Anathemas and Admirations (48 page)

Having begun my day with Meister Eckhart, I then turned to Epicurus. And the day is not yet over; with whom shall I end it?

Once I emerge from the “I,” I put myself to sleep.

Who does not believe in Fate proves he has not lived.

If I should ever happen to die one of these days . . .

A middle-aged woman, passing me on the street, took it into her head to announce, without looking at me, “Today I see nothing but walking corpses wherever I look.” Then, still without looking at me, she added, “I’m crazy, aren’t I, Monsieur?”

“Not all that crazy,” I replied, with a glance of complicity.

To see in every baby a future Richard III . . .

At every age of our life, we discover that life is a mistake. Only at fifteen is this a revelation that combines a shudder of fear and a touch of enchantment. With time this revelation, degenerating, turns into to a truism, and thus we come to regret the period when it was a source of the unforeseen.

In the spring of 1937, as I was walking on the grounds of the psychiatric hospital of Sibiu, in Transylvania, a “pensioner” approached me. We exchanged a few words, and then I said to him, “It’s pleasant here.”

“I know — it’s worth the trouble of being crazy,” he replied.

“But still, you are in a sort of prison.”

“If you like, but we live here quite without anxiety. Besides, there’s a war coming; you know that as well as I do. And this is a safe place. We won’t be called up, and they never bomb insane asylums. If I were you, I’d get myself committed right away.” Troubled, amazed, I left him and tried to find out something more about my interlocutor. I was assured that he was genuinely mad. Mad or not, no one has ever given me more reasonable advice.

It is flawed humanity that constitutes the substance of literature. The writer congratulates himself upon Adam’s perversity and prospers only to the degree that each of us assumes and renews it.

As for biological patrimony, the merest innovation is, it would seem, a disaster. Life is conservative and flourishes only through repetition, through cliché, through formula. Just the contrary of art.

Ghenghis Khan took along the greatest Taoist sage of his time on all of his expeditions. Extreme cruelty is rarely vulgar; it always has something strange and refined about it that inspires fear and respect. William the Conqueror, as pitiless to his allies as he was to his enemies, liked only wild beasts and dark forests where he would always walk alone.

I was about to go out when, in order to tie my scarf, I glanced at myself in the mirror. Suddenly an unspeakable terror:
who is that?
Impossible to recognize myself. Though I had no trouble identifying my overcoat, my necktie, my hat, I couldn’t make out who I was, for I was not
myself
—
that
was not me. This lasted a certain number of seconds: twenty, thirty, forty? When I managed to come to my senses, the terror persisted. I had to wait for it to consent to disappear.