Anathemas and Admirations Page 15

  In the spring of 1937, as I was walking on the grounds of the psychiatric hospital of Sibiu, in Transylvania, a “pensioner” approached me. We exchanged a few words, and then I said to him, “It’s pleasant here.”

  “I know — it’s worth the trouble of being crazy,” he replied.

  “But still, you are in a sort of prison.”

  “If you like, but we live here quite without anxiety. Besides, there’s a war coming; you know that as well as I do. And this is a safe place. We won’t be called up, and they never bomb insane asylums. If I were you, I’d get myself committed right away.” Troubled, amazed, I left him and tried to find out something more about my interlocutor. I was assured that he was genuinely mad. Mad or not, no one has ever given me more reasonable advice.

  It is flawed humanity that constitutes the substance of literature. The writer congratulates himself upon Adam’s perversity and prospers only to the degree that each of us assumes and renews it.

  As for biological patrimony, the merest innovation is, it would seem, a disaster. Life is conservative and flourishes only through repetition, through cliché, through formula. Just the contrary of art.

  Ghenghis Khan took along the greatest Taoist sage of his time on all of his expeditions. Extreme cruelty is rarely vulgar; it always has something strange and refined about it that inspires fear and respect. William the Conqueror, as pitiless to his allies as he was to his enemies, liked only wild beasts and dark forests where he would always walk alone.

  I was about to go out when, in order to tie my scarf, I glanced at myself in the mirror. Suddenly an unspeakable terror: who is that? Impossible to recognize myself. Though I had no trouble identifying my overcoat, my necktie, my hat, I couldn’t make out who I was, for I was not myself— that was not me. This lasted a certain number of seconds: twenty, thirty, forty? When I managed to come to my senses, the terror persisted. I had to wait for it to consent to disappear.

  An oyster, to build up its shell, must pass its weight in seawater through its body fifty thousand times. . . . Where have I turned for my lessons in patience!

  Read somewhere the statement “God speaks only of Himself.” On this specific pointy the Almighty has more than one rival.

  To be or not to be.

  . . . Neither one nor the other.

  Each time I happen upon even the merest sentence of Buddhist lore, I am overcome by a desire to return to that wisdom, which I have tried to absorb for quite a long period of time and which, inexplicably, I have partially forsaken. In that wisdom abides not so much truth as something better still . . . and it is by that wisdom we accede to the state where we are purified of all things, of illusions first of all. No longer to have any such things yet not to risk ruin, to sink into disillusion while avoiding bitterness, to be a little more emancipated every day from the obnubilation in which these living hordes languish. . . .

  To die is to change genre, to renew oneself. . . .

  Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

  If relations between men are so difficulty it is because men have been created to knock each other down and not to have “relations.”

  Conversation with him was as conventional as with a dying man.

  Ceasing to exist signifies nothings can signify nothing. What is the use of being concerned with what survives a nonreality, with a semblance that succeeds another semblance? Death is in fact nothing, it is at most a simulacrum of mystery, like life itself. Antimetaphysical propaganda of the graveyards.

  In my childhood, there was one figure I could never forget, a peasant who, having just inherited some money, went from tavern to tavern, followed by a “musician.” A splendid summer day: the whole village was in the fields; he alone, accompanied by his violinist, wandered the empty streets, humming some tune. After two years, he was as poor as before. But the gods were kind: he died soon after. Without knowing why, I was fascinated, and rightly so. When I think of him now, I still believe he was really someone; of all the inhabitants of the village, he alone had enough imagination to ruin his life.

  Longing to yell, to spit in people’s faces, to drag them along the ground, to trample them ... I have trained myself to decency in order, to humble my rage, and my rage takes revenge as often as it can.

  If I were asked to summarize as briefly as possible my vision of things, to reduce it to its most succinct expression, I should replace words with an exclamation point, a definitive!

  Doubt creeps in everywhere, with, however, a signal exception: there is no skeptical music.

  Demosthenes copied out Thucydides eight times. That is how you learn a language. One ought to have the courage to transcribe all the books one loves.

  That someone should detest what we do, we tolerate, more or less. But if someone disdains a book we have recommended to him, that is much more serious, and it wounds us like an underhanded attack. For then it is our taste that is called into question, and even our discernment!

  When I observe how I slide into sleep, I have the impression of sinking into a providential abyss, of falling into it for eternity, without ever being able to escape. Moreover no desire to escape even touches me. What I desire in such moments is to perceive them as clearly as possible, to lose nothing of them, and to enjoy them until the last, before unconsciousness, before beatitude.

  The last important poet of Rome, Juvenal, and the last decisive writer of Greece, Lucian, both labored in irony. Two literatures that ended thus — as everything, literature or not, ought to end.

  This return to the inorganic ought not to affect us in any fashion. Yet so lamentable, not to say so laughable a phenomenon makes cowards of us all. It is time to rethink death, to imagine a less mediocre downfall.

