Anathemas and Admirations (30 page)

No greater obstacle to deliverance than the need for failure.

To know, in vulgar terms, is to get over something; to know, in absolute terms, is to get over everything. Illumination represents one further step: the certainty that henceforth we will never again be taken in, a last glance at illusion.

I strive to conceive the cosmos without . . . myself. Fortunately death is here to remedy my imagination’s inadequacy.

Since our defects are not surface accidents but the very basis of our nature, we cannot correct them without deforming that nature, without perverting it still more.

What dates most is rebellion — that is, the most
vital
of our reactions.

In Marx’s entire oeuvre, I don’t think there is a single
disinterested
reflection on death. . . . I was pondering this at his grave in Highgate.

I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be
necessary
to anything.

In Vedic mythology, anyone raising himself by knowledge upsets the comfort of Heaven. The gods, ever watchful, live in terror of being outclassed. Did the Boss of Genesis behave any differently? Did he not spy on man because he feared him? Because he saw him as a rival? Under these conditions, one understands the great mystics, desire to lee God, His limits and His woes, in order to seek boundlessness in the Godhead.

By dying, one becomes the despot of the world.

When you get over an infatuation, to fall for someone ever again seems so inconceivable that you imagine no one, not even a bug, that is not mired in disappointment.

My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.

Coming from a country where failure constituted an obligation and where “I couldn’t fulfill myself” was the leitmotif of all confidences . . .

No fate to which I could have adjusted myself. I was made to exist before my birth and after my deaths not during my very existence.