Anathemas and Admirations Read online

  We do not undermine our reasons for living without at the same time undermining those for writing.

  Nonreality is an obvious matter I forget and rediscover every day. So intimately does this farce become part of my existence that I cannot dissociate them. Why this buffoonery of starting all over again? Yet it is no such thing, for by this means I belong among the livings or appear to do so.

  Every individual, as such, even before actually falling, has already fallen, and to the antipodes of his original model

  How to explain that the fact of not having been, that the colossal absence preceding birth, seems to disturb no one, and that even the person who is troubled by it is not troubled to any excessive extent?

  According to a Chinese sage, a single hour of happiness is all that a centenarian could acknowledge after carefully reflecting upon the vicissitudes of his existence. . . . Since everyone exaggerates, why should the sages constitute an exception?

  I should like to forget everything and waken to a light before time.

  Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.

  To have passed one’s youth at a demiurgic temperature. . . .

  How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject.

  To conceive the act of thought as a poison bath, the pastime of an elegaic viper.

  God is the conditioned creature par excellence, the slave of slaves, prisoner of His attributes, of what He is. Man, on the contrary, has a certain leeway insofar as he is not — insofar as, possessing only a borrowed existence, he struggles in pseudoreality.

  To assert itself, life gives evidence of a rare ingenuity; and no less to deny itself. What it has invented as ways of getting rid of itself! Death is far and away its greatest find, its most prodigious success.

  The clouds passed by. In the silence of the night, you could have heard the noise they were making as they rushed overhead. Why are we here? what meaning can our infinitesimal presence have? Questions without answers, though I reply spontaneously, without the shadow of reflection and without blushing at uttering such a distinguished banality: “It is in order to torment ourselves that we are here, and for no other reason.”

  Had I been informed that my moments, like all the rest, were going to abandon me, I should have felt neither fear, nor regret, nor joy. Flawless absence. Every personal accent had vanished from what I thought I was still feeling, but in truth I was feeling nothing, I was surviving my own sensations, and yet I was not a living dead man: I was alive, but as one is seldom alive, as one is alive only once.

  To frequent the Desert Fathers and yet to be moved by the latest news! In the first centuries of our era, I would have belonged among those eremites of whom it is said that after a certain time they were “wearied with seeking God.”

  Though we ourselves have come too late, we shall be envied by our immediate successors, and still more by our remote descendants. In their eyes we shall have the look of privileged characters, and rightly so, for everyone wants to be as far as possible from the future.

  Let no one enter if he has spent a single day in stupor’s refuge!

  Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing — between two fictions.

  The other, it must be confessed, seems to us more or less of a lunatic. We follow him only up to a point; after that he necessarily strays, since even his most legitimate concerns strike us as unjustified, inexplicable.

  Never ask language to furnish an effort out of proportion to its natural capacity; in any case, do not force it to yield its maximum. Let us avoid all extravagance with words, lest, bewildered, they can no longer bear the burden of a meaning.

  No thought more corrosive nor more reassuring than the thought of death. Doubtless it is because of this double quality that we brood over it to the point of being unable to do without it. What luck to meet up, in one and the same moment, with a poison and a remedy, a revelation that kills yet gives life, a roborant venom!

  After the Goldberg Variations — “superessential music,” to employ the mystical jargon — we close our eyes, giving ourselves up to the echo they have raised within us. Nothing more exists, except a plenitude without content, which is indeed the sole way of approaching the Supreme.

  To attain deliverance, we must believe that everything is real, or else that nothing is. But we distinguish only degrees of reality; things strike us as more or less true, more or less in being. And so it is that we never know where we are.

  To trace back to the sovereign zero, out of which emerges that subaltern zero that constitutes ourselves. . . .

  The Serious is not quite an attribute of existence; the Tragic is, for it implies a notion of gratuitous disaster, whereas the Serious suggests a minimum of finality. And the charm of existence is that it allows of none.

  Each of us passes through his Promethean crisis, and all we do afterward is revel in or revile that past.

  To exhibit a skull in a showcase: already a challenge; a whole skeleton, a scandal After even the most furtive glance, how will the passing wretch attend to his affairs, and in what mood will the poor lover proceed to his assignation? With all the more reason, a prolonged halt before our ultimate metamorphosis can only discourage desire and delirium. . . . And thus it is that as I walked away, there was nothing for me to do but curse that vertical horror and its uninterrupted sneer.

  “When the bird of sleep thought to nest in my pupils, it saw the lashes and fled in fear of the net.” Who better than this Ben al-Hamara, an Arab poet of Andalusia, has perceived the unfathomability of insomnia?

  Those moments when a memory or even less is enough to slip out of the world.

  Even as a runner who stops in the heat of the race, trying to understand the meaning of it all: to meditate is an admission that one is winded.

  Enviable form of renown: to attach our name, like our first ancestor to mud that will dazzle the generations of men.