  Astray here on earth, as I would doubtless be astray anywhere.

  There cannot be pure sentiments between those who follow similar paths. One need merely recall the glances we cast at each other when we share the same sidewalk.

  One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.

  To shift from scorn to detachment seems easy enough. Yet this is not so much a transition as a feat, an accomplishment. Scorn is the first victory over the world; detachment the last, the supreme. The interval separating them is identified with the path leading from liberty to liberation.

  I have never met one deranged mind that lacked curiosity about God. Are we to conclude from this that there exists a link between the search for the absolute and the disaggregation of the brain?

  Any maggot to regard itself as first among its peers would immediately assume the status of man.

  If everything were to be erased from my mind except the traces of what I have known as unique, where would these come from if not from the thirst for nonexistence?

  How many missed opportunities to compromise myself with God!

  Overwhelming joy, if extended, is closer to madness than is the persistent melancholy which justifies itself by reflection and even by mere observation, whereas joy’s excesses derive from some derangement. If it is disconcerting to be happy over the mere fact of being alive, it is quite normal, on the other hand, to be sad even before learning baby talk.

  The luck of the novelist or the playwright: to express himself by disguising himself, to release himself from his conflicts and, still more, from all those characters brawling within himself! Things turn out otherwise for the essayist, faced with a problematic genre into which he projects his own incompatibilities only by contradicting himself at every step. One is freer in the aphorism — triumph of a disintegrated ego. . . .

  I am thinking at this moment of someone whom I used to admire unreservedly, who kept none of his promises and who, by disappointing all those who believed in him, died in a virtual paroxysm of satisfaction.

  Language compensates for the inadequacy of remedies and cures most of our diseases. The chatterbox does not haunt pharmacies.

  Stupefying lack of nece
ssity: life, improvisation, fantasy of matter, ephemeral chemistry. . . .

  Love’s great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.

  Letters, letters to write. This one, for instance . . . but I cannot do it: I suddenly feel myself incapable of lying.

  On this estate dedicated, like its manor house, to the crackbrained enterprises of charity, everywhere one looks there are old women kept alive by virtue of surgical operations. There was a time when one died at home, in the dignity of solitude and desertion; now the moribund are collected, crammed, and their indecent throes extended as long as possible.

  No sooner have we lost one defect than another presses forward to take its place. Such is the price of our equilibrium.

  Words have become so external to me that making contact with them assumes the proportions of a feat. We have nothing more to say to one another, and if I employ them still, it is to denounce them, while secretly deploring an ever-imminent rupture.

  At the Luxembourg, a woman of about forty, almost elegant but with a certain bizarre look about her, was speaking in an affectionate, even impassioned tone to someone who was not to be seen. As I caught up with her, I noticed that she was clutching a marmoset to her bosom. She then sat down on a bench, where she continued her monologue with the same intensity. The first words I heard as I passed her were: “You know, I’ve had about enough.” I walked on, not knowing whom to pity more: her or her confidant.

  That man is going to disappear has been, heretofore, my firm conviction. But now I’ve changed my mind: he must disappear.

  Aversion to all that is human is compatible with pity; I should even say that these reactions are interdependent but not simultaneous. Only someone who knows the former is capable of intensely experiencing the latter.

  Just now, the sensation of being the last version of the Universe: worlds revolved around me, yet I felt not the slightest trace of disequilibrium, only something far above what it is licit to experience.

  Waking with a start, wondering if the word sense has any meaning, then astounded not to be able to fall asleep again!

  It is characteristic of pain not to be ashamed of repeating itself.

  To that very old friend who informs me of his decision to put an end to his days, I reply that he mustn’t be in any hurry, that the game’s ending is not without a charm of its own, and that one can even come to terms with the Intolerable, provided one never forgets that everything is a bluff, a bluff that generates torments. . . .

  He worked and produced, he flung himself into massive generalizations, astonished by his own fecundity. He was quite ignorant, fortunately for him, of the nightmare of nuance.

  To exist is a deviation so patent that it acquires thereby the prestige of a longed-for infirmity.

  To recognize in oneself all the vile instincts of which one is ashamed. . . . If they are so energetic in someone who strives to be rid of them, how much more virulent must they be in those who, lacking a minimum of lucidity, will never manage to be on their guard, and still less to loathe themselves!

  In the heat of success or of failure, remember how we were conceived. Incomparable recipe for triumphing over euphoria or discontent.

  Only the plant approaches “wisdom”; the animal is un-suited to it. As for man . . . Nature should have stopped with the vegetable kingdom, instead of disqualifying herself by a craving for the extraordinary.

  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).

  These Hindus have had the audacity to set illusion so high, to make it a substitute for self and world, and to convert it into the supreme given. Remarkable conversion, ultimate and inescapable stage. What is to be done? Every extremity, even liberation, being an impasse, how to escape in order to catch up with the Possible? Perhaps one must lower the terms of the debate, endow things with a shadow of reality, restrain the hegemony of clear-sightedness, dare to maintain that everything that seems to exist does exist in its way, and then, weary of wandering off the pointy change the subject. . . .

