January 11. Entire day devoured by conversation.
All natural deaths are compromising.
If the story of the fall is so beautiful, it is because the author describes there figures that are neither symbolic nor mythological: he sees a God of flesh and blood in the garden, not an entity.
One day man will abolish knowledge and power, he will renounce it, or else will die of it.
Every climate makes me sick, my body is not adapted to a single latitude.
Whoever speaks myth proclaims his disbelief, his total absence of religious sense.
One must think of God, and not of religion, of ecstasy, and not of mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of religion and the believer is as great as that between the psychiatrist and the madman.
Everything about civilization is derived, and everything that is derived is worth nothing.
The more that men move away from God, the more they move forward in the knowledge of religions.
History, in some form that can be envisaged, is a screen that conceals the absolute from us.
The original alone is true. All that the mind invents is false.
I have lost a number of my former faults; in exchange I have acquired others. Equilibrium remains intact.
I have remarked that I can get along quite well with a man when he has reached the height of defeat, when he has lost all foundation, and with it, all the certitudes of his success. In these moments, he is stripped of all of his lies, and he is naked and true, restored to his essence by the blows of fate.
Do not waste time in critiquing others, in censuring their works; make your own, consecrate all your hours to it. The rest is a jumble or infamy. Be united with what is true in yourself and even “eternal”.
Someone has said very well that “to exist is to be distinct”. — One ceases to exist in every regime, religious or political, that suppresses heresy, the will to go against dogma or against the current.
These attacks of terror, without motives, without foundation, without a single apparent justification, which grab us by the throat, paralyze us, and leave us in a humiliating stupor. — Thus, the other day, in climbing the staircase, in complete darkness, I was stopped by an invisible force, coming at once from outside and from myself; impossible to proceed, I stayed there for several minutes, petrified, nailed in place, in a panic and ashamed. And this was not the first time that it happened to me but it always ends in rage and desolation. What kind of phenomenon could it be the symptom of?
In judging one’s contemporaries without mercy, one risks being right and becoming in the eyes of posterity an incisive and clairvoyant mental figure. But at the same time, one gives up the adventurous side of admiration, and the warm errors that they presuppose. Yes, admiration is an adventure, all the more beautiful in that it is almost always deceived. It is frightening, though reasonable, not to have a single illusion about someone.
Nothing is more lamentable than being inevitably right.
(Particularly about moralists who have precisely fallen into this failing.)
Not a single species of literary originality is yet possible so long as one respects syntax. One must crush the phrase, if one wants to get something out of it.
Only the thinker must stand by old superstitions, clear language and conventional syntax. Originality fundamentally has the same demands since the time of Thales.
Heraclitus, Pascal, the first happier than the second, because his work has only survived in fragments, — what luck for them not to have organized their interrogations into a system! The commentator devotes to them a joyful heart, who loves to fill in lacunae, the intervals between the “thoughts” or maxims; and to ramble on with impunity; he can without risk construct a figure in his own image. For what he loves is the arbitrary, what gives him the illusion of liberty and invention: it is cheap rigor.
Someone asks me to write an article on Camus? I refuse. His death has shattered me, but I find nothing to say about an author who has had his fill of fame, and whose work, as I have written in my letter of abstention, is from a “desperately evident signification”.
Camus, who had protested against injustice so much, should have protested against his fame, if he had wanted to be consistent with himself. But that would have been indecent. And doubtless he believed that his fame was merited.
If one pushed the mania for justice to the limit, one would fall into ridicule or would be destroyed. There is more elegance in resignation than in revolt, and more beauty in anonymity than in acclaim, in the hype around a name.
Whoever adheres to his own celebrity is contemptible, who is neither humiliated nor sickened by it.
My admirations, however passionate they may be, always retain a bit of poison. I do not have what it takes to be a panegyrist.
Without grounding in desolation which colors all my thoughts and commands all my attitudes, giving them the appearance of seriousness and even of system, I would have had the makings of a perfect dilettante.
As solitary as an unemployed God.
All fiction is salutary, and, no more than others, I cannot do without it. (The farther I go, the more I am led to multiply my admissions of defeat.)
The first Roman historians drew all of their documents from the archives of patrician families, only funereal elegies, necessarily dishonest. And as each family tried to trace its origins back to some god, one understands the magnificence, and the useless beauty, of high antiquity.
The charlatan side of all talented men. It is as though the gift was not natural, but was invented and played by the one who possessed it. Or rather: he was astonished to be favored by it. Especially among the poets; invested with grace, but an equivocal grace.
Negation to my eyes contains such prestige that, cutting me off from the rest of things, it has made me a limited, propped up, invalidated being. Like those living under the charm of “progress”, I live under the No. And yet I understand that one can say yes, can acquiesce to everything, though such an exploit, which I admit to others, demands on my part a leap which presently I feel myself incapable. The No is in my blood, after having corrupted my mind.
There is something sickening and tiresome in the use of abstract style: all these empty words juxtaposed to convey the unreal, what is called thought.
Ah! how I would love to be satisfied only with sensation, with a world before the concept, with infinitesimal variations of a felt impression that would return me a thousand surprising and incoherent words! Even to write the sense, to convert by the interpretation of the body and soul uncoordinated! Uniquely to transcribe what I see, what touches me, to act like a reptile when he got to work, not a reptile, but an insect, for the reptile has the unfortunate reputation as an intellectual. A book that would be poetic by pure physiology.
I have too often gone back to the classics ever to be able to return to the origins, and to go by means of language beyond language.
James Joyce: the most overproud man of the century. Because he willed, and partly attained, the Impossible, with the obstinacy of a mad god. And because he never compromised with the reader and he would not hear of being readable at any cost. To reach the peak in obscurity.
To manage to abolish the public, to go past it, not to matter to anyone, to swallow the universe.
What ruins the greater part of talents is that they do not know how to limit themselves.
Nothing sterilizes a writer so much as the pursuit of perfection. To create, one must let his nature go free, to let himself go, to heed one’s voices…, eliminate the censor of irony or of good taste…
Two texts from Antiquity, one beautiful in itself, the other as significant as possible: the description by Pliny the naturalist of the eruption of Vesuvius and the end of Pompeii; the letter from Pliny to Trajan on the way the Christians should be treated.
Everything good that I have comes from my laziness; without it, what would stop me from putting my wicked designs into motion? It has happily constrained me within the limits of “virtue”.
All our vices come from the excess of activity, from this propensity in us to realize, to give an honorable appearance to our foibles.
All these happy, stuffed people, French, English… Oh! I am not here, I have behind me centuries of uninterrupted misfortune. I was born in a luckless nation. Happiness ends at Venice; beyond, Malediction!
Immense cowardice before life, and like a shiver of spinelessness.
I have never pronounced or written the word solitude, without feeling voluptuousness.
Articles on, studies, books on, always on someone, on authors, on works, on ideas of others; accounts amplified, useless and mediocre commentaries; were they remarkable, that would not change anything. Nothing from anyone, nothing original; everything is derived. Oh! It is better to speak of oneself with nullity than to speak of others with talent. An idea which is not lived, which does not run its course, is worth nothing. What more nauseating spectacle than this borrowed humanity, cerebral, erudite, which lives parasitically on the mind.
The historian of philosophy is not a philosopher. A caretaker who asks questions is better than that.
In the act of invention, man should have stood by the wheelbarrow. All technical improvement is harmful and should be denounced as such. One could say that the only sense of “progress” is contributing to the augmentation of noise, to the consolidation of hell.