  “What is impermanent is suffering; what is suffering is non-self. What is non-self is not mine; I am not that, that is not I” (Samyutta Nikaya). What is suffering is non-self. It is difficult, it is impossible, to agree with Buddhism on this point, crucial though it is. For us, suffering is what is most ourselves, most self. What a strange religion! It sees suffering everywhere yet at the same time declares it to be unreal.

  On his countenance, not a trace of mockery remaining. It is because he had an almost sordid attachment to life. Those who have not deigned to cling to it wear a scornful smile, sign of deliverance and of triumph. They are not going into nothingness; they have left it behind.

  Before his serious health problems, he was a scholar; since . . . he has fallen into metaphysics. To be accessible to that essential divagation, the cooperation of loyal miseries is necessary — those eager to recur.

  To have borne the Himalayas all night long — and to call that sleep.

  What sacrifice would I not make in order to be free of this wretched self, which at this very moment occupies, within the All, a place no god has dared aspire to!

  It takes an enormous humility to die. The strange thing is that everyone turns out to have it!

  These waves and their sempiternal prattle are eclipsed, in futility, by the yet more inept trepidation of the city. If you close your eyes and let yourself sink beneath this double rumbling, you imagine yourself present at the sketches for the Creation, and you rapidly lose your way in cosmogonie lucubrations. Wonder of wonders: no interval between the first agitation and this unnameable point we have reached.

  Every form of progress is a perversion, in the sense that being is a perversion of nonbeing.

  You may have endured insomnias of which a martyr would be jealous, but if they have not marked your features, no one will believe you. Without witnesses, you will continue to seem some kind of joker, and acting the part better than anyone, you yourself will be the first accomplice of the incredulous.

  Proof that a generous action goes
against nature: it provokes — sometimes immediately, sometimes months or years later — an uneasiness one dares not admit to anyone, even to oneself.

  At that funeral service, everything was shadow and dream and dust returning to dust. Then, without transition the deceased was promised eternal joy and all that follows from it. So much inconsistency vexed me, and I forsook both the Greek Orthodox pope and the late-lamented. As I left, I could not help thinking that I was in no position to protest against those who so ostensibly contradict themselves.

  What a relief to throw into the garbage a manuscript, witness of a fallen fever, of a disconcerting frenzy!

  This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.

  Everything that inconveniences us allows us to define ourselves. Without indispositions, no identity — the luck and misfortune of a conscious organism.

  If to describe a misery were as easy as to live through it!

  Daily lesson in reserve: to realize, if only for the wink of an eye, that one day people will speak of our remains.

  People insist on the diseases of the will; they forget that the will as such is suspect, and that it is not normal to will.

  After having palavered for hours, I am invaded by the void. By the void and by shame. Is it not indecent to display one’s secrets, to proffer one’s very being, to tell and to tell oneself, whereas the fullest moments of one’s life have been known in silence, in the perception of silence?

  As an adolescent, Turgenev tacked to his bedroom wall a portrait of Fouquier-Tinville. Youths always and everywhere, has idealized executioners, provided they perform their task in the name of the vague and the bombastic.

  Life and death have little enough content, the one as well as the other. Unfortunately we always know this too late, when it can no longer help us either to live or to die.

  You are calm, you forget your enemy, who meanwhile watches and waits. Yet there is every reason to be ready when he attacks. You will triumph, for he will be weakened by that enormous consumption of energy, his hatred.

  Of all things one feels, nothing gives the impression of being at the very heart of truth so much as fits of unaccountable despair; compared to these, everything seems frivolous, debased, lacking in substance and interest.

  Weariness independent of the organs’ wear and tear, timeless weariness, for which no palliative exists, and over which no rest, even the last, can triumph. . . .

  Everything is salutary, save to question ourselves moment by moment as to the meaning of our actions: everything is preferable to the only question that matters.

  Having once been concerned with Joseph de Maistre, instead of explaining the figure by accumulating details, I should have recalled that he managed to sleep only three hours a night, at the most. This suffices to account for the extravagances of a thinker, or of anyone at all Yet I had neglected to observe the phenomenon — an all the more unforgivable omission in that human beings are divided into sleepers and makers, two specimens of beings, forever heterogeneous, with nothing but their physical aspect in common.

  We should really breathe better if one fine day we were told that the quasi-totality of our kind had evaporated as if by magic.

  You must have powerful religious dispositions in order to utter with conviction the word being; you must believe simply to say about an object or about someone that it or he is.

  Every season is an ordeal; nature changes and renews herself only in order to scourge us.

  At the source of the least thought appears a slight disequilibrium. What then are we to say about the kind from which thought itself proceeds?

  If in “primitive” societies the old are disposed of a little too readily, in “civilized” ones, on the other hand, they are flattered and overfed. The future, no doubt about it, will retain only the first model

  Though you abandon all religious or political faith, you will preserve the tenacity and the intolerance that impelled you to adopt it. You will still be in a rage, but your rage will be directed against the abandoned belief; fanaticism, linked to your very essence, will persist there independent of the convictions you can defend or reject. The basis, your basis, remains the same, and it is not by changing opinions that you will manage to modify it.

