There are some days… I got ready to go out, when, to arrange my scarf, I looked at myself in the mirror. Suddenly, an unspeakable terror: who is this man? Impossible to recognize me. In vain I identified my overcoat, my scarf, my hat, I nonetheless did not know who I was, for I was …
Category Archives: Notebooks
1957-12-25
Saw today Wednesday, 25 December 1957, the face of my father dead in his coffin. I have sought my salvation in Utopia and have only found some consolation in the Apocalypse. College of France. Course by Puech on the Gospel According to Matthew (Egyptian apocrypha). Terrible feeling: the entire audience appeared to me, all at …
1957-12-22
22 XII 1957 Toss out the superhuman, endure the collapse of all certitudes painfully acquired these past years… On the 18th of the month, the death of my father. I do not know, but I think I will cry some other time. I am so absent from myself that I do not even have the …
1957-08-02
2 August 1957 Suicide of E.: an immense abyss opens itself in my past. A thousand exquisite and agonizing memories come out.She so loved ruin! And yet she killed herself to escape it. If I will have seen through a tenth of my projects, then I will be by far the most prolific writer ever. …
1957-06-26
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 …