December 20
This afternoon, wanting to write on fame, and not finding anything to say, I went to bed. Often my grand enterprises have led me to bed, a lamentable end to my ambitions.
Mind quick and yet irresolute.
My pathological taste for Tacitus, the need I have to feed on horrors. Then, the eloquence and the poetry of indignation.
The Annals, Macbeth, the books, no, the images of my everyday routine.
Nothing disturbs so much as the continuity of the reflection of feeling the physical presence of the brain. It is perhaps the reason why madmen think only in flashes.
It is the temptation for fame that has ruined paradise. Each time we want to go out anonymously, that symbol of pleasure, we give way to the suggestions of the serpent.
I esteem nothing better than a skeletal prose crossed by a shiver.
Man inevitably goes toward catastrophe. To the extent I will be persuaded of it, I will be interested in him, with avidity, with passion.
Poetry strictly said seems to me more and more inconceivable: I can no longer support what is implicit, indirect, what is precisely not said, I hear poetry without the means and the subterfuges that it usually has.
Originality is incompatible with “good taste”, the perogative and malediction of ancient civilizations.
There is no genius without a strong dose of bad taste.
This world has no more consistency than an episode of a smile.
X — I admire him because he does not know the point at which he is ridiculous.
To perish! this word that I love so much, and that evokes in me, quite curiously, nothing irreparable.
To have taste is to sacrifice to the conventional and to love mediocrity delicately.
To oppose great taste, the very highest taste, as the magnificent Hugo calls it.
Among minds I love only affability or vehemence.
In the order of affability: Joubert, Valéry.
” ” of vehemence: Tertullian, Nietzsche.