Anathemas and Admirations (32 page)

Akhmatova, like Gogol, wanted to possess nothing. She gave away the presents given to her, and a few days later they would be found in other people’s houses. This characteristic recalls the behavior of nomads, compelled to the provisional by necessity and by choice. Joseph de Maistre cites the case of a Russian prince and his friends who would sleep anywhere in his palace and had, so to speak, no
fixed
bed, for they lived with the sentiment of being transitory there, of camping out until it was time to pull up stakes. . . . When Eastern Europe furnishes such models of detachment, why seek them out in India or elsewhere?

Letters one receives filled with nothing but internal debate, metaphysical interrogations, rapidly become tiresome. In everything there must be something
petty
if there is to be the impression of truth. If the angels were to write, they would be — except for the fallen ones — unreadable.
Purity
passes with difficulty because it is incompatible with breathing.

Out in the street, suddenly overcome by the “mystery” of Time, I told myself that Saint Augustine was quite right to deal with such a theme by addressing himself directly to God: with whom else to discuss it?

Everything that disturbs me I could have translated, had I been spared the shame of not being a musician.

A victim of crucial preoccupations, I had taken to my bed in the middle of the afternoon, an ideal position from which to ponder a nirvana
without remainder
, without the slightest trace of an ego, that obstacle to deliverance, to the state of non-thought. A sentiment of blessed extinction initially, then a blessed extinction without sentiment. I believed myself on the threshold of the final stage; it was only its parody, only the swerve into torpor, into the abyss of ... a nap.

According to Jewish tradition, the Torah — God’s work — preceded the world by two thousand years. Never has a people esteemed itself so highly. To attribute such priority to its sacred book, to believe it predates the
Fiat Lux!
Thus is created a destiny.

Having opened an anthology of religious texts, I came straight off upon this remark of the Buddha: “No object is worth being desired.” I closed the book at once, for after that, what else is there to read?

The older we grow, the more we lack character. Each time we manage to “have” such a thing, we are uncomfortable, we feel inauthentic — whence our uneasiness in the presence of those who
smell
of conviction.

The felicity of having frequented a Gascon, an authentic Gascon. The particular Gascon I am thinking of, I have never seen depressed. All his disasters — and they were considerable — he described to me as triumphs. The gap between him and Don Quixote was infinitesimal. Yet he tried, my Gascon, to see clearly from time to time, though his efforts came to nothing. He remained to the end a trifler in disappointment.

Had I listened to my impulses, I should be, today, unhinged or hanged.

I have noticed that following any internal shock, my reflections, after a brief flight, take a lamentable and even grotesque turn. This has been invariably the case in my crises, whether decisive or not. As soon as one makes any sort of leap outside of life, life takes its revenge and brings one down to its level.