Anathemas and Admirations (19 page)

How we must have loathed each other in the pestilential darkness of the caves! Easy to understand why the painters who managed to keep body and soul together there had no desire to immortalize the image of their kind — why they preferred the figures of animals.

“Having renounced sanctity . . .”: to think I could have uttered such a thing! I must have an excuse, and I don’t despair of finding it.

Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other,
only better
.

How age simplifies everything! At the library I ask for four books. Two are set in type that is too small; I discard them without even considering their contents. The third, too . . . serious, seems unreadable to me. I carry off the fourth without conviction.

One can be proud of what one has done, but one should be much prouder of what one has not done. Such pride has yet to be invented.

After an evening in his company, you were exhausted, for the necessity of controlling yourself, of avoiding the slightest allusion likely to wound him — and everything wounded him — ultimately left you depleted, irritated with him and with yourself. You resented having to side with him out of scruples carried to the lowest degree of flattery; you despised yourself for not having exploded instead of letting yourself in for so wearying an exercise in . . . delicacy.

We never say of a dog or a rat that it is
mortal
. Why is man alone entitled to this privilege? After all, death is not man’s discovery, and it is a sign of fatuity to imagine oneself its unique beneficiary.

As memory weakens, the praise that has been lavished upon us fades, too, to the advantage of the censure. And this is just: the praise has rarely been deserved, whereas the censure sheds a certain light on what we did not know about ourselves.

If I had been born a Buddhist, I should have remained one; born a Christian, I ceased being one in early youth when, much more so than today, I would have abounded in the sense of Goethe’s blasphemy when he wrote — the very year of his death — to Zelter, “The Cross is the most hideous image on this earth.”

The essential often appears at the end of a long conversation. The great truths are spoken on the doorstep.

What is dated in Proust: those trifles swollen by a dizzying prolixity, the eddies of the Symbolist manner, the accumulation of effects, the poetic saturation. As if Saint-Simon had undergone the influence of the
Précieuses
. No one would read him today.

A letter worthy of the name is written in the wake of admiration or outrage — of exaggeration, in short. We realize why a sensible letter is a stillborn one.