Anathemas and Admirations (58 page)

To side with things testifies to an upsetting perturbation. To say “living” is to say “partial”: objectivity, a belated phenomenon, an alarming symptom, is the first stage of capitulation.

One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.

A neophyte’s virtues are accentuated and reinforced under the effect of his new convictions. He knows this; what he does not know is that his faults increase proportionately. The source of his chimeras and his vainglory.

“My children, salt comes from water, and if it comes in contact with water, it dissolves and vanishes. In the same way, the monk is born of woman, and if he approaches a woman, he dissolves and ceases to be a monk.” This Jean Moschus, in the seventh century, seems to have understood better than either Strindberg or Weininger the danger already pointed out in Genesis.

Every
life
is the story of a collapse. If biographies are so fascinating, it is because the heroes, and the cowards quite as much, strive to innovate in the art of debacle.

Disappointed by everyone, it is inevitable that we should eventually be so by ourselves — unless that is how we began.

“Since I first began to observe men, I have learned only to love them more,” writes Lavater, a contemporary of Chamfort. Such a remark, normal for an inhabitant of a Swiss village, might have seemed of an indecorous simplicity to a frequenter of Parisian salons.

Regret at not having been deceived like all the rest, rage at having seen clearly: such is the secret misery of more than one enlightened person.

How could I resign myself even for a moment to what is not eternal? Yet this happens to me — at this very moment, for example.

Each of us clings as best he can to his unlucky star.

The older one grows, the more clearly one realizes that though one believes oneself liberated from everything, in reality one is liberated from nothing.

On a gangrened planet, we should abstain from making plans, but we make them still, optimism being, as we know, a dying man’s reflex.

Meditation is a waking state sustained by a dim disturbance, which is at once ravage and benediction.