January 6, 1960
I had spoken to Camus only a single time, in 1950, I think; I have spoken ill of him a great deal, and now I feel myself under the blow of a terrible and unjustified remorse. I lose all my means before a cadaver, especially when he is so respectable. Sorrow without name.
Weakness bordering on tears. But I must save appearances and persevere in the combat without believing in it. Such a horrible life I will have lived!
Justice is literally a mediocre ideal.
Wherever I went, the same sentiment of not belonging, of a useless and stupid game, of imposture, not among others, but among myself: I feign interest in what hardly matters to me, I constantly play a role out of spinelessness or to save appearances; but I am not in it, for what captures my heart is elsewhere. Cast out of paradise, where will I find my place, where a home of my own? Fallen, a thousand times fallen. There are in me, like a sudden hosanna, hymns reduced to powder, an explosion of regrets.
A man for whom there is no homeland down here.
To speak of affairs of which one has no part is to struggle in the everyday when one lives a religious tragedy!
On the struggles with the French language: an agony in the true sense of the word, a combat where I always come out the loser.
“… but Elohim knows that, the day when you will eat it, your eyes will be opened…”
Your eyes will be opened!, that is indeed the drama of knowledge. Paradise: look without understanding. Life would be tolerable only under that condition.
The story of the fall is perhaps the most profound one written ever. Everything is said there that we are going to feel and to suffer, all history on one page.
“Then he heard the noise of Yahweh-Elohim who passed in the garden in the breeze of evening…”
In reading that, one feels, one shares the fear of Adam. “Who has told you that you are naked?”
God gave Adam and Eve happiness, on the condition that they neither aspire to nor attain knowledge or power.
One critic has observed quite correctly that the God of the Garden of Eden is a rural God.
Why had Adam and Eve not first touched the tree of life? It is because the temptation for immortality is less strong than that of knowledge, and above all of power.