Cioran: Notebooks 1957-1972

March 12, 1960 Spent the afternoon in a state of acute nostalgia, for everything, for my country, for my youth, for all that I have wasted, for all the pointless years, for all the days I have not wept… “Life” does not suit me. I was made for a savage existence, for absolute solitude, out of time, in the middle of a twilight paradise. I have pushed the purpose of sorrow to the point of vice.

The approach of spring dissolves my brain. It is the season I dread the most. Sensation of frozen melody; — soul mute, prostrate, where a thousand pleas are extinguished.

There is no one whom I think of more often than Baudelaire, whom I have not read for a number of years.
I am only interested in spirits filled with the dimensions of the funeral.

I should write a Treatise on Tears. I have always felt an immense need to cry (in which regard, I feel so close to characters in Chekhov). To miss everything in looking fixedly at the sky for hours…, that’s how I spend my time, while others wait for some work from me and exhort me to activity from all sides.

“Joy is a passion by which the soul passes to a greater perfection. Sorry is a passion by which the soul passes to a lesser perfection” (Spinoza)
Is that true?

I have no aptitude for philosophy: I am only interested in attitudes, and in the pathetic side of ideas.

One error stated energetically is worth more than a truth translated in colorless terms.
The splendor of heresies, the dreariness of orthodoxies.

The only profound sentiments are those one hides. Hence the strength of vile sentiments.

I can only live where I am — and where one calls me a stranger. A country — my country? — seems to me as distant and inaccessible as the old Paradise.

“Do not write about snow” — one of the proscriptions of Pythagoras. What is the meaning in this? The lack of duration?

I go from infirmity to infirmity. My body is my torturer. I struggle to understand how I have accumulated so many years without succumbing under their weight.

Nearly all of my friends are flayed, from a sickly susceptibility. I wrote on Rancor thinking of them. Have I overgeneralized in making that a common dimension for all men? I do not think so.

There is only one nostalgia: for Paradise. And perhaps for Spain.

I can read nothing on the “blessed isles” of the Ancients or on the “golden isles” of the Chinese in the Taoist epoch without feeling a kind of physical weakness. How little affinity I feel with this world, since the least allusion to Paradise and even the lowest forms or expressions that suggest to me its image spark a tempest of regrets in me!

All my “writings” lack ease. That’s the misfortune of those who write little, who cannot write as they “breathe”. An author by accident, since I only take up the pen to free myself from temporary oppression.

Zen: witticisms that reclaim the obsession and the quest for salvation. Acrobatics with the absolute as background.

Sorrow, at its height, shuts out thought, and becomes a kind of empty delirium.

“When he dreams, man never doubts”, says a Chinese text.

In writing an essay on the essence of man (!), I realized that I would do just as well to draft it in a confessional tone. It is an autobiographical subject par excellence.

I drag myself along day after day on a little bit of space, on the fringes of the universe, in the midst of an infinity of silent words.

Ama nesciri (Imitation of Jesus Christ); love to be unknown. One is happy only when one is wise enough to conform to this precept.

This universe so brilliantly wasted! That’s what I often tell myself, to console myself, in my moments of confidence and optimism.

I have suffered too much to feel great passions truly. My ills have taken the place of them.

Apart from sleep at night, and instants of stupor during the day, my inconveniences have reduced me to a continual reflexion on my condition and have forced a kind of automatism of conscience, with everything hideous and horrible that that can signify. In sum, I have lived an anti-life.

I am an obsessed one, without a single doubt, and yet I do not like those who are insistent.

To imagine miracles, to possess the ability to produce them, to be a thaumaturge…
To write, such a degeneration!

If I hate Occidentals, it is because they love that they are hated. Such unbelievable thirst for destruction! Paradise in the midst of cadavers.

Demonic fury, such is the nuance of my religiosity.

Never to work in the inessential; to behave as if one had to be accountable to an intelligent god, to push the issue of intellectual probity to the point of mania for scruples.

Write nothing about which you would have to blush in your moments of supreme solitude. Death rather than tricks or lies.

Be cynical with regard to everything, except for the ideal image of your duties toward the spirit.

