Anathemas and Admirations (23 page)

We always date ourselves by our admirations. As soon as we cite anyone but Homer or Shakespeare, we risk seeming old-fashioned or dotty.

It is just possible to imagine God speaking French. Christ, never. His words do not function in a language so ill at ease in the naive or the sublime.

So long to have questioned ourselves about man! impossible to carry the taste of the morbid further.

Does fury come from God or from the Devil? From both; otherwise, how explain that our rage dreams of galaxies to pulverize and that it is inconsolable at having nothing but this wretched planet within reach?

We go to such lengths — why? To become again what we were before we were.

X, who has failed in everything, complained in my presence of not having a destiny.

— Oh yes, certainly you do. The sequence of your failures is so remarkable that it seems to reveal a providential plan.

Woman mattered as long as she simulated shame, reserve. What inadequacy she reveals by no longer playing the game! Already she is worth nothing, now that she resembles us. Thus vanishes one of the last lies that made existence tolerable.

To love one’s neighbor is inconceivable. Does one ask a virus to love another virus?

The only notable events of a life are its rifts. And it is they that are the last to fade from our memory.

When I learned he was quite impermeable to both Dostoyevsky and music, I refused — for all his great virtues — to meet him. I much prefer a slightly backward type, sensitive to one or the other.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live — moreover, the only one.

Since day after day I have lived in the company of Suicide, it would be unjust and ungrateful on my part to denigrate it. What could be healthier, what could be more natural? What is neither healthy nor natural is the frantic appetite to exist — a grave flaw, a law par excellence, my flaw.

4

Valéry Facing His Idols

I
T IS A MISFORTUNE for an author to be understood, as Valéry was in his lifetime, as he has been subsequently. Was he so simple, then, so
penetrable?
Certainly not. But he was imprudent enough to furnish too many details about himself and his work; he revealed himself, gave himself away, supplied any number of keys, and dissolved a good many of those misunderstandings indispensable to a writer’s secret prestige. Instead of leaving the labor of decipherment to others, he took it upon himself; he made a kind of vice out of the craving for self-disclosure. This singularly facilitated the commentators’ task: by initiating them from the start into his essential actions and preoccupations, he invited them to ruminate not so much upon his work as upon the remarks he himself had made about it. Henceforth the Valerian question would be whether, on this or that point concerning him, he had been the victim of an illusion or, on the contrary, of an
excessive
clairvoyance — in either case, of a judgment dislocated from reality. Not only was Valéry his own commentator, but indeed all his works are merely a more or less camouflaged autobiography, an adept introspection, a
diary
of his mind, a promotion of his experiences — any of his experiences — to the rank of intellectual event, an assault upon anything
unconsidered
that might be within him, a rebellion against his depths.