Anathemas and Admirations (33 page)

Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it.

I had gone far in search of the sun, and the sun, found at last, was hostile to me. And if I were to fling myself off a cliff? While I was making such rather grim speculations, considering these pines, these rocks, these waves, I suddenly felt how bound I was to this lovely, accursed universe.

Quite unjustly, we grant depression only a minor status, well below that of anguish. Actually it is the more virulent affliction, but refractory to the manifestations it affects. More modest and yet more devastating, it can appear at any moment, whereas anguish, being remote, reserves itself for great occasions.

He comes as a tourist, and I always encounter him by chance. This time, being especially expansive, he confides to me that he is wonderfully healthy, that he is conscious of a sense of well-being at all times. I reply that his health seems suspect to me, that it is not normal to feel in continual possession of health, that true health is never
felt
. Watch out for your well-being, were my last words when I left him. Unnecessary to add that I have not encountered him since.

At the slightest vexation and, a fortiori, at the slightest affliction, hurry to the nearest cemetery, sudden distributor of a peace to be sought elsewhere in vain. A miracle cure, for once.

Regret, that backward transmigration, by resuscitating our life at will, gives us the illusion of having lived several times.

My weakness for Talleyrand . . . when one has practiced cynicism exclusively in words, one is filled with admiration for someone who has so magisterially translated it into action.

If a government decreed in midsummer that vacations were to be indefinitely extended and that, on pain of death, no one was to leave the paradise in which he was sojourning, mass suicides would follow, and unprecedented carnage.

Happiness and misery make me equally wretched. Then why does it sometimes happen that I prefer the former?

The depth of a passion is measured by the low feelings it involves — feelings that guarantee its intensity and its continuance.

Grim Death, a “poor portraitist,” according to Goethe, gives faces something false, something outside of truth; it is assuredly not Goethe who, like Novalis, would identify death with the principle that “romanticizes” life. It must be said in his defense that having lived fifty years longer than the author of
Hymnen an die Nacht
, Goethe possessed all the time required to lose his illusions about death.

In the train, a middle-aged woman of a certain distinction; beside her, an idiot of thirty, her son, who occasionally took her arm and kissed it, then stared at her blissfully. She was radiant, and smiled back. What a
petrified
curiosity might be, I did not know. I know now, because I experienced it in the presence of this spectacle. A new variety of consternation was revealed to me.