spectator of myself ...
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Happy the man who doesn’t ask for more than what life spontaneously gives him, being guided by the instinct of cats, which seek sunlight when there’s sun, and when there’s no sun then heat, wherever they find it. Happy the man who renounces his personality ...
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To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent....
Reduce your necessities to a minimum, so as not to depend on anyone for anything.
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My abstention from collaborating in the existence of the outside world results in, among other things, a curious psychic phenomenon.
Abstaining entirely from action and taking no interest in Things, I’m able to see the outside world with perfect objectivity. Since nothing interests me or makes me think it should be changed, I don’t change it.
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I reduced my contact with others to a minimum. I did my best to lose all attachment to life ..... In time I even shed my desire for glory, like a sleepy man who takes off his clothes to go to bed.
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Not pleasure, not glory, not power… Freedom, only freedom.
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Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude. If you can’t live alone, you were born a slave. You may have all the splendours of the mind and the soul, in which case you’re a noble slave, or an intelligent servant, but you’re not free. And you can’t hold this up as your own tragedy, for your birth is a tragedy of Fate alone. Hapless you are, however, if life itself so oppresses you that you’re forced to become a slave. Hapless you are if, having been born free, with the capacity to be isolated and self-sufficient, poverty should force you to live with others. This tragedy, yes, is your own, and it follows you.
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And since we wish to be sterile, let us also be chaste, for there is nothing more shameful and ignoble than to forswear what in Nature is fertile while holding on to the part we like in what we’ve forsworn. There are no halfway noble attitudes.
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Remain pure, not in order to be noble or strong but to be yourself. To give your love is to lose love.
Abdicate from life so as not to abdicate from yourself.
Women are a good source of dreams. Don’t ever touch them.
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‘Creator of indifferences’ is the motto I want for my spirit today. I’d like my life’s activity to consist, above all, in educating others to feel more and more for themselves, and less and less according to the dynamic law of collectiveness. To educate people in that spiritual antisepsis which precludes contamination by commonness and vulgarity is the loftiest destiny I can imagine for the pedagogue of inner discipline that I aspire to be. If all who read me would learn – slowly, of course, as the subject matter requires – to be completely insensitive to other people’s opinions and even their glances, that would be enough of a garland to make up for my life’s scholastic stagnation.
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Do I dream of being famous? Then I feel all the public exposure that comes with glory, the total loss of privacy and anonymity that makes glory painful.
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Living isn’t worth our while. Only seeing is. To be able to see without living would bring happiness, but this is impossible, like virtually everything we dream. How great would be the ecstasy that didn’t include life!
[Observing life is to interesting to waste time on living it. NGD]
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It’s hard to achieve that distinction of spirit whereby isolation becomes a repose without anguish.
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To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It’s exceedingly important that we love nobody.)
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When I participate, although it seems that I’m expanding, I’m limiting myself. To associate is to die. Only my consciousness of myself is real for me; other people are hazy phenomena in this consciousness, and it would be morbid to attribute very much reality to them.
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So why do I keep writing? Because I still haven’t learned to practise completely the renunciation that I preach. I haven’t been able to give up my inclination to poetry and prose.
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A life of aesthetic quietism, to prevent the insults and humiliations of life and the living from getting any closer than a loathsome periphery of our sensibility, outside the walls of our conscious soul.
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To see life passing by under a blue sky makes up for a lot. I forget myself indefinitely, forgetting more than I could ever remember. The sufficiency of things fills my weightless, translucent heart, and just to look is a sweet satisfaction. I’ve never been more than a bodiless gaze, whose only soul was a slight breeze that passed by and saw.
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The only thing I’ve loved is nothing at all. The only thing I’ve desired is what I couldn’t even imagine. All I asked of life is that it go on by without my feeling it.
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The intensity of my sensations has always been less than the intensity of my awareness of them. I’ve always suffered more from my consciousness that I was suffering than from the suffering of which I was conscious.
The life of my emotions moved early on to the chambers of thought, and that’s where I’ve most fully lived my emotional experience of life.