Such secret conflicts, such tensions when one adopts a noble pose! The courage to accept one’s baseness is rare, even impossible.

To believe exclusively in the absolute, and to recognize, to detect in oneself all the temptations and miseries of a frivolous spirit.

X — why is he mad? Because he never conceals, never can conceal his first move. With him all is in a raw state, in him everything evokes the shamelessness of true nature.

R. in Arts tries to understand me by my writings. I respond to him that I am the result of my infirmities, and that I had been the same way when I had not even written a single book. My vision of things precedes my intellectual formation. What I really know I have always know, even had I stayed in my homeland.

Headaches, sensation of idiocy, sinusitis, ears blocked, etc. — every year the same story. There is where you should search for an explanation of my Odyssey of Rancor.

I have the appearance of health on a foundation of illness. As one perceives only the exterior of things, I am thought to be insincere or someone who conforms to trends.

Old people are right to criticize everything, to regret the loss of former morals, the type of life of their era. The present and the future are always worth less than the past, which is not worth much, though…
One knows neither why nor toward what one progresses. This double ignorance is the whole story.

“Problems” are the major obstacle to the improvement, the metaphysical advancement of mankind. From whence come the necessity for celibacy, for asceticism, etc., if one can take hold of the absolute?

The power of a man capable of renouncing is infinite. All vanquished desire becomes powerful, and one grows to the extent that one frustrates one’s natural appetites. Whatever is not a victory over oneself is a defeat.

It is not in disquietude, but in dissatisfaction that I have always lived; one essential dissatisfaction, such that nothing could and never can be right.

Against unsystematic thought. I would love to live in a society of fakirs, people who act without moving, and who have all the more succeeded in this world from which they have distanced themselves, which they do not join.
To have an immense will at one’s disposal, without directing it toward action, to have an excess of energy, apparently unused…

In all mortifications we store up explosives.
Unsatisfied desire by voluntary denial brings us near either to saint or to demon.

I must start a portrait anthology from Saint-Simon to Tocqueville.
That will be my farewell to man.

One can only become invulnerable through asceticism, that is to say in refusing everything. It is only then that the world can no longer do anything to us.

Ideas come while walking, said Nietzsche. Walking dispels thought, professed Çankara.
I have tried both theories.

Man always and necessarily makes poor use of liberty. Thus it happens that all the regimes that are based on it and claim to follow it are doomed to ruin.

Man is a vague animal.

“A tree knows no misery.” (Pascal)
My nostalgia for the vegetal…

February 25, 1960. Today, in writing my name on a form, it was as if I had written it for the first item, as if I did not recognize it. The day, the year of my birth, all of it seemed new to me, and inexplicable, without a single relationship with me. Psychiatrists call the feeling strangeness. As for my face, often I must make an effort to identify it, an effort of painful and humiliating adaptation.
Prostrate, disconcerted, nauseated before the revelation of being oneself.

Liberty is like health: it has no value and one pays it no attention until it is lost. Also it constitutes neither an ideal for those who possess it, nor a charm. The world called “free” is a an empty world, for itself.

Just like that, happiness without limits, vision of ecstasy. And that, after having seen my tax collector, having joined the line at the police department for my identity card, seen a nurse for a shot, and all in keeping. Mystery of our interior chemistry, metamorphosis that would puzzle a demon and pulverize an angel.

In France, it is enough to be insolent to earn a reputation of intelligence and wit.
or
In France, insolence takes the place of intelligence and wit.

Today, at J. Supervielle’s place, spoke of J.C. I had described him as revolting. They protested. Dominique Aury and Paulhan maintained that he did not merit that epithet, that he did not go that far.
I concede: let’s say that he was a failure at being revolting.
A man without dimensions.

Two epochs in which I would have loved to live: the Eighteenth century in France, and Tsarist Russia.
Elegant boredom, and dreary, tense, infinite boredom…

I have known states of overflowing happiness only following nervous troubles, prolonged insomnia, senseless pains, and intolerable anxieties. Compensation or natural conclusion?

