Anathemas and Admirations (8 page)

After so many years, after a whole life, I saw her again. “Why are you crying?” I asked her immediately. “I’m not,” she answered. And indeed she was not crying, she was smiling at me, but age having distorted her features, joy no longer found access to her face, on which one might also have read, “Whoever does not die young will regret it sooner or later.”

A man who survives spoils his . . . biography. In the long run, the only destinies that can be regarded as fulfilled are obstructed ones.

We should bother our friends only for our burial. And even then . . .!

Boredom, with a bad reputation for frivolity, nonetheless allows us to glimpse the abyss from which issues the need for prayer.

“God has created nothing more odious to Himself than this world, and from the day He created it. He has not glanced at it again, so much does He loathe it.” The Moslem mystic who wrote that, I don’t know who it was, I shall never know this friend’s name.

Undeniable trump card of the dying: being able to utter banalities without compromising themselves.

Retiring to the countryside after the death of his daughter, Tullia, Cicero, overwhelmed by grief, wrote letters of consolation to himself. A pity they have not been recovered and, still more, that such a therapeutics has not found favor! True, if it had been adopted, religions would long since have gone bankrupt.

A patrimony all our own: the hours when we have done nothing. . . . It is they that form us, that individualize us, that make us
dissimilar
.

A Danish psychoanalyst suffering from insistent migraine and who had undergone treatment with a colleague, to no effect, went to Freud, who cured him in several months. It was Freud himself who declared he had done so, and he was readily believed. A disciple, however inept, cannot fail to feel better after daily contact with his master. What better cure than to see the man whom one esteems most in the world taking such extended interest in your miseries! Few infirmities would not yield to such solicitude. Let us recall that the master had every quality of a founder of a sect, though disguised as a man of science. If he achieved cures, it was less by method than by
faith
.

“Old age is the most unexpected thing of all that happens to man,” notes Trotsky a few years before his end. If, as a young man, he had had the exact, visceral intuition of this truth, what a miserable revolutionary he would have made!

Noble deeds are possible only in periods when self-irony is not yet rife.

It was his lot to fulfill himself only halfway. Everything in him was
truncated
: his way of life, like his way of thinking. A man of fragments, himself a fragment.