Anathemas and Admirations (31 page)

Those nights when you convince yourself that everyone has evacuated this universe, even the dead, and that you are the last living being here, the last ghost.

In order to reach compassion, you must carry self-concern to the saturation point, to nausea, such paroxysms of disgust being a symptom of healthy a necessary condition for looking beyond one’s own trials and tribulations.

The true? Nowhere; everywhere effigies, from which nothing is to be expected. So why add to an initial disappointment all those that follow and that confirm it with diabolic regularity, day after day?

“The Holy Ghost,” Luther instructs us, “is not a skeptic,” Not everyone can be — and that is really too bad.

Discouragement, ever at the service of knowledge, hides the other side, the inner shadow, of persons and things — hence the sensation of infallibility it gives.

The pure passing of time, naked time, reduced to an essence of flux, without the discontinuity of the moments, is realized in our sleepless nights. Everything vanishes. Silence invades — everywhere. We listen; we hear nothing. The senses no longer turn toward the world outside. What outside? Engulfment survived by that pure passage through us that
is
ourselves, and that will come to an end only with sleep or daylight. . . .

Seriousness is not involved in the definition of existence; tragedy is, since it implies a notion of risk, of gratuitous disaster, whereas what is serious postulates a goal. Now, the great originality of existence is to have nothing to do with such a thing.

When you love someone, you hope — the more closely to be attached — that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.

No longer to be tempted save by what lies beyond . . . extremes.

If I were to obey my first impulse, I should spend my days writing letters of insult and adieu.

There is a certain shamelessness in dying. Indeed, there is something indecent about death. This aspect, understandably, is the last that comes to mind.

I have wasted hour after hour ruminating upon what seemed to me eminently worthy of being explored — upon the vanity of all things, upon what does not deserve a second’s reflection, since one does not see what there is still to be said for or against what is obvious.

If I prefer women to men, it is because they have the advantage of being more off balance, hence more complex, more perspicacious, and more cynical — not to mention that mysterious superiority conferred by an age-old slavery.