January 1st, 1960. For years, I no longer read Baudelaire, but I think of him as if I gave my daily lecture on him. Is it because he alone seems to me to have gone farther than me in the experience of “depression”?
Chance meeting with X — always that puzzling blend of crook and madman, but elusive at base: a man who does not even have the notion of “truth”, physiologically “inaccurate” and amoral. His great excuse is the universal scorn that he has succeeded in sparking around his person. There is something of the serpent in him. I have always felt in his regard a sensation of disgust — and of curiosity. Terror as well before a crawling, malaise before his allures; eyes cold and brilliant; there is metal in his gaze. In his blood is surely mixed Greek and slave, two irreconcilable elements, which could only give birth to a monster. Subterranean and arrogant. Impression of vertigo. His monumental obsequiousness. All of that comprises, on the contrary, his gifts. When I encountered him for the first time, and without having read anything by him, I had said to M.: “He surely has talent. He is too hideous.” Hideous in morals and in physique.
One day to write on him: “Portrait of a serpent”.
P.S. These notes are so devoid of mercy that I am ashamed of them. With me pity follows disgust: ah! how beings fare badly with me.
Again regarding X — What he is, the phenomenon he incarnates, is only conceivable in a country like ours, where the mixed ethnic contributions have not been “joined”, melted, organically blended, where blood is, as it were, uncultivated, because “culture” has not been able to exercise its work of individualization, at the same time as its work of leveling. He is a monster in its natural state, uncorrected; his cunning, his duplicity, which are immense, totally spoil the “veneer”; it is hypocrisy… unveiled, it is the impostor in the open, it is infamy in full light, and that precisely due to his continual and evident dissimulations. One is struck by his total insincerity, perceptible in all his movements, in all his speech; but the word is not fair: for to be insincere is to hide the truth, or some calculation or God knows what; but whoever hides everything hides nothing; for there is not a single truth in him, not a single criterion according to which he acts or judges; there is in him only an enormous obstinacy, a revolting voracity, a thirst for gain and celebrity at the most vulgar level. He is filth, an unbelievable fanatic, a madman interested…
Nothing can completely spoil someone, except for success. “Fame” is the worst from of malediction which can befall someone.
Vulgarity is contagious, always; delicacy, never.
Pain is a sensation; suffering, a sentiment. One cannot properly say: a sensation of suffering.
It was at the base of the cliffs of Varengeville. Before this display of rock, I had the nearly terrifying perception of fragility, of the non-existence of all flesh. And of the ridiculousness of life. How life spoils us! Never will I forget this revelation, of an intensity untouched until then.
A great character is not open, but closed: its power resides in its refusal, in its massive refusal.
In all breakdown, in the least symptom of fainting there is a bit of voluptuousness.
Could pleasure be a form of disintegration?
All sensuality is pain. A special pain, it is true.
My joys are latent sadnesses.
Albert Camus died in an auto accident. He died at the moment when everyone, and perhaps himself as well, knew that he had nothing more to say and that in living he could only demean his fame, disproportionate, excessive, or even ridiculous. Immense sorrow in learning of his death, last evening, at 11 pm, in Montparnasse. An excellent minor writer, who did well by having been totally free from vulgarity, despite all the honors which where thrown on him.
X: he interests everyone; how his evident weaknesses… Sought by the incidental, by the “living”, he passed the essential by, he no longer knew what mattered above all. Difficult and universal dispersion.