26 June 1957
Read a book on the fall of Constantinople. I have fallen with the city.
I want to cry in the middle of the streets. I have the demon of tears.
My skepticism is inseparable from vertigo, I have never understood how one could doubt by method.
Emily Dickinson: “I felt a funeral in my brain”, I could add like Mlle de Lespinasse “every instant of my life”.
Perpetual funerals of the mind.
Can one ever understand the drama of a man who, in each moment of his life, could not forget paradise?
I have one foot in paradise; as others have one in the tomb.
Help me, Lord, to exhaust the execration and pity of myself, and no more to feel the inexhaustible horror of it.
Everything in me turns to prayer and blasphemy, all of that turns to appeal and refusal.
Words from a beggar: “When you pray beside a flower, it grows faster.
To be an unemployed tyrant.
Perpetual poetry without words: silence that rumbles beneath myself. Why have I not the gift of the Word? To be sterile with such sensations!
I have cultivated what is felt much to the detriment of what is expressed; I have lived on speech; — thus have I sacrificed what is said —
So many years, an entire life — and no verse!
All of the poems that I could have written, that I have choked up in me through lack of talent or love of prose, will come suddenly to reclaim their right to exist, crying their indignation to me and drowning me.
My ideal for writing: to stifle forever the poet that one harbors in oneself; to liquidate the last vestiges of lyricism; — to go against the current of what one is, to betray one’s inspirations; to trample upon one’s impulses until one grimaces.
All stink of poetry poisons prose and make it unbreathable.
I have a negative courage, a courage direct against myself. I have oriented my life beyond the sense of what it prescribes for me. I have invalidated my future.
I have an immense lead on death.
I am a philosopher-howler. My ideas, if ideas they are, bark; they explain nothing, they explode.
All my life I have vowed a cult to the great tyrants entangled in blood and remorse.
I have been mistaken in Letters from the impossibility of killing or being killed. This incapacity, this cowardice alone has made me a scribe all my life.
If God could imagine what burdens the smallest acts represent for me, he would succumb to mercy or cede me his place. For my impossibilities have something infinitely vile and divine about them mixed together. One could not be made for the earth less than I am. I belong to another world, I am practically from an under-world. A spit-ball of the devil, that’s what I am made from. And yet, and yet!
Torn between aggression and fright.
The heart’s Mongolia.
He was a man corrupted by suffering.