Anathemas and Admirations Read Free

than a puppet, Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise.

    Two friends, both actresses in a country of eastern Europe. One decamps to the West, becoming rich and famous there; the other remains where she is, poor and obscure. Half a century later, the second woman takes a trip and pays a visit to her fortunate colleague. “She used to be a head taller than me, and now she’s a shrunken old woman, and paralyzed into the bargain.” Other details follow, and in conclusion: “I’m not afraid of death; I’m afraid of death in life.” Nothing like recourse to philosophical reflection to camouflage a belated revenge.

    Fragments, fugitive thoughts, you say. Can you call them fugitive when you are dealing with obsessions — with thoughts whose precise quality is not to flee?

    I had just written a very temperate, very correct note to someone who scarcely deserved it. Before sending it, I added a few allusions vaguely tinged with gall. And then, just when I was putting the thing in the mailbox, I felt myself clutched by rage and, along with it, by a disdain for my noble impulse, for my regrettable fit of distinction .

    Picpus Cemetery. A young man and a lady past her prime. The caretaker explains that this cemetery is reserved for descendants of those who were guillotined. The lady blurts out, “But that’s who we are!” With what an expression! After all, she might have been telling the truth. Yet that provocative tone immediately put me on the executioner’s side.

    Opening Meister Eckhart’s Sermons , I read that suffering is intolerable to one who suffers for himself but light to one who suffers for God, because it is God who bears the burden, though it be heavy with the suffering of all mankind. It is no accident that I have come across this passage, for it perfectly applies to one who can never relieve himself of all that weighs upon him.

    According to the kabbala, God permits His splendor to diminish so that, men and angels can endure it — which comes down to saying that the Creation coincides with an impoverishment of the divine lumen, an effort toward darkness to which the Creator has assented. The hypothesis of God’s deliberate obscuration has the merit of making us accessible to our own shadows, responsible for our irreceptivity to a certain light.

    The ideal: to be able to repeat oneself like . . . Bach.

    Immense, supernatural aridity: as if I were beginning a second existence on another planet where speech is unknown, in a universe refractory to language and incapable of creating such a thing for itself.

    One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland — and no other.

    After reading in a work of psychoanalytic inspiration that as a young man Aristotle was jealous of Philip, the father of Alexander, his future pupil, one cannot help regarding a would-be therapeutic system in which such situations are posited as suspect, for it invents secrets for the pleasure of inventing explanations and cures.

    There is something of the charlatan in anyone who triumphs in any realm whatever.

    Visit a hospital, and in five minutes you become a Buddhist, or become one again if you have left off being such a thing.

    Parmenides. Nowhere do I perceive the Being he exalts, and fail to see myself in his sphere, which includes no fault, no place for me.

    In this compartment, a hideous woman sitting opposite, snoring, mouth open: an obscene agony. What was to be done? How endure such a spectacle? Stalin came to my aid. In his youth, passing between two rows of cossacks who were whipping him, he utterly concentrated upon reading a book, so that his consciousness of the blows was completely diverted. Strengthened by this example, I too plunged into my book, and halted at each word with extreme application till the moment the monster ended her agony.

    I was saying to a friend the other day that while I no longer believed in “writing,” I was reluctant