Cioran on cessation

“In this our life”—to be in life: suddenly I am struck by the strangeness of such an expression, as if it applied to no one.
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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.”
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With the passage of time, I am convinced that my first years were a paradise. But I am undoubtedly mistaken. If there was ever a paradise, I must look for it earlier than all my years.
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Once we have ceased linking our secret life to God, we can ascend to ecstasies as effective as those of the mystics and conquer this world without recourse to the Beyond. And if, nonetheless, the obsession of another world were to pursue us, it would be permissible to construct, to project one for the occasion, if only to satisfy our thirst for the invisible. What matters are our sensations, their intensity and their virtues, as our capacity to fling ourselves into a madness that is not sacred. In the unknown, we can go as far as the saints, without making use of their means. It will be enough for us to constrain reason to a long silence. Handed over to ourselves, nothing will keep us from acceding to the delicious suspension of all our faculties. A man who has glimpsed these states knows that our movements there lose their habitual direction: we ascend to the abyss, we fall into heaven. Where are we? A question without object: we no longer take place …
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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.
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Even in childhood I watched the hours flow, independent of any reference, any action, any event, the disjunction of time from what was not itself, its autonomous existence, its special status, its empire, its tyranny. I remember quite clearly that afternoon when, for the first time, confronting the empty universe, I was no more than a passage of moments reluctant to go on playing their proper parts. Time was coming unstuck from being—at my expense.
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There was a time when time did not yet exist…. The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.
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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.
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What makes destruction suspect is its facility: anyone who comes along can excel in it. But if to destroy is easy, to destroy oneself is less so. Superiority of the outcast over the agitator or the anarchist.
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The amount of emptiness I have accumulated, while keeping my individual status — the miracle of not having exploded under the weight of so much nonexistence!
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Sarvakarmaphalatyâga . . . Years ago, having written this spellbinding word in capital letters on a sheet of paper, I had tacked it to the wall of my room so I could stare at it throughout the day. It remained there for months, until I finally took it down because I realized I was becoming more and more attached to its magic and less and less to its content. Yet what it signifies: detachment from the fruit of action, is of such importance that anyone who had truly possessed himself of it would have nothing more to accomplish, since he would have reached the one valid end, the real truth that annihilates all the others and exposes their emptiness, being empty itself, moreover—but this emptiness is conscious of itself. Imagine a greater awareness, a further step toward awakening, and he who takes it will be no more than a ghost, a phantom.
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All great conversions are born from the sudden revelation of life's meaninglessness. Nothing could be more moving or more impressive than this sudden apprehension of the void of existence.
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The day I read the list of nearly all the Sanskrit words that designate the absolute, I realized that I had taken the wrong path, the wrong country, the wrong idiom.
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Deep in his heart, man aspires to rejoin the condition he had before consciousness. History is merely the detour he takes to get there.
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“Meditate but one hour upon the selfs nonexistence and you will feel yourself to be another man.” said a priest of the Japanese Kusha sea to a Western visitor.
Without having frequented the Buddhist monasteries, how many times have I not lingered over- the world’s unreality, and hence my own? I have not become another man for that, no, but there certainly has remained with me the feeling that my identity is entirely illusory, and that by losing it I have lost nothing, except something, except everything.
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At a grave, the words: game, imposture, joke, dream, come to mind. Impossible to think that existence is a serious phenomenon. Certainty of faking from the start, at bottom. Over the gate of our cemeteries should be written: “Nothing Is Tragic. Everything Is Unreal.”
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A middle-aged woman, passing me on the street, took it into her head to announce, without looking at me, “Today I see nothing but walking corpses wherever I look.” Then, still without looking at me, she added, “I’m crazy, aren’t I, Monsieur?”
“Not all that crazy,” I replied, with a glance of complicity.
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What sacrifice would I not make in order to be free of this wretched self, which at this very moment occupies, within the All, a place no god has dared aspire to!
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To trace back to the sovereign zero, out of which emerges that subaltern zero that constitutes ourselves. . . .
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Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing — between two fictions.
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I should like to forget everything and waken to a light before time.
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No use counting on the windfall of being alone — always escorted by oneself!
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The merest subservience, even to the desire to die, unmasks our loyalty to the impostures of the self.
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The initial revelation of any monastery: everything is nothing.
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The road to ecstasy and the experience of the void presupposes a will to make the soul a tabula rasa, a striving towards psychogical blankness. Once it has totally rejected the world, the soul is ripe for a long-term and fecund emptiness.
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It would be hard to find a more self-denying mystic than Eckhart, who totally managed to repress his animal instincts. His rejection of nature let him to detachment from wordly things, a precondition for attachment to God. Aware of the painful dissonance between life and eternity, he gave up the former without the least hesitation.
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Nietzsche says somewhere: "You have been searching for the heaviest load, and you have found yourself!"
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I think of Man, and see only shadows; I think of shadows and see only myself.
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According to Eckhart, God hates nothing more than time and our commitment to it. In their longing for eternity, God and Eckhart have only contempt for "the smell and taste of time".
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Our disease? Centuries of attention to time, the idolatry of becoming. What recourse to China or India will heal us?
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To recover our first absence, let us follow our cosmogonies in reverse and, since the modesty of dying fails us, let us annihilate at least every trace in ourselves of the here and now, down to the last memory of what we were. May some god grant us the power to resign from everything...
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Those who cannot benefit from their possibilities of nonexistence are strangers to themselves: puppets, objects “furnished” with a self, numbed by a neutral time that is neither duration nor eternity. To exist is to profit by our share of unreality, to be quickened by each contact with the void that is within. To this void the puppet remains insensible, abandons it, permits it to decay, to die out …
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Ceasing to live in terms of a self ...  I no longer belonged to myself.
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We last only as long as our fictions.
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*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.

