Anathemas and Admirations (39 page)

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.