February 25, 1960. Today, in writing my name on a form, it was as if I had written it for the first item, as if I did not recognize it. The day, the year of my birth, all of it seemed new to me, and inexplicable, without a single relationship with me. Psychiatrists call the feeling strangeness. As for my face, often I must make an effort to identify it, an effort of painful and humiliating adaptation.
Prostrate, disconcerted, nauseated before the revelation of being oneself.
Liberty is like health: it has no value and one pays it no attention until it is lost. Also it constitutes neither an ideal for those who possess it, nor a charm. The world called “free” is a an empty world, for itself.
Just like that, happiness without limits, vision of ecstasy. And that, after having seen my tax collector, having joined the line at the police department for my identity card, seen a nurse for a shot, and all in keeping. Mystery of our interior chemistry, metamorphosis that would puzzle a demon and pulverize an angel.
In France, it is enough to be insolent to earn a reputation of intelligence and wit.
or
In France, insolence takes the place of intelligence and wit.
Today, at J. Supervielle’s place, spoke of J.C. I had described him as revolting. They protested. Dominique Aury and Paulhan maintained that he did not merit that epithet, that he did not go that far.
I concede: let’s say that he was a failure at being revolting.
A man without dimensions.
Two epochs in which I would have loved to live: the Eighteenth century in France, and Tsarist Russia.
Elegant boredom, and dreary, tense, infinite boredom…
I have known states of overflowing happiness only following nervous troubles, prolonged insomnia, senseless pains, and intolerable anxieties. Compensation or natural conclusion?
Each instant sends me a warning — that I evade. Decidedly, I have failed my duty toward Time.
I am only due to my gaps, my desertions, and my refusals. A totally negative existence. I am at odds with all my good resolutions, and abandon them with determination, with a perseverance worth of a better cause.
H.M. has written three books on mescaline. That need for depth, that insistence is not French. The advantage and drawback of being born in Brussels.
D. before his illness was a historian; then, he fell into metaphysics. It takes a fall, an “abyss” for a Frenchman to become open to the essential digression.
To run a newspaper, such evidence of impotence to coordinate one’s thoughts! It is the sure sign of a discontinuous mind, broken at its roots, at the core complicit with and victim of the fluctuations of time, of its time. Unfit to meditate, it is meditated… It is philosophy reduced to a cozy calendar.
The more one knows oneself, the more one puts on oneself. About a wreck…
My article on resentment; it is what I wrote more courageously above others, and it is, of all my rantings, the one which has sparked the least response… No one has taken any notice of it. It is like a flawless mirror.
The maximum that prose can achieve is to brush against the sublime; when it becomes immersed in it, it becomes ridiculous, bloated, tiresome.
France — a country of amateurs, — and, on the positive side of its dilettantism, the only place in the world where nuance still counts.
I would like to remove all excess from myself, and yet I love only passionate accents, and the possibilities of a cry enclosed in each truth. A gift of more, a supplement of grace, a veritable love of contemplation, and what I mystic I would have made! But whatever I do, I must remain short of a decisive step. Too many voices have died in me! Curses on those who are unworthy of their soul, who are worth less than they are!
Jacqueline Pascal, Lucile de Chateaubriand, Mme de Beaumont, and among the men, Joubert, — souls according to my taste.
This sorrow that borders on vertigo… Would that I could put myself under an angel’s protection! I have let myself be tempted by demons, and now I must forever pay for an instant of criminal weakness.
The love of agony and the horror of death, I pay for this contradictory movement that I have cultivated with the bitterness of a cynic and a martyr.
B. — he was a boy who, when poor, spoke to me of the inanity of life, when rich, he could only tell dirty stories. One does not betray misery with impunity. Every form of possession is a cause of spiritual death.
Often I wake in the morning with an oppressive sentiment of guilt, as if I carried the weight of a thousand crimes…
It is a failing of elocution, my stammering, my jerky way of speaking, my art of mumbling, and above all the burning obsession with my accent, that has pushed me, in reaction, to take care of my style in French, and to give myself back something small worthy of a language that I massacre, in speech, every day…
Had I spoken like a native, then I would never have striven for good writing, and for all the coquetries and vain subtleties that stylistic research comprises.
The secret of a skill resides in a more or less clandestine defect.
For several days continual fever that the thermometer does not register. It is always around 37˚; but I am in the midst of boiling where my reason is resolved in fumes…
Some search for Fame; others for Truth. I dare to side with the latter. One unachievable task offers more seduction than an accessible goal. Such humiliation to aim for the approbation of people!
Conversation with D. — He is intelligent, he certainly acts intelligent, he wants to appear so. Nearly all brilliant spirits I have known were main to the supreme degree. For the rest, vanity is not a fault in the intellectual order.