For one skeptic to be born, a thousand believers must proliferate. the order
December 25, 1959
I received a greeting card from a Spanish poet, depicting a rat, symbol, he wrote me, of all that we can “hope” for in the year 1960.
Suffered from a cold six months a year! I should write a book with a Sorbonne-ish title: Phenomenology of Nasal Congestion.
When Māra, the tempter, tried by every kind of seduction and intimidation to distract the Buddha from his way, he told him, among others: By what right do you claim to reign over men and the universe? Is it that you have suffered through knowledge?
And, in effect, the expanse and the depth of a mind is measured in the sufferings that it has endured to acquire learning. No one knows without having survived ordeals. A subtle mind can be perfectly superficial. It is necessary to pay for the least step toward learning. (Use this to distinguish the moralists: Pascal on the one side, Montaigne on the other.)
How I envy believers the opportunity that they have to be able to slip towards heresy! If it is stupid, an interdicted theory is forever spared ridicule. Misfortune to the heresiarchs whom the Church has not deigned to condemn!
After the Anthology of moralists, write: The Fall into Time.
I am carried to exaggeration, by boredom, satiated, by the for strong sensations, by the will as well to throw off my stagnation.