Anathemas and Admirations (38 page)

Much more than time, it is sleep that is the antidote to grief. Insomnia, on the other hand, which enlarges the slightest vexation and converts it into a blow of fate, stands vigil over our wounds and keeps them from flagging.

Instead of paying attention to the faces of people passing by, I watched their feet, and all these busy types were reduced to hurrying steps — toward what? And it was clear to me that our mission was to graze the dust in search of a mystery stripped of anything serious.

The first thing I was told by a friend who had dropped out of sight for many years: though he had accumulated a stock of poisons over a long period, he had not managed to kill himself because he could not decide which one to take.

We do not undermine our reasons for living without at the same time undermining those for
writing
.

Nonreality is an obvious matter I forget and rediscover every day. So intimately does this farce become part of my existence that I cannot dissociate them. Why this buffoonery of starting all over again? Yet it is no such thing, for by this means I belong among the livings or appear to do so.

Every individual, as such, even before actually falling, has already fallen, and to the antipodes of his original model

How to explain that the fact of not having been, that the colossal absence preceding birth, seems to disturb no one, and that even the person who is troubled by it is not troubled to any excessive extent?

According to a Chinese sage, a single hour of happiness is all that a centenarian could acknowledge after carefully reflecting upon the vicissitudes of his existence. . . . Since everyone exaggerates, why should the sages constitute an exception?

I should like to forget
everything
and waken to a light
before time
.

Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.

To have passed one’s youth at a demiurgic temperature. . . .

How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject.

To conceive the act of thought as a poison bath, the pastime of an elegaic viper.