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No longer to be tempted save by what lies beyond . . . extremes.
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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.
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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 !
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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.
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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.”

Think of Rilke, that expatriate de luxe, and of the number of solitudes he had to accumulate in order to liquidate his connections, in order to establish a foothold in the invisible. It is not easy to be nowhere, when no external condition obliges you to do so. Even the mystic attains his askesis only at the cost of monstrous efforts. To extricate oneself from the world—what a labor of abolition!
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When Nothingness invades me and, according to an Oriental formula, I attain to the “vacuity of the void,” it so happens that, crushed by such an extremity, I fall back on God, if only out of a desire to trample my doubts underfoot, to contradict myself and, multiplying my frissons, to seek in Him a stimulant. The experience of the Void is the unbeliever’s mystic temptation, his possibility for prayer, his moment of plenitude. At our limits, a God appears, or something that serves his turn.
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But I cannot comprehend our attachment to beings. I dream of the depths of the Ungrund, the reality anterior to the corruptions of time, and whose solitude, superior to God, will forever separate me from myself and from my kind, from the language of love, from the prolixity that results from our curiosity about other people.
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A man who has completely vanquished selfishness, who retains no trace of it whatever, cannot live longer than twenty-one days, according to one modern Vedantist school. No Western moralist, not even the grimmest, would have dared venture an observation on human nature so startling, so revealing.
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If it is true that what perishes has never existed, birth, source of the perishable, exists as little as the rest.
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When, after a series of questions about desire, disgust, and serenity, Buddha was asked: “What is the goal, the final meaning of nirvana?” he did not answer. He smiled. There has been a great deal of commentary on that smile, instead of seeing it as a normal reaction to a pointless question. It is what we do when confronted by a child’s why. We smile, because no answer is conceivable, because the answer would be even more meaningless than the question. Children admit no limits to anything; they always want to see beyond, to see what there is afterward. But there is no afterward. Nirvana is a limit, the limit It is Iteration, supreme impasse….
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I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.
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A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself …
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No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.
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Nirvana has been compared to a mirror that no longer reflects any object. To a mirror, then, forever pure, forever unemployed.
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I am distinct from all my sensations. I fail to understand how. I even fail to understand whose they are. Moreover, who is this I initiating the three propositions?
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I ponder C., for whom drinking coffee 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 coffee”. We all have some mania or other that keeps us from unconditionally accepting supreme happiness.
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I was about to go out when, in order to tie my scarf, I glanced at myself in the mirror. Suddenly an unspeakable terror: who is that? Impossible to recognize myself. Though I had no trouble identifying my overcoat, my necktie, my hat, I couldn’t make out who I was, for I was not myself— that was not me. This lasted a certain number of seconds: twenty, thirty, forty? When I managed to come to my senses, the terror persisted. I had to wait for it to consent to disappear.
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How could I resign myself even for a moment to what is not eternal? Yet this happens to me — at this very moment, for example.
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The reasons for persisting in Being seem less and less well founded, and our successors will find it easier than we to be rid of such obstinacy.
[Easier to come to think of it; perhaps. But such obstinacy, is very hard to be rid of, no matter what time, even if one wishes to be rid of oneself].
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What a pity that “nothingness” has been devalued by an abuse of it made by philosophers unworthy of it!
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Cioran on detachment

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?