Each instant sends me a warning — that I evade. Decidedly, I have failed my duty toward Time.
I am only due to my gaps, my desertions, and my refusals. A totally negative existence. I am at odds with all my good resolutions, and abandon them with determination, with a perseverance worth of a better cause.

H.M. has written three books on mescaline. That need for depth, that insistence is not French. The advantage and drawback of being born in Brussels.

D. before his illness was a historian; then, he fell into metaphysics. It takes a fall, an “abyss” for a Frenchman to become open to the essential digression.

To run a newspaper, such evidence of impotence to coordinate one’s thoughts! It is the sure sign of a discontinuous mind, broken at its roots, at the core complicit with and victim of the fluctuations of time, of its time. Unfit to meditate, it is meditated… It is philosophy reduced to a cozy calendar.

The more one knows oneself, the more one puts on oneself. About a wreck…

My article on resentment; it is what I wrote more courageously above others, and it is, of all my rantings, the one which has sparked the least response… No one has taken any notice of it. It is like a flawless mirror.

The maximum that prose can achieve is to brush against the sublime; when it becomes immersed in it, it becomes ridiculous, bloated, tiresome.

France — a country of amateurs, — and, on the positive side of its dilettantism, the only place in the world where nuance still counts.

I would like to remove all excess from myself, and yet I love only passionate accents, and the possibilities of a cry enclosed in each truth. A gift of more, a supplement of grace, a veritable love of contemplation, and what I mystic I would have made! But whatever I do, I must remain short of a decisive step. Too many voices have died in me! Curses on those who are unworthy of their soul, who are worth less than they are!

Jacqueline Pascal, Lucile de Chateaubriand, Mme de Beaumont, and among the men, Joubert, — souls according to my taste.

This sorrow that borders on vertigo… Would that I could put myself under an angel’s protection! I have let myself be tempted by demons, and now I must forever pay for an instant of criminal weakness.

The love of agony and the horror of death, I pay for this contradictory movement that I have cultivated with the bitterness of a cynic and a martyr.

B. — he was a boy who, when poor, spoke to me of the inanity of life, when rich, he could only tell dirty stories. One does not betray misery with impunity. Every form of possession is a cause of spiritual death.

Often I wake in the morning with an oppressive sentiment of guilt, as if I carried the weight of a thousand crimes…

It is a failing of elocution, my stammering, my jerky way of speaking, my art of mumbling, and above all the burning obsession with my accent, that has pushed me, in reaction, to take care of my style in French, and to give myself back something small worthy of a language that I massacre, in speech, every day…

Had I spoken like a native, then I would never have striven for good writing, and for all the coquetries and vain subtleties that stylistic research comprises.
The secret of a skill resides in a more or less clandestine defect.

For several days continual fever that the thermometer does not register. It is always around 37˚; but I am in the midst of boiling where my reason is resolved in fumes…

Some search for Fame; others for Truth. I dare to side with the latter. One unachievable task offers more seduction than an accessible goal. Such humiliation to aim for the approbation of people!

Conversation with D. — He is intelligent, he certainly acts intelligent, he wants to appear so. Nearly all brilliant spirits I have known were main to the supreme degree. For the rest, vanity is not a fault in the intellectual order.

I swear never to speak of things that I don’t know well, not to improvise for anything in the world, not to be unworthy of a subject that I treat, not to discredit myself in my own eyes.
(Oath sworn at the end of a conference with M., particularly superficial.)
January the 20^th, 1960.

The French would be the happiest people on earth if vanity did not disturb their happiness.
Vanity is the way in which we atone for our happiness (vanity is the punishment for happiness).

Renouncing one’s ambitions often leads to regret for having renounced them; which is more serious than acting on them and cultivating them. Everything happens as if man were capable of anything, except attaining wisdom.

Horrible numbness, as if I were below the level of insensibility of an element and my spirit had expired. With rare exceptions, I live below myself, with the weight of culpability and great dishonor on my conscience. When I think of all my projects abandoned due to sloth or bad temper, I actually make myself out to be a worse deserter than I ever was.

