June 25, 1958
When young, I had thought so much about death that I have nothing more to say about it now that I am old: hackneyed fright.
June 25, 1958 4:00 pm
Sensation of an extraordinary happiness. Where could it have come from? How mysterious and insane it all is!
There is nothing more enigmatic than joy.
June 24
I feel I am going to be reconciled with poetry. It could not be otherwise: I can only think of myself.
The abdication of Charles V is the moment in history dearest to my heart. I have literally lived in Yuste in the company of the gouty emperor.
I have aspired for a long time to give up the “conversation of creatures”, but nevertheless succeed only rarely, fitfully, and regretfully.
I fortify myself with the contempt that people are pleased to dispense to me, and I ask for only one mercy: to be nothing in their eyes.
The Book according to my soul: an Imitation without Jesus.
Success does not inevitably call for success; but failure always calls for failure. Destiny is a word that only has meaning in misfortune.
Powers of Heaven! how I long for the time that one could invoke you, would not exclaim into the void, indeed that the void did not even exist.
Saturday, June 21, 1958
My father has been dead for exactly six months.
Boredom captures me again, the same boredom that I knew on certain Saturdays in my childhood, and the one that then devastated my adolescence. An emptiness that drains space, against which only alcohol could defend me. But alcohol is forbidden to me, all remedies are forbidden to me. And to think that I am thereby abstinent! But in what do I persevere? Without doubt, in Being.
My pusillanimity prevents me from being myself. I would have had the courage neither to live nor to destroy myself. Always halfway between quasi-existence and nothingness.
“A single day of solitude makes me taste more pleasures than all my triumphs have ever given me.” (Charles V)
At twenty, I had an insatiable desire for glory; — I no longer have it now. And without it, how could I act? It remains for me nothing more than the consolation of an intimate and ineffective thought.
For months, I lived all my moments of anguish in the company of Emily Dickinson.
June 9, 1958
The universe explodes in my brain. Intolerable fever! I am a finger’s breadth away from Chaos. The elements are unleashed. I lose ground. Who will reconcile me with what this may be? A fixed point, I seek a fixed point, and find only incertitude and mud, and an uncontrollable delirium. Being is a crossed-out text, and I no longer have the strength to rewrite it.
Everything is appearance — but appearance of what? Of Nothing.
I have a bit of skepticism in me that nothing can grasp, and that resists the assault of all my beliefs, of all my metaphysical impulses.
This fever in a pure and sterile state, and this frozen cry!
Having an obsessive sentiment of one’s nothingness is not being humble, not by a long shot. A little humility, I need a little humility more than anyone. But the sensation of my nothingness inflates my pride.
The sensation of an insect fastened to an invisible cross, a drama both cosmic and infinitesimal, a heaviness from a ferocious and elusive hand on me.
I should fashion myself a smile, to arm myself with it, to put myself under its protection, to interpose it between myself and the world, to disguise my wounds, in short to become an apprentice of the mask.
A life of failure, of harlotry, of useless sorrows and impotence, of objectless and directionless nostalgia; a nothingness which crawls on the roads, and which wallows in its pains and its sniggers.
Ah! if I could convert myself to my essence! but what if it were corrupted? Decidedly, I invalidate myself and invalidate myself completely. There is no longer any trace of myself in me.
When others have ceased to exist for us, we cease to exist for ourselves in our turn.
June 8, 1958
Depressing Sunday. I come to raise the eyelid of God.
The same Sunday.
For thirty years I felt in my legs everyday a billion ants which persist ceaselessly. A billion pricks daily, sometimes scarcely perceptible, sometimes painful. A mixture of discomfort and disaster.
To create a work, a minimum of faith is needed — in oneself or in what one does. But when one doubts oneself and one’s enterprises, so much that this doubt is raised to the level of belief! Negative, sterile faith that leads to nothing, except endless complications or strangled cries.
Paris: insects compressed in a box. To be a famous insect. Every glory is ludicrous; everyone who aspires to it should truly have a taste for downfall.
June 7, 1958
Found in a corner a bit of cheese, thrown there long ago. An army of black insects all around. One might imagine these same insects consuming the last remains of a brain. Thinking of one’s own corpse, of the horrible metamorphoses to which it will be submitted, is somewhat calming: it inures you against troubles and agonies; one fear destroys a thousand others.
The persistence of macabre visions in me forever brings me closer to the Fathers of the desert. A hermit right in Paris.
I do not believe that the virtues could be connected, or that possessing one of them is possessing all of them. In reality, they serve to neutralize each other; they are jealous. Thus comes our mediocrity and our stagnation.
Lord, why don’t I have the vocation of prayer? There is no one in the world closer to you, nor farther. One strand of certitude, just a bit of consolation, that’s all I ask. But you cannot respond, you cannot.
June 4, 1958
Everyone believes that what he does is important, except for me; plus I can do nothing anyway…
Read some poems of Alexander Blok. — Ah! these Russians — how close they are to me! — My form of boredom is completely Slavonic. God knows from what steppe my ancestors came. I have in me the hereditary memory of limitlessness, like a poison.
Further, I am like the Sarmatians, a man you cannot get to the bottom of, a dubious individual, suspect and uncertain from a duplicity all the more serious since it is disinterested. Thousands of slaves cry out their opinions and their sad contradictions in me.