[“Here, ruler of gods, a bhikkhu has heard that nothing is worth adhering to. When a bhikkhu has heard that nothing is worth adhering to, he directly knows everything; having directly known everything, he fully understands everything...MN37]
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Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.
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What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.
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That I can still desire proves that I lack an exact perception of reality, that I am distracted, that I am a thousand miles from the Truth. “Man,” we read in the Dhammapada, “is prey to desire only because he does not see things as they are.”
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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.
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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.
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An Egyptian monk, after fifteen years of complete solitude, received a packet of letters from his family and friends. He did not open them, he flung them into the fire in order to escape the assault of memory. We cannot sustain communion with ourself and our thoughts if we allow ghosts to appear, to prevail. The desert signifies not so much a new life as the death of the past: at last we have escaped our own history. In society, no less than in the Thebaid, the letters we write, and those we receive, testify to the fact that we are in chains, that we have broken none of the bonds, that we are merely slaves and deserve to be so.
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Anyone may now and then have the sense of occupying only a point and a moment; to have such a sense day and night, hour by hour, is less frequent, and it is from this experience, this datum, that one turns toward nirvana or sarcasm—or toward both at once.
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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.
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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.
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Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do, one so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it.
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The final step toward indifference is the destruction of the very notion of indifference.
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If attachment is an evil, we must look for its cause in the scandal of birth, for to be born is to be attached. Detachment then should apply itself to getting rid of the traces of this scandal, the most serious and intolerable of all.
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Withdraw into yourself, perceive there a silence as old as being, even older….
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To withdraw indefinitely into oneself, like God after the six days. Let us imitate Him, on this point at least.
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My books, my work: the grotesquerie of such possessives. Everything was spoiled once literature stopped being anonymous. Decadence dates from the first author.
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To shift from scorn to detachment seems easy enough. Yet this is not so much a transition as a feat, an accomplishment. Scorn is the first victory over the world; detachment the last, the supreme. The interval separating them is identified with the path leading from liberty to liberation.
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He was above all others, and had had nothing to do with it: he had simply forgotten to desire….
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Plotinus befriended a Roman senator who had freed his slaves, renounced his wealth, and who ate and slept at the houses of friends, for he no longer owned anything. This senator, from the “official” point of view, was deranged, and his case would be regarded as distressing, which indeed it was: a saint in the Senate…. His presence, even his possibility—what an omen! The hordes were not far….
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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.
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One can be proud of what one has done, but one should be much prouder of what one has not done. Such pride has yet to be invented.
*
Why does 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.
*
X reproached me for being a spectator, for not getting involved, for loathing the new. “But I don’t want to change anything,” I answered. He did not grasp the meaning of my reply. He took it for modesty.
*
Explosive force of any mortification. Every vanquished desire affords us power. We have the more hold over this world the further we withdraw from it, the less we adhere to it. Renunciation confers an infinite power.
*
“My children, salt comes from water, and if it comes in contact with water, it dissolves and vanishes. In the same way, the monk is born of woman, and if he approaches a woman, he dissolves and ceases to be a monk.” This Jean Moschus, in the seventh century, seems to have understood better than either Strindberg or Weininger the danger already pointed out in Genesis.
*
You should avoid simulacra and even “realities;” you should take up a position external to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live, according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a “solitary elephant.”
*
Ama nesari, says the Imitation of Christ. Love to be unknown. We are happy with ourselves and with the world only when we conform to this precept.
*
There was a time when, in order to dispel any impulse of vengeance once I had endured some affront, I would imagine myself quite still in my grave. And I calmed down at once. We must not despise our corpse too much: it can be useful on occasion.
*
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.
*
Amid anxiety and distress, sudden calm at the thought of the foetus one has been.

*

Endlessly to refer to a world where nothing yet stooped to occurrence, where you anticipated consciousness without desiring it, where, wallowing in the virtual, you rejoiced in the null plenitude of a self anterior to selfhood….
Not to have been born, merely musing on that—what happiness, what freedom, what space!
*
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.
*
Renunciation is the only kind of action that is not degrading.
*
“If a man loves nothing, he will be invulnerable” (Chuang Tse)
*
“A life of intensity is contrary to the Tao,” teaches Lao Tse, a normal man if ever there was one.
*
Counterirritant to desolation: close your eyes for a long while in order to forget light and all that it reveals.