As if Time were coagulated in my veins…

Reduce your hours to an audience with yourself, and even better with God. Banish men from your thoughts, so that nothing external comes to dishonor your solitude, leave to the clown the worry of having fellow men. Diminish the other for you, for he obliges you to play a role; eliminate gestures from your life, confine yourself to the essential.

To Write
— A commentary on Genesis
— On time: the problem of the autobiography.
Saint Augustine (G. Mish: Geschichte des Autobiographie).
— The experience of time.

Fame closes in on an author at the moment he has nothing more to say; it consecrates a cadaver.

Everyone is busy with his own game, as though he knew his destiny by heart.

The more a writer is original, the more he risks being dated and boring: as soon as people get accustomed to his tricks, he is finished. True originality is unconscious of means, and an author must be carried by his talent; instead of directing and exploiting it.
An ingenious mind flees its talent, meaning it invents it. Isn’t that the definition of a man of letters?

In a work, the horrible should elate; if it creates malaise, it is poor quality.

I only get along well with those who, without being believers, have gone through a religious crisis which has marked them for the rest of their days. Religion — as interior debate — is the only modality of piercing, of punching through the layer of appearances that separates us from the essential.

That “glorious delirium” of which Theresa of Avila speaks, to designate one of the phases of union with God, I have sometimes come near it… a long time ago, alas!

Irony, the privilege of wounded souls. Like one who evidences a secret crack in relief.
Irony, by itself, is a confession, or the mask that borrows pity from itself.

This terrible proverb: “When the sage ponders, the madman ponders as well…”

January 11. Entire day devoured by conversation.

All natural deaths are compromising.

If the story of the fall is so beautiful, it is because the author describes there figures that are neither symbolic nor mythological: he sees a God of flesh and blood in the garden, not an entity.

One day man will abolish knowledge and power, he will renounce it, or else will die of it.

Every climate makes me sick, my body is not adapted to a single latitude.

Whoever speaks myth proclaims his disbelief, his total absence of religious sense.
One must think of God, and not of religion, of ecstasy, and not of mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of religion and the believer is as great as that between the psychiatrist and the madman.

Everything about civilization is derived, and everything that is derived is worth nothing.

The more that men move away from God, the more they move forward in the knowledge of religions.

History, in some form that can be envisaged, is a screen that conceals the absolute from us.

The original alone is true. All that the mind invents is false.

I have lost a number of my former faults; in exchange I have acquired others. Equilibrium remains intact.

I have remarked that I can get along quite well with a man when he has reached the height of defeat, when he has lost all foundation, and with it, all the certitudes of his success. In these moments, he is stripped of all of his lies, and he is naked and true, restored to his essence by the blows of fate.

Do not waste time in critiquing others, in censuring their works; make your own, consecrate all your hours to it. The rest is a jumble or infamy. Be united with what is true in yourself and even “eternal”.

Someone has said very well that “to exist is to be distinct”. — One ceases to exist in every regime, religious or political, that suppresses heresy, the will to go against dogma or against the current.

These attacks of terror, without motives, without foundation, without a single apparent justification, which grab us by the throat, paralyze us, and leave us in a humiliating stupor. — Thus, the other day, in climbing the staircase, in complete darkness, I was stopped by an invisible force, coming at once from outside and from myself; impossible to proceed, I stayed there for several minutes, petrified, nailed in place, in a panic and ashamed. And this was not the first time that it happened to me but it always ends in rage and desolation. What kind of phenomenon could it be the symptom of?

In judging one’s contemporaries without mercy, one risks being right and becoming in the eyes of posterity an incisive and clairvoyant mental figure. But at the same time, one gives up the adventurous side of admiration, and the warm errors that they presuppose. Yes, admiration is an adventure, all the more beautiful in that it is almost always deceived. It is frightening, though reasonable, not to have a single illusion about someone.
Nothing is more lamentable than being inevitably right.
(Particularly about moralists who have precisely fallen into this failing.)

Not a single species of literary originality is yet possible so long as one respects syntax. One must crush the phrase, if one wants to get something out of it.
Only the thinker must stand by old superstitions, clear language and conventional syntax. Originality fundamentally has the same demands since the time of Thales.

