Anathemas and Admirations (47 page)

In my fits of rage I feel vexatiously close to Saint Paul. My affinities with the frantic — with all whom I detest . . . who has ever so resembled his antipodes?

Looming up out of a sort of primordial Ineffectually. . . . Just now, trying to contend with a serious subject and failing altogether, I went to bed. How frequently have my plans led me to this predestined term of all my ambitions!

There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself
rises
Nothingness.

To perish!
— that verb which is my favorite and which, oddly enough, suggests nothing irreparable.

Whenever I have to meet someone, I am overcome with such a craving for isolation that when I am about to speak". I lose all control over my words, and their somersaulting is taken for . . . verve!

This universe, so magisterially miscarried — as one keeps telling onself when one happens to be in a concessive mood.

Braggadocio and physical pain do not go together. As soon as our carcass makes itself known, we are brought back to our normal dimensions, to the most mortifying", the most devastating certitude.

What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word
goal
while following a funeral procession!

We have always been dying, and yet death has lost none of its freshness, its originality. Herein lies the secret of secrets.

To read is to let someone else work for you — the most delicate form of exploitation.

Anyone who quotes us from memory — and incorrectly— is a saboteur who should be taken to court. A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice all the more serious in that the intention was to do us a favor.

The tormented — who are they, if not martyrs embittered by not knowing for whose sake to immolate themselves?

To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.