Anathemas and Admirations (45 page)

An acute sense of absurdity makes the merest action unlikely, indeed impossible. Lucky those who lack such a thing! Providence has looked out for them.

At an exhibit of Oriental art, a many-headed Brahma, irritated, sullen, besotted to the last degree. It is in this attitude that I enjoy seeing representations of the god of gods.

Out of patience with them all. But I like to laugh. And I cannot laugh alone.

Never having known what I was after in this world, I am still waiting for someone to tell me what he himself pursues.

Asked why the monks who followed him were so . . . radiant, Buddha answered that it was because they thought neither of the past nor of the future. We turn gloomy, in fact, whenever we contemplate either one, and worse than gloomy whenever we contemplate both.

Counterirritant to desolation: close your eyes for a long while in order to forget light and all that it reveals.

When a writer passes himself off as a philosopher, you can be sure he does so in order to camouflage any number of deficiencies. Ideas: a screen that hides nothing.

In admiration as in envy, the eyes suddenly light up. How to distinguish one from the other in those we are uncertain about?

He calls me in the middle of the night to tell me he can’t sleep. I give him a good lecture on this variety of disaster which is, in reality, disaster itself. At the end I am so pleased with my performance that I go back to bed feeling like a hero, proud to confront the hours separating me from daylight.

The publication of a book involves the same kinds of problems as a marriage or a funeral

Never write about anyone. I am so convinced of this that each time I am inclined to do so, my first thought is to attach
even if I admire him
, the person of whom I am to speak.

“And God saw that the light was good”: such is the opinion of mortals, with the exception of the sleepless, for whom it is an aggression, a new inferno more pitiless than the night’s.

There comes a moment when negation itself loses its luster and, much deteriorated, goes down the drain with appearances.