Anathemas and Admirations (51 page)

Any maggot to regard itself as first among its peers would immediately assume the status of man.

If everything were to be erased from my mind except the traces of what I have known as unique, where would these come from if not from the thirst for nonexistence?

How many missed opportunities to compromise myself with God!

Overwhelming joy, if extended, is closer to madness than is the persistent melancholy which justifies itself by reflection and even by mere observation, whereas joy’s excesses derive from some derangement. If it is disconcerting to be happy over the mere fact of being alive, it is quite normal, on the other hand, to be sad even before learning baby talk.

The luck of the novelist or the playwright: to express himself by disguising himself, to release himself from his conflicts and, still more, from all those characters brawling within himself! Things turn out otherwise for the essayist, faced with a problematic genre into which he projects his own incompatibilities only by contradicting himself at every step. One is freer in the aphorism — triumph of a disintegrated ego. . . .

I am thinking at this moment of someone whom I used to admire unreservedly, who kept none of his promises and who, by disappointing all those who believed in him, died in a virtual paroxysm of satisfaction.

Language compensates for the inadequacy of remedies and cures most of our diseases. The chatterbox does not haunt pharmacies.

Stupefying lack of necessity: life, improvisation, fantasy of matter, ephemeral chemistry. . . .

Love’s great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.

Letters, letters to write. This one, for instance . . . but I cannot do it: I suddenly feel myself incapable of
lying
.

On this estate dedicated, like its manor house, to the crackbrained enterprises of charity, everywhere one looks there are old women kept alive by virtue of surgical operations. There was a time when one died at home, in the dignity of solitude and desertion; now the moribund are collected, crammed, and their indecent throes extended as long as possible.

No sooner have we lost one defect than another presses forward to take its place. Such is the price of our equilibrium.

Words have become so external to me that making contact with them assumes the proportions of a feat. We have nothing more to say to one another, and if I employ them still, it is to denounce them, while secretly deploring an ever-imminent rupture.