Anathemas and Admirations (53 page)

The young and the old, and the others too — all odious, they can be brought to heel only by flattery, which ends by making them more odious still.

“Heaven is open to no one . . . it will open only after the disappearance of the world” (Tertullian). One is speechless that after such a warning, we have continued our agitation. Of what obstinancy is history the fruit!

Dorotea von Rodde-Schloezer, accompanying her husband, the mayor of Lübeck, to Napoleon’s coronation, wrote, “There are so many madmen on earth, and especially in France, that it is child’s play for this Corsican prestidigitator to make them dance like marionettes to the sound of his pipe. They all fling themselves after this rat charmer, and no one asks where he is leading them.” Periods of expansion are periods of delirium; periods of decadence and recession are by comparison reasonable, even too reasonable, and that is why they are almost as deadly as the others.

Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.

We are all the more attached to someone when his instinct for self-preservation is ambivalent, not to say obliterated.

Lucretius: we know nothing specific about his life. Specific? Not even vague. An enviable destiny.

Nothing comparable to the onset of depression at the moment of waking. It takes one back billions of years, back to the first signs, to the prodromes of Being — indeed, back to the very
principle
of depression.

“You have no need to end up on the Cross, for you were born crucified” (December 11, 1963). What would I not give to recall what could have provoked a despair so overweening!

We recall Pascal’s frenzy, in
The Provincial Letters
, over the casuist Escobar, who, according to a French traveler visiting him on the Iberian peninsula, knew nothing of these attacks. Further, Pascal was scarcely known in his own country. Misunderstanding and unreality, wherever one looks.

So many friends and enemies, who showed an equal interest in us, vanished one after the next. What a relief! To be able to let oneself go at last, no longer having to fear their censure or their disappointment.

To pass irreconcilable judgments upon anything, including death, is the sole manner of not cheating.

According to Asanga and his school, the triumph of good over evil is merely a victory of
maya
over
maya;
similarly, putting an end to transmigration by illumination is like “a king of illusion vanquishing a king of illusion” (
Mahayanasutralamkara
).