Anathemas and Admirations Read Free Page A

to abandon it, that work was a defensible illusion, and that after scribbling a page or even a sentence, I always felt like whistling.

    Religions, like the ideologies that have inherited their vices, are reduced to crusades against humor.

    Every philosopher I've ever known, without exception, was “impulsive.” This flaw of the West has marked the very ones who should be exempt from it.

    To be like God and not like the gods, that is the goal of the true mystics, who aim too high to condescend to polytheism.

    I am invited to a colloquium abroad, there being a need, apparently, for my vacillations. The skeptic-on-duty of a decaying world.

    My habitation? I shall never know. True, one has no better knowledge of where God resides, for what is the sense of the expression “to reside in oneself” for those of us who lack any basis , both in and outside ourselves?

    I abuse the word God; I use it often, too often. I employ it each time I touch an extremity and need a word to designate what comes after . I prefer God to the Inconceivable.

    One work of piety declares that the inability to take sides is a sign one is not “enlightened by the divine light.” In other words, irresolution, that total objectivity , is the road to perdition.

    I infallibly discern a flaw in all those who are interested in the same things as myself. . . .

    To have read through a work on old age solely because the author’s photograph led me to do so. That mixture of rictus and entreaty, and that expression of grimacing stupor — what hype, what an endorsement!

    “This world was not created according to the will of Life,” it is said in the Ginza, a Gnostic text of a Mandaean sect in Mesopotamia. Remember this whenever you have no better argument to neutralize a disappointment.

    After so many years, after a whole life, I saw her again. “Why are you crying?” I asked her immediately. “I’m not,” she answered. And indeed she was not crying, she was smiling at me, but age having distorted her features, joy no longer found access to her face, on which one might also have read, “Whoever does not die young will regret it sooner or later.”

    A man who survives spoils his . . . biography. In the long run, the only destinies that can be regarded as fulfilled are obstructed ones.

    We should bother our friends only for our burial. And even then . . .!

    Boredom, with a bad reputation for frivolity, nonetheless allows us to glimpse the abyss from which issues the need for prayer.

    “God has created nothing more odious to Himself than this world, and from the day He created it. He has not glanced at it again, so much does He loathe it.” The Moslem mystic who wrote that, I don’t know who it was, I shall never know this friend’s name.

    Undeniable trump card of the dying: being able to utter banalities without compromising themselves.

    Retiring to the countryside after the death of his daughter, Tullia, Cicero, overwhelmed by grief, wrote letters of consolation to himself. A pity they have not been recovered and, still more, that such a therapeutics has not found favor! True, if it had been adopted, religions would long since have gone bankrupt.

    A patrimony all our own: the hours when we have done nothing. . . . It is they that form us, that individualize us, that make us dissimilar .

    A Danish psychoanalyst suffering from insistent migraine and who had undergone treatment with a colleague, to no effect, went to Freud, who cured him in several months. It was Freud himself who declared he had done so, and he was readily believed. A disciple, however inept, cannot fail to feel better after daily contact with his master. What better cure than to see the man whom one esteems most in the world taking such extended interest in your miseries! Few infirmities would not yield to such solicitude. Let us recall that the master had every quality of a founder of a sect, though disguised as a man of science. If he achieved cures, it was less by