Anathemas and Admirations (50 page)

If I were asked to summarize as briefly as possible my vision of things, to reduce it to its most succinct expression, I should replace words with an exclamation point, a definitive
!

Doubt creeps in everywhere, with, however, a signal exception: there is no
skeptical
music.

Demosthenes copied out Thucydides eight times. That is how you learn a language. One ought to have the courage to transcribe all the books one loves.

That someone should detest what we do, we tolerate, more or less. But if someone disdains a book we have recommended to him, that is much more serious, and it wounds us like an underhanded attack. For then it is our taste that is called into question, and even our discernment!

When I
observe
how I slide into sleep, I have the impression of sinking into a providential abyss, of falling into it for eternity, without ever being able to escape. Moreover no desire to escape even touches me. What I desire in such moments is to perceive them as clearly as possible, to lose nothing of them, and to enjoy them until the last, before unconsciousness, before beatitude.

The last important poet of Rome, Juvenal, and the last decisive writer of Greece, Lucian, both
labored
in irony. Two literatures that ended thus — as everything, literature or not, ought to end.

This return to the inorganic ought not to affect us in any fashion. Yet so lamentable, not to say so laughable a phenomenon makes cowards of us all. It is time to
rethink
death, to imagine a less mediocre downfall.

Astray here on earth, as I would doubtless be astray anywhere.

There cannot be
pure
sentiments between those who follow similar paths. One need merely recall the glances we cast at each other when we share the same sidewalk.

One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor,
effort
being the mortal enemy of meditation.

To shift from scorn to detachment seems easy enough. Yet this is not so much a transition as a feat, an accomplishment. Scorn is the first victory over the world; detachment the last, the supreme. The interval separating them is identified with the path leading from liberty to liberation.

I have never met one deranged mind that lacked curiosity about God. Are we to conclude from this that there exists a link between the search for the absolute and the disaggregation of the brain?