March 12, 1960 Spent the afternoon in a state of acute nostalgia, for everything, for my country, for my youth, for all that I have wasted, for all the pointless years, for all the days I have not wept… “Life” does not suit me. I was made for a savage existence, for absolute solitude, out of time, in the middle of a twilight paradise. I have pushed the purpose of sorrow to the point of vice.
The approach of spring dissolves my brain. It is the season I dread the most. Sensation of frozen melody; — soul mute, prostrate, where a thousand pleas are extinguished.
There is no one whom I think of more often than Baudelaire, whom I have not read for a number of years.
I am only interested in spirits filled with the dimensions of the funeral.
I should write a Treatise on Tears. I have always felt an immense need to cry (in which regard, I feel so close to characters in Chekhov). To miss everything in looking fixedly at the sky for hours…, that’s how I spend my time, while others wait for some work from me and exhort me to activity from all sides.
“Joy is a passion by which the soul passes to a greater perfection. Sorry is a passion by which the soul passes to a lesser perfection” (Spinoza)
Is that true?
I have no aptitude for philosophy: I am only interested in attitudes, and in the pathetic side of ideas.
One error stated energetically is worth more than a truth translated in colorless terms.
The splendor of heresies, the dreariness of orthodoxies.
The only profound sentiments are those one hides. Hence the strength of vile sentiments.
I can only live where I am — and where one calls me a stranger. A country — my country? — seems to me as distant and inaccessible as the old Paradise.
“Do not write about snow” — one of the proscriptions of Pythagoras. What is the meaning in this? The lack of duration?
I go from infirmity to infirmity. My body is my torturer. I struggle to understand how I have accumulated so many years without succumbing under their weight.
Nearly all of my friends are flayed, from a sickly susceptibility. I wrote on Rancor thinking of them. Have I overgeneralized in making that a common dimension for all men? I do not think so.
There is only one nostalgia: for Paradise. And perhaps for Spain.
I can read nothing on the “blessed isles” of the Ancients or on the “golden isles” of the Chinese in the Taoist epoch without feeling a kind of physical weakness. How little affinity I feel with this world, since the least allusion to Paradise and even the lowest forms or expressions that suggest to me its image spark a tempest of regrets in me!
All my “writings” lack ease. That’s the misfortune of those who write little, who cannot write as they “breathe”. An author by accident, since I only take up the pen to free myself from temporary oppression.
Zen: witticisms that reclaim the obsession and the quest for salvation. Acrobatics with the absolute as background.
Sorrow, at its height, shuts out thought, and becomes a kind of empty delirium.
“When he dreams, man never doubts”, says a Chinese text.
In writing an essay on the essence of man (!), I realized that I would do just as well to draft it in a confessional tone. It is an autobiographical subject par excellence.
I drag myself along day after day on a little bit of space, on the fringes of the universe, in the midst of an infinity of silent words.
Ama nesciri (Imitation of Jesus Christ); love to be unknown. One is happy only when one is wise enough to conform to this precept.
This universe so brilliantly wasted! That’s what I often tell myself, to console myself, in my moments of confidence and optimism.
I have suffered too much to feel great passions truly. My ills have taken the place of them.
Apart from sleep at night, and instants of stupor during the day, my inconveniences have reduced me to a continual reflexion on my condition and have forced a kind of automatism of conscience, with everything hideous and horrible that that can signify. In sum, I have lived an anti-life.
I am an obsessed one, without a single doubt, and yet I do not like those who are insistent.
To imagine miracles, to possess the ability to produce them, to be a thaumaturge…
To write, such a degeneration!
If I hate Occidentals, it is because they love that they are hated. Such unbelievable thirst for destruction! Paradise in the midst of cadavers.
Demonic fury, such is the nuance of my religiosity.
Never to work in the inessential; to behave as if one had to be accountable to an intelligent god, to push the issue of intellectual probity to the point of mania for scruples.
Write nothing about which you would have to blush in your moments of supreme solitude. Death rather than tricks or lies.
Be cynical with regard to everything, except for the ideal image of your duties toward the spirit.
Such secret conflicts, such tensions when one adopts a noble pose! The courage to accept one’s baseness is rare, even impossible.
To believe exclusively in the absolute, and to recognize, to detect in oneself all the temptations and miseries of a frivolous spirit.
X — why is he mad? Because he never conceals, never can conceal his first move. With him all is in a raw state, in him everything evokes the shamelessness of true nature.
R. in Arts tries to understand me by my writings. I respond to him that I am the result of my infirmities, and that I had been the same way when I had not even written a single book. My vision of things precedes my intellectual formation. What I really know I have always know, even had I stayed in my homeland.
Headaches, sensation of idiocy, sinusitis, ears blocked, etc. — every year the same story. There is where you should search for an explanation of my Odyssey of Rancor.
I have the appearance of health on a foundation of illness. As one perceives only the exterior of things, I am thought to be insincere or someone who conforms to trends.
Old people are right to criticize everything, to regret the loss of former morals, the type of life of their era. The present and the future are always worth less than the past, which is not worth much, though…
One knows neither why nor toward what one progresses. This double ignorance is the whole story.
“Problems” are the major obstacle to the improvement, the metaphysical advancement of mankind. From whence come the necessity for celibacy, for asceticism, etc., if one can take hold of the absolute?
The power of a man capable of renouncing is infinite. All vanquished desire becomes powerful, and one grows to the extent that one frustrates one’s natural appetites. Whatever is not a victory over oneself is a defeat.
It is not in disquietude, but in dissatisfaction that I have always lived; one essential dissatisfaction, such that nothing could and never can be right.
Against unsystematic thought. I would love to live in a society of fakirs, people who act without moving, and who have all the more succeeded in this world from which they have distanced themselves, which they do not join.
To have an immense will at one’s disposal, without directing it toward action, to have an excess of energy, apparently unused…
In all mortifications we store up explosives.
Unsatisfied desire by voluntary denial brings us near either to saint or to demon.
I must start a portrait anthology from Saint-Simon to Tocqueville.
That will be my farewell to man.
One can only become invulnerable through asceticism, that is to say in refusing everything. It is only then that the world can no longer do anything to us.
Ideas come while walking, said Nietzsche. Walking dispels thought, professed Çankara.
I have tried both theories.
Man always and necessarily makes poor use of liberty. Thus it happens that all the regimes that are based on it and claim to follow it are doomed to ruin.
Man is a vague animal.
“A tree knows no misery.” (Pascal)
My nostalgia for the vegetal…