Anathemas and Admirations (22 page)

Extreme fatigue goes quite as far as ecstasy, except that with fatigue you
descend
toward the extremities of knowledge.

Just as the advent of the Crucified One has cut history in two, in the same way this night has severed my life.

Everything seems debased and futile once the music stops. You understand that music can be hated, and one is tempted to identify its absolute status with fraudulence. This is because we must react at any cost against it
when we love it too much
. No one has realized this danger better than Tolstoy, for he knew that music could do with him as it liked. Hence he began execrating it out of fear of becoming its plaything.

Renunciation is the only kind of action that is not degrading.

Can we imagine a city dweller who does not have the soul of a murderer?

To love only the indefinite thought that never reaches words, and the instantaneous thought that lives by words alone: divagation and boutade.

A young German asks me for one franc. I begin a conversation with him and learn that he has traveled round the world, that he has been to India, whose beggars he likes to think he resembles. Yet one does not belong with impunity to a didactic nation. I watch him solicit: he looks as if he had taken courses in mendicancy.

Nature, in search of a formula likely to content everyone, let her choice fall on deaths which — as was to be expected — has satisfied no one.

Heraclitus has a Delphic side and a textbook side, a mixture of lightning-bolt perceptions and the primer: a man of inspiration and a schoolteacher. A pity he did not drop learnings did not always think
outside
learning!

I have so often stormed against any form of action that to manifest myself in any way at all seems an imposture, even a betrayal.

— Yet you go on breathing.

— Yes, I do everything that is done.
But
. . .

What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!

While he described his projects to me, I listened to him without being able to forget that he would not survive the week. What madness on his part to speak of the future, of
his
future! But once I had left, once I was outside, how to avoid thinking that after all, the difference was not so great between the mortal and the moribund? The absurdity of making plans is only a little more obvious in the second case.