Heraclitus, Pascal, the first happier than the second, because his work has only survived in fragments, — what luck for them not to have organized their interrogations into a system! The commentator devotes to them a joyful heart, who loves to fill in lacunae, the intervals between the “thoughts” or maxims; and to ramble on with impunity; he can without risk construct a figure in his own image. For what he loves is the arbitrary, what gives him the illusion of liberty and invention: it is cheap rigor.

Someone asks me to write an article on Camus? I refuse. His death has shattered me, but I find nothing to say about an author who has had his fill of fame, and whose work, as I have written in my letter of abstention, is from a “desperately evident signification”.

Camus, who had protested against injustice so much, should have protested against his fame, if he had wanted to be consistent with himself. But that would have been indecent. And doubtless he believed that his fame was merited.
If one pushed the mania for justice to the limit, one would fall into ridicule or would be destroyed. There is more elegance in resignation than in revolt, and more beauty in anonymity than in acclaim, in the hype around a name.
Whoever adheres to his own celebrity is contemptible, who is neither humiliated nor sickened by it.

My admirations, however passionate they may be, always retain a bit of poison. I do not have what it takes to be a panegyrist.

Without grounding in desolation which colors all my thoughts and commands all my attitudes, giving them the appearance of seriousness and even of system, I would have had the makings of a perfect dilettante.

As solitary as an unemployed God.

All fiction is salutary, and, no more than others, I cannot do without it. (The farther I go, the more I am led to multiply my admissions of defeat.)

The first Roman historians drew all of their documents from the archives of patrician families, only funereal elegies, necessarily dishonest. And as each family tried to trace its origins back to some god, one understands the magnificence, and the useless beauty, of high antiquity.

The charlatan side of all talented men. It is as though the gift was not natural, but was invented and played by the one who possessed it. Or rather: he was astonished to be favored by it. Especially among the poets; invested with grace, but an equivocal grace.

Negation to my eyes contains such prestige that, cutting me off from the rest of things, it has made me a limited, propped up, invalidated being. Like those living under the charm of “progress”, I live under the No. And yet I understand that one can say yes, can acquiesce to everything, though such an exploit, which I admit to others, demands on my part a leap which presently I feel myself incapable. The No is in my blood, after having corrupted my mind.

There is something sickening and tiresome in the use of abstract style: all these empty words juxtaposed to convey the unreal, what is called thought.

Ah! how I would love to be satisfied only with sensation, with a world before the concept, with infinitesimal variations of a felt impression that would return me a thousand surprising and incoherent words! Even to write the sense, to convert by the interpretation of the body and soul uncoordinated! Uniquely to transcribe what I see, what touches me, to act like a reptile when he got to work, not a reptile, but an insect, for the reptile has the unfortunate reputation as an intellectual. A book that would be poetic by pure physiology.

I have too often gone back to the classics ever to be able to return to the origins, and to go by means of language beyond language.

James Joyce: the most overproud man of the century. Because he willed, and partly attained, the Impossible, with the obstinacy of a mad god. And because he never compromised with the reader and he would not hear of being readable at any cost. To reach the peak in obscurity.

To manage to abolish the public, to go past it, not to matter to anyone, to swallow the universe.

What ruins the greater part of talents is that they do not know how to limit themselves.

Nothing sterilizes a writer so much as the pursuit of perfection. To create, one must let his nature go free, to let himself go, to heed one’s voices…, eliminate the censor of irony or of good taste…

Two texts from Antiquity, one beautiful in itself, the other as significant as possible: the description by Pliny the naturalist of the eruption of Vesuvius and the end of Pompeii; the letter from Pliny to Trajan on the way the Christians should be treated.

Everything good that I have comes from my laziness; without it, what would stop me from putting my wicked designs into motion? It has happily constrained me within the limits of “virtue”.
All our vices come from the excess of activity, from this propensity in us to realize, to give an honorable appearance to our foibles.

All these happy, stuffed people, French, English… Oh! I am not here, I have behind me centuries of uninterrupted misfortune. I was born in a luckless nation. Happiness ends at Venice; beyond, Malediction!

Immense cowardice before life, and like a shiver of spinelessness.