  10

  Mircea Eliade

  I FIRST MET ELIADE around 1932, in Bucharest, where I had just finished some sort of studies in philosophy. He was at that time the idol of the “new generation,” a magic formula we were proud to invoke. We scorned the “old,” the “dodderers” — anyone over thirty. Our intellectual leader waged a campaign against them; he demolished them one by one, striking almost always to the heart (I say “almost” because occasionally he missed his aim, as when he attacked Tudor Arghezi, a great poet whose only fault was to be acclaimed, consecrated). The struggle between generations seemed to us the key to every conflict and the explanatory principle of every event. To be young, for us, was automatically to have genius. Such infatuation, it will be said, is universal. No doubt. But I don’t think it was ever carried so far as it was with us: in it was expressed, was exacerbated, a determination to force History, an appetite to find our place within it and to affect the New at any price. Frenzy was the order of the day. In whom was it embodied? In someone who had returned from India, from the country that has always and specifically turned its back on History, on chronology, on Becoming as such. I should not point out this paradox if it did not testify to a profound duality, to a character trait in Eliade, equally solicited by essence and by accident, the timeless and the quotidian, mysticism and literature,, This duality involves no laceration for him: it is his nature and his luck to be able to live simultaneously or alternately on different spiritual levels, to ponder ecstasy and pursue anecdotes without making a fuss.

  In the period when I knew him, I was already amazed th
at he could be studying Sankhya (about which he had just published a long article) and also be interested in the latest novel. Subsequently I have never failed to be amazed by the spectacle of a curiosity so immense and so intense; in anyone else it would be morbid. He has nothing of the grim and perverse obstinacy of the maniac, of the obsessive who limits himself to a single realm, to a single sector, and rejects all the rest as secondary and trivial The one obsession I recognize in him — and in truth it has diminished with the years — is that of the polygraph, the universal writer, hence of the anti-obsessive par excellence, since he is eager to fling himself upon any subject in his unquenchable thirst for exploration. Nicolas Iorga, the Rumanian historian —an extraordinary figure, fascinating and dismaying, the author of over a thousand works that in places are extremely lively but in general are confused, poorly constructed, unreadable, shot through with flashes of wit smothered in tedium — in those days Eliade admired him passionately, the way one admires the elements, a forest, the sea, the fields, fecundity itself, everything that burgeons, proliferates, erupts, and asserts itself. The superstition of vitality and productivity, especially in literature, has never left him. I may be speaking out of turn here, but I have every reason to believe that in his unconscious, he sets books above the gods: more than to the latter, it is to books that he addresses his worship. In any case, I have met no one who loved them so much as he. I shall never forget the fever with which, arriving in Paris just after the liberation, he touched them, caressed them, leafed through them; in bookstores he exulted, he officiated; it was something like enchantment, idolatry. So much enthusiasm presupposes a great depth of generosity, a defect of which one cannot determine the profusion, the exuberance, the prodigality — all qualities thanks to which the mind imitates and exceeds nature. I have never been able to read Balzac; to tell the truth, I stopped trying on the threshold of adolescence. His world is closed to me, inaccessible; I never manage to enter it; I am refractory to it. How many times has Eliade tried to convert me! He first read the Comédie humaine in Bucharest; he reread it in Paris in 1947; perhaps he is rereading it in Chicago now. He has always loved ample, exuberant novels that unfold on several levels, accompanying the “endless” melody, the massive presence of time, the accumulation of details and the abundance of complex and divergent themes; on the other hand, he has no use for anything, in letters, that is exercise, the anemic and refined games aesthetes play, the overripe, faisandé aspect of certain productions lacking in instinct and in juice. But one can also explain his passion for Balzac in another way. There are two kinds of minds: those that love process and those that love the result. The first are attached to the unfolding, the stages, the successive expressions of thought or of action; the second, to the final expression, except for which nothing matters. By temperament I have always been inclined toward the latter, toward a Chamfort, a Joubert, a Lichtenberg, who give you a formula without revealing the path that has led them to it. Whether out of modesty or out of sterility, they cannot free themselves from the superstition of concision; they want to say everything in a page, a phrase, a word; sometimes they succeed, though rarely, it must be said: laconism must resign itself to silence if it wants to avoid a fake enigmatic profundity. Still, when one lives this quintessentialized — or sclerotic — form of expression, it is difficult to wrest oneself away from it and to care much for any other variety. He who has frequented the moralists for a long time will have difficulty understanding Balzac, but he can divine the reasons of those who have a great weakness for him, who derive from his universe a sensation of life, of expansion, of freedom, unknown to the lover of maxims, a minor genre in which perfection is identified with asphyxia.