Anathemas and Admirations (7 page)

In this compartment, a hideous woman sitting opposite, snoring, mouth open: an obscene agony. What was to be done? How endure such a spectacle? Stalin came to my aid. In his youth, passing between two rows of cossacks who were whipping him, he utterly concentrated upon reading a book, so that his consciousness of the blows was completely diverted. Strengthened by this example, I too plunged into my book, and halted at each word with extreme application till the moment the monster ended her agony.

I was saying to a friend the other day that while I no longer believed in “writing,” I was reluctant to abandon it, that work was a defensible illusion, and that after scribbling a page or even a sentence, I always felt like whistling.

Religions, like the ideologies that have inherited their vices, are reduced to crusades against humor.

Every philosopher I've ever known, without exception, was “impulsive.” This flaw of the West has marked the very ones who should be exempt from it.

To be like God and not like the gods, that is the goal of the true mystics, who aim too high to condescend to polytheism.

I am invited to a colloquium abroad, there being a need, apparently, for my vacillations. The skeptic-on-duty of a decaying world.

My habitation? I shall never know. True, one has no better knowledge of where God resides, for what is the sense of the expression “to reside in oneself” for those of us who lack any
basis
, both in and outside ourselves?

I abuse the word
God;
I use it often, too often. I employ it each time I touch an extremity and need a word to designate what comes
after
. I prefer God to the Inconceivable.

One work of piety declares that the inability to take sides is a sign one is not “enlightened by the divine light.” In other words, irresolution, that total
objectivity
, is the road to perdition.

I infallibly discern a flaw in all those who are interested in the same things as myself. . . .

To have read through a work on old age solely because the author’s photograph led me to do so. That mixture of rictus and entreaty, and that expression of grimacing stupor — what hype, what an endorsement!

“This world was not created according to the will of Life,” it is said in the Ginza, a Gnostic text of a Mandaean sect in Mesopotamia. Remember this whenever you have no better argument to neutralize a disappointment.