Anathemas and Admirations (9 page)

Dreams, by abolishing time, abolish death. The deceased take advantage of them in order to importune us. Last night, there was my father. He was just as I have always known him, yet I had a moment’s hesitation. Suppose it wasn’t my father? We embraced in the Rumanian manner but, as always with him, without effusion, without warmth, without the demonstrativeness customary in an expansive people. It was because of that sober, icy kiss that I knew it was indeed my father. I woke up realizing that one resuscitates only as an intruder, as a dream-spoiler, and that such distressing immortality is the only kind there is.

Punctuality, a kind of “pathology of scruple,” To be on time, I would be capable of committing a crime.

Above the pre-Socratics, one is occasionally inclined to set those heresiarchs whose works were mutilated or destroyed and who survive only in a few fragments of speech, as mysterious as one could wish for.

Why, after performing a good deed, does one long to follow a flag, any flag? Generous impulses involve a certain danger; they make one lose one’s head — unless one is generous precisely because one has lost one’s head already, generosity being a patent form of intoxication.

Each time the future seems conceivable to me, I have the impression of having been visited by Grace.

If only it were possible to identify that vice of fabrication whose trace the universe so visibly bears!

I am always amazed to see how lively, normal, and unassailable
low feelings
are. When you experience them, you feel cheered, restored to the community, on equal footing with your kind.

If man so readily forgets he is accursed, it is because he has always been so.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

A man who sees himself
as he is
stands higher than a man who raises the dead, according to a saint. Not knowing oneself is the universal law, and no one transgresses it with impunity. The truth is that no one has the courage to transgress it, which accounts for the saint’s exaggeration.

It is easier to imitate Jupiter than Lao-Tse.

Keeping up
is the mark of a fluctuating mind that pursues nothing personal, that is unsuited to obsession, that
continual
impasse.

The eminent ecclesiastic sneered at Original Sin. “That sin is your livelihood. Without it you would starve to death, for your ministry would have no further meaning. If man has not fallen since his origins, why has Christ come? To redeem whom, and what?” To my objections, his sole response was a condescending smile. A religion is finished when only its adversaries strive to preserve its integrity.