CHAPTER 1
On the Verge of Existence
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WHEN CHRIST HARROWED HELL, the Just under the old law — Abel, Enoch, Noah — mistrusted his teaching and made no answer to his call They took him for an emissary of the Tempter whose schemes they feared. Only Cain and those of his race adhered to such doctrine, or professed to, and followed him out of hell. Such was the doctrine of Mareion. "The wicked prosper," that old objection to the notion of a merciful or at least honorable Creator — who consolidated it better than this heresiarch? Who else so acutely perceived its invincibility?
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Amateur paleontologist, I have spent several months pondering the skeleton. Result: no more than a few pages. ... The subject, it is true, scarcely warrants prolixity.
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Applying the same treatment to a poet and a thinker strikes me as a lapse in taste. There are realms from which philosophers ought to abstain. To dissect a poem as if it were a system is a crime, even a sacrilege. Oddly enough, the poets exult when they do not understand the pronouncements made upon them. The jargon flatters them, gives them the illusion of preferment. Such weakness demeans them to the level of their glossators.
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To Buddhism (indeed, to the Orient in general), Nothingness does not have the rather grim signification we attribute to it. It is identified with a limit-experience of light or, if you like, with a state of luminous absence, an everlasting radiant void: Being that has triumphed over all its properties, or rather non-Being supremely positive in that it dispenses bliss without substance, without substratum, without support in any world at all.
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Solitude: so fulfilling that the merest rendezvous is a crucifixion .
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Hindu philosophy pursues deliverance; Greek — with the exception of Pyrrho, Epicurus, and a few unclassifiable figures — is a disappointment: it seeks only ... truth.
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Nirvana has been compared to a mirror that no longer reflects any object. To a mirror, then, forever pure, forever unemployed.
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Christ having named Satan "Prince of this world," Saint Paul, to go one better, struck home: "God of this world." When such authorities designate our ruler by name, who is entitled to disinherited status?
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Man is free, save for his depths. On the surface, he does as he likes; down there, will is a meaningless syllable.
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To disarm the envious, we should take to the streets on crutches. Only the spectacle of our collapse can humanize, to some extent, our friends and our enemies.
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Rightly, in every age it is assumed we are witnessing the disappearance of the last traces of the earthly paradise.
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Christ again: according to one Gnostic source, he ascended — in abhorrence of fatum — to trouble celestial arrangements and to prevent any questioning of the heavenly bodies. In such confusion, what can have happened to my poor star?
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Kant waited until the last days of his old age to perceive the dark side of existence and to indicate "the failure of any rational theodicy." ... Others have been luckier: to them this occurred even before they began to philosophize.
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Apparently matter, jealous of life, seeks to discover its weak points and to punish its initiatives, its betrayals. For life is life only by infidelity to matter.
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I am distinct from all my sensations. I fail to understand how. I even fail to understand whose they are. Moreover, who is this I initiating the three propositions?
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I have just read a biography. The notion that all the figures it describes no longer exist except in this book strikes me as so intolerable that I have had to lie down to avoid a collapse.
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What entitles you to fling my truths in my face? You are taking a liberty I deny. Granted, all you allege is correct, but I have not authorized you to be frank with me. (After each outburst of rage, shame accompanied by the invariable swagger — "At least there's some life in that" — followed in its turn by even greater shame.)
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"I am a coward, I cannot endure the pain of being happy." To sound someone out, to know him, it is enough to see how he reacts to Keats's avowal. If he fails to understand immediately, no use continuing.
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Affrightment: a pity the word should have vanished with the great churchmen.
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Man being an ailing animal, any of his remarks, his gestures, has symptomatic value.
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"I am amazed that so remarkable a man could have died," I once wrote to a philosopher's widow. I realized the stupidity of my letter only after mailing it: to send another would be to risk a second blunder. With regard to condolences, whatever is not a cliché borders on impropriety or aberration.
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In her seventies, Lady Montague admitted she had ceased looking at herself in a mirror eleven years before. Eccentricity? Perhaps, but only to those ignorant of the calvary of daily encounters with one's own ... countenance.
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What can I speak of save what I feel? And right now I feel nothing. Everything seems erased — suspended. Let me not be proud of this, nor embittered by it. "In the course of the many lives we have lived," says The Treasure of the True Law, "how often have we been born in vain, how often have we died!"
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The further man advances, the less he will have to convert to.
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The best way to get rid of an enemy is to speak well of him everywhere. What you say will be repeated to him, and he will no longer have the strength to harm you: you have broken his mainspring. ... He will still campaign against you, but without vigor or consistency, for unconsciously he will have ceased to hate you. He is conquered, though unaware of his defeat.
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Claudel's famous edict: "I am for every Jupiter, against every Prometheus," We may have lost our illusions about revolt, yet such an enormity wakens the terrorist slumbering in us all.
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One holds no grudges against those one has insulted; quite the contrary, one is disposed to grant them every imaginable virtue. Alas, such generosity is never to be met with in the injured party.
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I haven't much use for anyone who can spare Original Sin. Myself, I resort to it on every occasion, and without it I don't see how I should avoid uninterrupted consternation.
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Kandinsky maintains that yellow is the color of life. ... Now we know why this hue so hurts the eyes.
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When we must make a crucial decision, it is extremely dangerous to consult anyone else, since no one, with...