I have never pronounced or written the word solitude, without feeling voluptuousness.

Articles on, studies, books on, always on someone, on authors, on works, on ideas of others; accounts amplified, useless and mediocre commentaries; were they remarkable, that would not change anything. Nothing from anyone, nothing original; everything is derived. Oh! It is better to speak of oneself with nullity than to speak of others with talent. An idea which is not lived, which does not run its course, is worth nothing. What more nauseating spectacle than this borrowed humanity, cerebral, erudite, which lives parasitically on the mind.

The historian of philosophy is not a philosopher. A caretaker who asks questions is better than that.

In the act of invention, man should have stood by the wheelbarrow. All technical improvement is harmful and should be denounced as such. One could say that the only sense of “progress” is contributing to the augmentation of noise, to the consolidation of hell.

January 6, 1960
I had spoken to Camus only a single time, in 1950, I think; I have spoken ill of him a great deal, and now I feel myself under the blow of a terrible and unjustified remorse. I lose all my means before a cadaver, especially when he is so respectable. Sorrow without name.

Weakness bordering on tears. But I must save appearances and persevere in the combat without believing in it. Such a horrible life I will have lived!

Justice is literally a mediocre ideal.

Wherever I went, the same sentiment of not belonging, of a useless and stupid game, of imposture, not among others, but among myself: I feign interest in what hardly matters to me, I constantly play a role out of spinelessness or to save appearances; but I am not in it, for what captures my heart is elsewhere. Cast out of paradise, where will I find my place, where a home of my own? Fallen, a thousand times fallen. There are in me, like a sudden hosanna, hymns reduced to powder, an explosion of regrets.
A man for whom there is no homeland down here.

To speak of affairs of which one has no part is to struggle in the everyday when one lives a religious tragedy!

On the struggles with the French language: an agony in the true sense of the word, a combat where I always come out the loser.

“… but Elohim knows that, the day when you will eat it, your eyes will be opened…”
Your eyes will be opened!, that is indeed the drama of knowledge. Paradise: look without understanding. Life would be tolerable only under that condition.

The story of the fall is perhaps the most profound one written ever. Everything is said there that we are going to feel and to suffer, all history on one page.

“Then he heard the noise of Yahweh-Elohim who passed in the garden in the breeze of evening…”
In reading that, one feels, one shares the fear of Adam. “Who has told you that you are naked?”
God gave Adam and Eve happiness, on the condition that they neither aspire to nor attain knowledge or power.

One critic has observed quite correctly that the God of the Garden of Eden is a rural God.

Why had Adam and Eve not first touched the tree of life? It is because the temptation for immortality is less strong than that of knowledge, and above all of power.

January 1^st, 1960. For years, I no longer read Baudelaire, but I think of him as if I gave my daily lecture on him. Is it because he alone seems to me to have gone farther than me in the experience of “depression”?

Chance meeting with X — always that puzzling blend of crook and madman, but elusive at base: a man who does not even have the notion of “truth”, physiologically “inaccurate” and amoral. His great excuse is the universal scorn that he has succeeded in sparking around his person. There is something of the serpent in him. I have always felt in his regard a sensation of disgust — and of curiosity. Terror as well before a crawling, malaise before his allures; eyes cold and brilliant; there is metal in his gaze. In his blood is surely mixed Greek and slave, two irreconcilable elements, which could only give birth to a monster. Subterranean and arrogant. Impression of vertigo. His monumental obsequiousness. All of that comprises, on the contrary, his gifts. When I encountered him for the first time, and without having read anything by him, I had said to M.: “He surely has talent. He is too hideous.” Hideous in morals and in physique.
One day to write on him: “Portrait of a serpent”.
P.S. These notes are so devoid of mercy that I am ashamed of them. With me pity follows disgust: ah! how beings fare badly with me.

