Friday April 24, 1959 — Since January, virtually sick; impossible to work; moved from one infirmity to another; it seems that each organ waited its turn… Nature experimented on me, and I helped, incapable of opposing with the least resistance. The “good usage of maladies”, — I am far from that.
This winter, one day while stricken with the flu, from my bed I looked at the sky, looking more desolated than one could imagine, I noticed two birds (what could they have been?) pursuing each other, in full amorous chase in front of this mournful backdrop. Such a spectacle reconciles you with death, and perhaps even life.
I will give all poets for Emily Dickinson.
I dine in town — and my “soul” is buried.
Diogenes Laertius speaks of the charm of the Epicurean doctrine and that it had, so to speak, the sweetness of the sirens.
Sorrow has destroyed all my talents.
I am a Mongol devastated by melancholy.
Sunday the 17th — Jardin des Plantes. More and more fascinated by reptiles. The eyes of pythons. No animal more mysterious, more distant from “life”. All of that returns to Chaos in the end. Sensation of making a backward leap, of returning to eternity.
Tacitus, my favorite historian.
I know nothing finer than the fall of Vitellius, Histories, paragraphs LXVII-LXVIII. “No one could forget human vicissitudes to the point of not being moved in seeing such a spectacle: a Roman emperor, recently master of the world…”
Happiness without predicate, to speak as in the Logic manuals.
I saw in an eternal false inspiration: not surprising that nothing came out of it. But isn’t that the secret of my sterility?
Everything turns sour in my entrails and in my spirit.
I have an infinite capacity to transform everything into suffering, or rather to aggravate all my sufferings.
Generation of pains.
I do not advance truths, but half-convictions, inconsequential heresies, which have done neither evil nor good to anyone. I will forever be a man without disciples, and it is my intention to have none. One is followed only if decides things, if one assumes an attitude or if one speaks in the name of men or of gods. But none of these apply to me. I am alone and I complain about it.
A tramp, whom I value for his defects and his imbalance, who sleeps for years under the stars, said to me the other day: “I am free to the utmost degree”.
Who has pity for himself has the same pity for God.