Visit from a painter who describes how, calling one evening on a blind man and finding him alone in the dark, he could not keep from pitying him and asking him if existence was endurable without light. “You don’t know what you’re missing,” was the blind man’s answer.
*
Detachment serenity—vague, almost empty words, except in those moments when we would have answered by a smile if we had been told we had only a few minutes left to live.
*
... detachment from the fruit of action, is of such importance that anyone who had truly possessed himself of it would have nothing more to accomplish, since he would have reached the one valid end, the real truth that annihilates all the others and exposes their emptiness, being empty itself, moreover—but this emptiness is conscious of itself. Imagine a greater awareness, a further step toward awakening, and he who takes it will be no more than a ghost, a phantom.
*
Tolstoy’s excuse as a preacher is that he had two disciples who derived the practical consequences of his homilies: Wittgenstein and Gandhi, The first gave away his possessions; the second had none to give away.
*
On this immaculate page, a gnat was making a dash for it, “Why be in such a hurry? Where are you going, what are you looking for? Relax!” I screamed out in the middle of the night. I would have been so pleased to see it obey me. It’s harder than you think to gain disciples.
*
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?
*
When I see someone fighting for some cause or other, I try to know what is happening in his mind and what can be the source of his obvious lack of maturity. The rejection of resignation is perhaps a sign of “life,” never in any case of perspicacity or simply of reflexion. The sane man never lowers himself to protest. He scarcely consents to indignation. Taking human affairs seriously attests to some secret flaw.
*
Epictetus: “Pleasure consists not in acquiring and enjoying but in not desiring.” —If wisdom is defined as opposition to Desire, it is because wisdom is concerned to make us superior to the ordinary disappointments as well as to the dramatic ones, inseparable, on either count, from the phenomenon of desiring, expecting, hoping. It is chiefly from the capital disappointments that wisdom seeks to preserve us, having specialized in the art of confronting or enduring the “blows of fate.” Of all the Ancients, it was the Stoics who carried this art furthest. According to them, the wise man possesses an exceptional status in the universe: the gods are secured from evils; the wise man is above, he is invested with a force that allows him to conquer all his desires. The gods are still subjected to theirs, they live in servitude; he alone escapes them. How does he raise himself to the unwonted, how does he manage to outclass all beings, mortal and divine? Apparently he does not immediately discern the bearing of his status: he is certainly above men and gods, but he must wait a certain while before realizing the fact. We have no difficulty admitting that it is not easy for him to understand his position, especially since we wonder when and where we have seen so prodigious an anomaly, such a specimen of virtue and pride. The wise man, Seneca claims, exceeds Jupiter in being able to scorn the privileges of this world and in refusing to benefit by them, while Jupiter, having no need of them and dismissing them from the start, has neither the occasion nor the merit of triumphing over them.
*
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 world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it, Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?
*
I pass without stopping at the grave of that critic whose vitriolic remarks I have so often pondered. Nor at the grave of the poet who spent his life dreaming of his ultimate dissolution. Other names pursue me, alien names linked to a pitiless and pacifying wisdom, to a vision calculated to free the mind from all obsessions, even funereal ones. Nagarjuna, Chandrakirti, Santideva—unparalleled swashbucklers, dialecticians belabored by the obsession of salvation, acrobats and apostles of Vacuity for whom, sages among the sages, the universe was only a word….
*
“Old age is the most unexpected thing of all that happens to man,” notes Trotsky a few years before his end. If, as a young man, he had had the exact, visceral intuition of this truth, what a miserable revolutionary he would have made!
*
A young German asks me for one franc. I begin a conversation with him and learn that he has traveled round the world, that he has been to India, whose beggars he likes to think he resembles. Yet one does not belong with impunity to a didactic nation. I watch him solicit: he looks as if he had taken courses in mendicancy.
*
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.
*
My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.
*
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.
*
When we begin to reflect upon life, to discover in it an infinity of emptiness, our instincts have already turned themselves into guides and middlemen of our acts; they rein in the flight of our inspiration and the pliability of our detachment.
*
An oyster, to build up its shell, must pass its weight in seawater through its body fifty thousand times. . . . Where have I turned for my lessons in patience!
*
Love’s great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.
*
In the heat of success or of failure, remember how we were conceived. Incomparable recipe for triumphing over euphoria or discontent.
*
The wise man consents to everything, for he identifies himself with nothing. An opportunist without desires.
*
I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.
*
In classical India, the sage and the saint were combined in one and the same person. To have any notion of such a success, we must imagine, if we can, a fusion between resignation and ecstasy, between a cold stoic and a disheveled mystic.
*
Every form of haste, even toward the good, betrays some mental disorder.
*
“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.

