Anathemas and Admirations (3 page)

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.

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?

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.

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.)

“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.

Affrightment
: a pity the word should have vanished with the great churchmen.

Man being an ailing animal, any of his remarks, his gestures, has
symptomatic
value.

“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.

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.

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!”

The further man advances, the less he will have to convert to.

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.