Anathemas and Admirations (41 page)

To have borne the Himalayas all night long — and to call that
sleep
.

What sacrifice would I not make in order to be free of this wretched self, which at this very moment occupies, within the All, a place no god has dared aspire to!

It takes an enormous humility to die. The strange thing is that everyone turns out to have it!

These waves and their sempiternal prattle are eclipsed, in futility, by the yet more inept trepidation of the city. If you close your eyes and let yourself sink beneath this double rumbling, you imagine yourself present at the sketches for the Creation, and you rapidly lose your way in cosmogonie lucubrations. Wonder of wonders: no interval between the first agitation and this unnameable point we have reached.

Every form of
progress
is a perversion, in the sense that
being
is a perversion of nonbeing.

You may have endured insomnias of which a martyr would be jealous, but if they have not marked your features, no one will believe you. Without witnesses, you will continue to seem some kind of joker, and acting the part better than anyone, you yourself will be the first accomplice of the incredulous.

Proof that a generous action goes against nature: it provokes — sometimes immediately, sometimes months or years later — an uneasiness one dares not admit to anyone, even to oneself.

At that funeral service, everything was
shadow
and
dream
and dust returning to dust. Then, without transition the deceased was promised eternal joy and all that follows from it. So much inconsistency vexed me, and I forsook both the Greek Orthodox pope and the late-lamented. As I left, I could not help thinking that I was in no position to protest against those who so ostensibly contradict themselves.

What a relief to throw into the garbage a manuscript, witness of a fallen fever, of a disconcerting frenzy!

This morning
I thought
, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.

Everything that inconveniences us allows us to define ourselves. Without indispositions, no identity — the luck and misfortune of a
conscious
organism.

If to describe a misery were as easy as to live through it!

Daily lesson in reserve: to realize, if only for the wink of an eye, that one day people will speak of our
remains
.