Anathemas and Admirations (42 page)

People insist on the
diseases
of the will; they forget that the will as such is suspect, and that it is not
normal
to will.

After having palavered for hours, I am invaded by the void. By the void and by shame. Is it not indecent to display one’s secrets, to proffer one’s very being, to tell and to tell
oneself
, whereas the fullest moments of one’s life have been known in silence, in the
perception
of silence?

As an adolescent, Turgenev tacked to his bedroom wall a portrait of Fouquier-Tinville. Youths always and everywhere, has idealized executioners, provided they perform their task in the name of the vague and the bombastic.

Life and death have little enough content, the one as well as the other. Unfortunately we always know this too late, when it can no longer help us either to live or to die.

You are calm, you forget your enemy, who meanwhile watches and waits. Yet there is every reason to be ready when he attacks. You will triumph, for he will be weakened by that enormous consumption of energy, his hatred.

Of all things one feels, nothing gives the impression of being at the very heart of truth so much as fits of
unaccountable
despair; compared to these, everything seems frivolous, debased, lacking in substance and interest.

Weariness independent of the organs’ wear and tear, timeless weariness, for which no palliative exists, and over which no rest, even the last, can triumph. . . .

Everything is salutary, save to question ourselves moment by moment as to the meaning of our actions: everything is preferable to the only question that matters.

Having once been concerned with Joseph de Maistre, instead of explaining the figure by accumulating details, I should have recalled that he managed to sleep only three hours a night, at the most. This suffices to account for the extravagances of a thinker, or of anyone at all Yet I had neglected to observe the phenomenon — an all the more unforgivable omission in that human beings are divided into
sleepers
and
makers
, two specimens of beings, forever heterogeneous, with nothing but their physical aspect in common.

We should really breathe better if one fine day we were told that the quasi-totality of our kind had evaporated as if by magic.

You must have powerful religious dispositions in order to utter with conviction the word
being;
you must
believe
simply to say about an object or about someone that it or he
is
.

Every season is an ordeal; nature changes and renews herself only in order to
scourge
us.