After a sleepless night, I went out into the street. Everyone I passed seemed like automatons; not one seemed to have the appearance of the living; each seemed moved by a secret spring; geometrical movements; nothing spontaneous; mechanical smiles; phantom gesticulations; — all were rigid…
It was the first time after insomnia that I had the impression of a rigid world, destitute of life. — These periods of wakefulness resorb my blood, even consume it; a phantom myself, how I can I see signs of reality in others?
Nearer to Greek tragedy than to the Bible. I have always understood and felt Destiny better than God.
Nothing Russian is strange to me.
My boredom is explosive. It’s the advantage I have over great boredoms, which are generally passive and soft.
Noise — the punishment, or rather the materialization of original sin.
February 24, 1958
For several days the idea of suicide keeps coming back to me. I think of it often, it is true; but thinking of it is one thing, submitting to its domination is another. Terrible bout of black obsessions! By my own means, it is impossible to remain thus for long. I have exhausted my capacity to console myself.
Corsica, Andalusia, Provence, — this planet will thus not have been useless.
My lack of talent borders on genius…
To conceive more projects than a swindler or an explorer does, and nevertheless to be struck by abulia, reaches down — without metaphor — to the root of the will.
Sick brain, sick stomach, — and all that comes with it. The essential is compromised.
Vision of collapse. That’s what I saw from morning to evening. I have all of the infirmities of a prophet, but none of the gifts.
And nevertheless I know — with an impetuous and irresistible knowledge — that I possess if not visions, in any case glimmers of the future. And such a future, great gods!
I feel contemporaneous with all future terrors.
My great predilection for shipwrecks.
I have all the qualities of an epileptic, except epilepsy.
Bout of superhuman, inhuman violence! I sometimes have the impression that all my flesh, everything material that I am will be resolved one sudden day into a cry whose significance will escape everyone, except God…
False prophet: even my deceptions are shipwrecked.
The only thing that suits me is the end of the world… Need for terror or infinite spinelessness?
I have renounced, among other things, poetry…
Whatever my recriminations, my violence, my bitterness may be, they all come from a discontentment with myself that no one here below could equal. Horror of self, horror of the world.
What cannot be rendered in terms of religion does not deserve to be experienced.
“The idea once came to me that if one wanted to destroy, to crush, to punish a man in such an implacable manner that the worst crook would tremble from it beforehand in fear, it was enough to give to his work a character of perfect absurdity, of absolute uselessness.” (Memoirs from the House of the Dead)
Nearly everything I do to earn my keep has this mark of uselessness, for everything that absolutely disinterests me appears to me as gratuitousness that borders on torture.
Sometimes I feel infinite forces in the depths of me. Alas! I don’t know how to use them; I believe in nothing, and to act, one must believe, believe, believe… I waste every day, since I let the world that I inhabit die. With an arrogance of folly, to sink yet in indignity, in a sterile sorrow, in impotence and silence.
Russia is a “vacant nation”, said Dostoyevsky. It was, but is no longer, alas!
“The sorrow in accordance with God produces salutary repentance that one never regrets, whereas the sorrow of the world produces death.” (Saint Paul)
“Who seek it [death] more ardently than treasure…” (Job)
There is a certain voluptuousness in resisting the appeal of suicide.
Russia! I have a deep attraction for this country that has destroyed mine.
Mercy, — just this word contains worlds. How far religion goes! I misjudge myself, voluntarily repudiate Christ, and such is the perversion of my nature, that I cannot repent of it.
A minimum of interest in things is needed in order to write; one must continue to believe that they can be captured, or at least touched by words, — I no longer have either this interest or this belief…
His rudimentary smile.
Torn between cynicism and elegy.
If I could write a psalm every day, how my fate would be relieved by it. What have I to write! if at least I could read one of them and nothing more! — I am short of my salvation or rather: I conceive the means to save myself, but I do not have these means, I cannot have them…
The two greatest sages of Antiquity end up: Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, a slave and an emperor.
I thought today, February 20, 1958, of the state of putrefaction of my dead friends and my father, and I dreamed of my own putrefaction.
Work alone could save me, but work I cannot. My will was achieved upon my birth. Infinite, chimerical projects, out of proportion to my capacities.
Something in me cripples me, has always crippled me. A wicked principle consubstantial with my blood and my spirit.
There is not a single subject that deserves more than a few moment’s attention toward it. To react against this certitude, I have attempted to transform all of my ideas into manias; it was the one way to make them persist — before my eyes and my … mind.
I return to Chaos by the simple play of my physiology. Tearing of entrails! sketch of a particularly special theology.
I am not from here; condition of exile in oneself; not a single part of me is at home — absolute alienation from whatever that may be.
The lost paradise — my obsession each instant.
What would I be, what would I do without clouds? I pass the clearest moments of my time watching them pass.
February 19, 1958 Intolerable happiness! Thousands of planets expand in the limitlessness of consciousness! Terrifying happiness!
Poor sorts of sensations — and sensations of a god — I have not known any other kinds. Minuscule and infinite, my dimensions, my modes of existence.
If the sensation of the vanity of all things could by itself confer saintliness, what I saint I would be! I would occupy the first place in the hierarchy of saints!
The base of despair is doubt of oneself.
I am finished, I am on the verge of prayer.