*According to Nagarjuna—a subtle mind, if ever there was one, and who transcended even nihilism-Buddha offered the world the “nectar of vacuity.” At the limits of the most abstract and the most destructive analysis, to evoke a draught, even of the gods—is this not a weakness, a concession? —However far one may have advanced, one still drags along the indignity of being—or of having been—human.

*
Thirty years of ecstasy at the altar of the Cigarette. Now, when I see others sacrifice to my former idol, I do not understand them, I regard them as unhinged or defective. If a “vice” we have conquered becomes alien to us to such a degree, how can we fail to be astounded by those we have not practiced?
*
“I cannot do without the things I care nothing for,” the Duchess du Maine liked to say. Frivolity, to this degree, is a prelude to renunciation.
*
...too favored by fate to know modesty or resignation, as unsuited to observe proportion in the face of the inevitable as of the unexpected.
*
I acknowledge the advantage of ... living without a background, with the unconcern of a tumbler, an idiot or a saint, or with the detachment of that serpent which, coiled around itself, survives without food for years on end, as if it were some god of inanition or else concealed, beneath the suavity of its hebetude, some hideous sun.
*
There are among us daylight ghosts, devoured by their absence, for whom life is one long aside. They walk our streets with muffled steps, and look at no one. No anxiety can be discovered in their eyes, no haste in their gestures. For them an outside world has ceased to exist, and they submit to every solitude. Careful to keep their distance, solicitous of their detachment, they inhabit an undeclared universe situated somewhere between the memory of the unimaginable and the imminence of certainty. Their smile suggests a thousand vanquished fears, the grace that triumphs over all things terrible: such beings can pass through matter itself. Have they overtaken their own origins? Discovered in themselves the very sources of light? No defeat, no victory dis turbs them. Independent of the sun, they are self-sufficient: illuminated by Death.
*
Resignation, had it become compulsory, would have taught us to endure our misfortunes with dignity, to contemplate our nullity in silence. Would poetry have evaporated from our world? So much the worse for poetry! In exchange, we should have captured the faculty of suffering our destinies without a murmur: accusing no one, condescending to neither melancholy nor mirth nor regret, reducing our relations with the universe to a harmonious system of defeats, living as condemned men may live—not imploring divinity but offering it a warning …
*
The repugnance which an animal begets is provisional; it never ripens in thought, whereas our kind obsesses our reflections, infiltrates the mechanism of our detachment from the world in order to confirm us in our system of refusal and non-adherence. After each conversation, whose refinement alone is enough to indicate the level of a civilization, why is it impossible not to regret the Sahara and not to envy the plants or the endless monologues of zoology?
*
The man who can no longer take sides because all men are necessarily right and wrong, because everything is at once justified and irrational-—that man must renounce his own name, tread his identity underfoot, and begin a new life in impassibility or despair. Or otherwise, invent another genre of solitude, expatriate himself in the void, and pursue—by means of one exile or another—the stages of uprootedness. Released from all prejudices, he becomes the unusable man par excellence, to whom no one turns and whom no one fears because he admits and repudiates everything with the same detachment. Less dangerous than a heedless insect, he is nonetheless a scourge for Life, for it has vanished from his vocabulary, with the seven days of the Creation. And Life would forgive him, if at least he relished Chaos, which is where Life began. But he denies the feverish origins, beginning with his own, and preserves, with regard to the world, only a cold memory, a polite regret.
*
Having exhausted his appetites, the man who approaches a limit-form of detachment no longer wants to perpetuate himself; he loathes surviving in someone else, to whom moreover he has nothing more to transmit; the species appalls him; he is a monster—and monsters do not beget.
*
A too-recent disaster has the disadvantage of keeping us from perceiving its good sides.
*
To perish! — that verb which is my favorite and which, oddly enough, suggests nothing irreparable.

I am nothing – just an abstract centre of impersonal sensations

This is my morality, or metaphysics, or me: passer-by of everything, even of my own soul, I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing – just an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a fallen sentient mirror reflecting the world’s diversity. I don’t know if I’m happy this way. Nor do I care.

Fernando Pessoa