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 not me. That lasted about thirty seconds. When I succeeded in finding myself again, the terror did not immediately cease, but deteriorated insensibly. To remain sane is a privilege that could be revoked from us.
Extremes of abulia! To escape it, from time to time I read some book on Napoleon. The courage of others sometimes serves as a tonic for us.
I know at last what my nights are: I revisit there in thought every interval that separates me from Chaos.
For a long time I thought that the capacity of renunciation is the unique criterion of our progress in spiritual life.
Nevertheless! Since reexamining some of my acts of renunciation, I see that each one was accompanied by a very great, though secret, arrogant satisfaction, a movement absolutely opposed to all inner development.
And to think that I had nearly touched saintliness! But those years are distant, and the memory of them are painful to me.
From morning to evening, I only do vengeance. Against whom? Against what? I don’t know or I forget, since everyone falls under it… No one knows better than I what desperate rage is. Oh! The explosions of my downfall!
“and the last shall be the first”.
This promise in itself suffices to explain the fortunes of Christianity.
(In my terrible downfall, hearing this promise does not come without a certain confusion. It’s what happened to me on January 30, at the College of France, during a course by Puech on the apocryphal Gospel According to Thomas.)
What will the future be?
The revolt of people without history.
In Europe, it is clear; the only people who will triumph there are those who have not lived.
My incapacity to live is equalled only by my incapacity to earn a livelihood. Money does not stick to my skin. I have come to forty-seven years without ever having had any income.
I can think of nothing in terms of money.
To earn a living, one must be involved with others; well, I have need only for… God and for myself, for everything and for nothing.
I come to die…
To reach the inferior limit, the extremity of humiliation, to be engulfed in it, to fall into it systematically, through a kind of unconscious and morbid obstinacy! To become a milksop, a heel, to sink in the mud; and then under the weight and terror of shame, to burst forth and regroup, gathering up one’s own remains.
I cannot descend lower than my birth, I cannot overcome the limits of my downfall.
Night circulates in my veins.
Who will wake me, who will wake me?
By finding that nothing had any importance, I now have no subject, no excuse on which to exercise my mind. If I want to avoid catastrophe, at all costs I must reinvent some material, to create new objects, something at last not myself, that requires more than the “I”.
To write a “Prussian Apology” — or “For a rehabilitation of Prussia”.
Since Prussia has been suffocated, annihilated, I have lost sleep over it. I am perhaps, apart from Germany, the only one to cry over the ruin of Prussia. It was the only solid reality in Europe; Prussia destroyed, the Occident must fall to the power of the Russians.
The Prussian is less cruel than any other “civilized” person. — Ridiculous prejudice against the Prussian (in this affair France is responsible); a prejudice favorable to Austrians, Rhinelanders, Bavarians, infinitely more cruel; Naziism is a product of South Germany. (That is evidence, though no one admits it.)
The time has come to speak the truth.
In pushing the political destruction of Prussia, the Russians knew what they did; the Anglo-Saxons only followed a prejudice they had inherited from the French (who had some excuse) who since the Revolution made opinion in the world, that is to say prejudices. […] American politics; from another direction, England, for the first time in a thousand years, worked against its own interests and abandoned — true suicide — the idea of European equilibrium.
Nameless exaltation, intolerable incandescence, as if the sun happened to hide in my veins!
To be able to live only in emptiness or fullness, to the interior of an excess.
I could, if necessary, maintain true relationships with Being, with beings, never.
All impossibilities are only of one kind: those of loving, of coming out of one’s own sorrow.
Hope is doubtless a sin; but a sin against oneself. (Such a profound intuition in Christianity! To have ranked the lack of hope among the sins!)
Sickness has come to give flavor to my destitution, to relieve my poverty.
To cry? to whom? Such was the only and unique problem of my life.