  The Zohar puts us in a quandary: if it is telling the truth, the poor man presents himself before God with only his soul, while the others have nothing to offer but their bodies. Given the impossibility of making a choice, best to keep on waiting.

  Do not confuse talent and verve. Most often verve will characterize the charlatan. From another point of view, without it, how give any spice to our truths, to our errors?

  Not a moment when I am not incredulous at finding myself in just that moment.

  Out of dozens of our dreams, only one has any meaning, and even then! The rest — discards, simplistic or vomitive literature, imagery of sickly genius. The dreams that are long-drawn-out testify to the indigence of the “dreamer,” who cannot see how to conclude and struggles unsuccessfully to find a dénouement, just as in the theater the playwright multiplies peripeties, not knowing how and where to stop.

  My problems — or rather, my pains — follow a policy that is beyond me. Sometimes they are concerted and advance together, sometimes each goes its own way, very often they oppose each other, but whether they agree or dispute, they behave as if their maneuvers had nothing to do with me, as if I were merely their flabbergasted spectator.

  Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.

  To dream of an enterprise of demolition that would spare none of the traces of the original Big Bang.

  8

  Saint-John Perse

  BUT WHAT IS THIS, oh! What is it, in each thing, that suddenly falls short?” No sooner is the question asked than the poet, dismayed by the evident sources from which it rises (as though from the abyss to which it leads), turns against it and wages — in order to compromise it, to destroy its insidious authority — a battle whose details and vicissitudes we do not know, as we do not know what secrets this abstract confidence conceals: “There is no history save of the soul.” Reluctant to divulge his history, he condemns us to guess or to construct it, hides behind the very avowals to which he assents, and does not intend us to touch the “pure keys” of his exile. Impenetrable out of a certain modesty, anything but inclined to the abdications of limpidity, the compromises of transparency, he has multiplied his masks, and if he has enlarged himself beyond the immediate and the finite, past that intelligibility which is limit and acquiescence to limit, it is not in order to espouse the Vague, poetic prelude to vacuity, but to “haunt Being,” his sole means of escaping the terror of insolvency, the flashing perception of what, in each thing, “falls short.” Rarely given, almost always conquered, Being well deserves the honor of a capital letter; in this case the conquest is so brilliant that it seems to emanate from a revelation rather than from a process or a struggle — whence the frequent surprises, the sensation of the instantaneous. “And suddenly everything is power and presence for me, there where the theme of nothingness is smoking still”; “The sea itself, like a sudden ovation . . .” Aside from the abyssal interrogation quoted above, emphasis is laid on the sudden, on the unforeseen, so as to mark the emergence and the sovereignty of the positive, the transfiguration of the inanimate, victory over the void.

  To have celebrated Exile, to have replaced the I as much as possible by the Stranger, yet to come to terms with the world, to find anchorage there, to become its spokesman — such is the paradox of a continually triumphant lyricism in which each word inclines toward the thing it translates, so as to bring it level with an apparently undeserved order, so as to hoist it up to the- miracle of a never-vanquished Yes and to enfold it in a hymn to diversity, to the iridescent image of the One, An erudite and virgin lyricism, concerted and original, produced from a knowledge of life-fluids, from a learn
ed intoxication with the elements, pre-Socratic and antibiblical, a lyricism that calls sacred everything capable of bearing a name, everything over which language — that true savior — can have a hold. To justify things is to baptize them, is to wrest them from their darkness, their anonymity; insofar as he succeeds, he will love them all, even that “golgotha of ordure and rust,” the modern city. (The recourse — however ironic — to Christian terminology has a strange effect in a fundamentally pagan work.)

  At once emanation and exegesis of a demiurge, the Poem — which, in Perse’s vision, proceeds as much from cosmogony as from literature — is elaborated like a universe: it engenders, enumerates, compares the elements, and incorporates them into its nature. The Poem is closed, subsisting in and of itself, yet open (“a whole mute nation rises in my words”), restive yet subjugated, autonomous yet dependent, as attached to expression as it is to the expressed, to the subject that savors itself and to the subject that records: the poem is ecstasy and enumeration, inventory and absolute. Sometimes, merely responding to its formal aspects and forgetting that it sounds reality, we are tempted to read it as if it were no more than the glamour of its music, as if it corresponded to nothing objective, nothing perceptible. “Beautiful, all right — like Sanskrit!” our passive and enchanted ego exclaims, capitulating to the voluptuous delights of language as such. But this language, once again, adheres to the object and reflects its appearances. The space it delights in is that “Raum der Rühmung” dear to Rilke, that space of celebration in which reality, never unfulfilled, tends toward a surplus of being, in which each thing participates in the Supreme because nothing falls under the curse of the Interchangeable, source of negation and cynicism.