Again regarding X — What he is, the phenomenon he incarnates, is only conceivable in a country like ours, where the mixed ethnic contributions have not been “joined”, melted, organically blended, where blood is, as it were, uncultivated, because “culture” has not been able to exercise its work of individualization, at the same time as its work of leveling. He is a monster in its natural state, uncorrected; his cunning, his duplicity, which are immense, totally spoil the “veneer”; it is hypocrisy… unveiled, it is the impostor in the open, it is infamy in full light, and that precisely due to his continual and evident dissimulations. One is struck by his total insincerity, perceptible in all his movements, in all his speech; but the word is not fair: for to be insincere is to hide the truth, or some calculation or God knows what; but whoever hides everything hides nothing; for there is not a single truth in him, not a single criterion according to which he acts or judges; there is in him only an enormous obstinacy, a revolting voracity, a thirst for gain and celebrity at the most vulgar level. He is filth, an unbelievable fanatic, a madman interested…

Nothing can completely spoil someone, except for success. “Fame” is the worst from of malediction which can befall someone.

Vulgarity is contagious, always; delicacy, never.

Pain is a sensation; suffering, a sentiment. One cannot properly say: a sensation of suffering.

It was at the base of the cliffs of Varengeville. Before this display of rock, I had the nearly terrifying perception of fragility, of the non-existence of all flesh. And of the ridiculousness of life. How life spoils us! Never will I forget this revelation, of an intensity untouched until then.

A great character is not open, but closed: its power resides in its refusal, in its massive refusal.

In all breakdown, in the least symptom of fainting there is a bit of voluptuousness.
Could pleasure be a form of disintegration?

All sensuality is pain. A special pain, it is true.

My joys are latent sadnesses.

Albert Camus died in an auto accident. He died at the moment when everyone, and perhaps himself as well, knew that he had nothing more to say and that in living he could only demean his fame, disproportionate, excessive, or even ridiculous. Immense sorrow in learning of his death, last evening, at 11 pm, in Montparnasse. An excellent minor writer, who did well by having been totally free from vulgarity, despite all the honors which where thrown on him.

X: he interests everyone; how his evident weaknesses… Sought by the incidental, by the “living”, he passed the essential by, he no longer knew what mattered above all. Difficult and universal dispersion.

December 31, 1959 Midnight. I should spend my life alone, and think without lapsing into Time.

For one skeptic to be born, a thousand believers must proliferate. the order
December 25, 1959
I received a greeting card from a Spanish poet, depicting a rat, symbol, he wrote me, of all that we can “hope” for in the year 1960.

Suffered from a cold six months a year! I should write a book with a Sorbonne-ish title: Phenomenology of Nasal Congestion.

When Māra, the tempter, tried by every kind of seduction and intimidation to distract the Buddha from his way, he told him, among others: By what right do you claim to reign over men and the universe? Is it that you have suffered through knowledge?

And, in effect, the expanse and the depth of a mind is measured in the sufferings that it has endured to acquire learning. No one knows without having survived ordeals. A subtle mind can be perfectly superficial. It is necessary to pay for the least step toward learning. (Use this to distinguish the moralists: Pascal on the one side, Montaigne on the other.)

How I envy believers the opportunity that they have to be able to slip towards heresy! If it is stupid, an interdicted theory is forever spared ridicule. Misfortune to the heresiarchs whom the Church has not deigned to condemn!

After the Anthology of moralists, write: The Fall into Time.

I am carried to exaggeration, by boredom, satiated, by the for strong sensations, by the will as well to throw off my stagnation.

December 20
This afternoon, wanting to write on fame, and not finding anything to say, I went to bed. Often my grand enterprises have led me to bed, a lamentable end to my ambitions.

Mind quick and yet irresolute.

My pathological taste for Tacitus, the need I have to feed on horrors. Then, the eloquence and the poetry of indignation.
The Annals, Macbeth, the books, no, the images of my everyday routine.

Nothing disturbs so much as the continuity of the reflection of feeling the physical presence of the brain. It is perhaps the reason why madmen think only in flashes.

It is the temptation for fame that has ruined paradise. Each time we want to go out anonymously, that symbol of pleasure, we give way to the suggestions of the serpent.

I esteem nothing better than a skeletal prose crossed by a shiver.

Man inevitably goes toward catastrophe. To the extent I will be persuaded of it, I will be interested in him, with avidity, with passion.

Poetry strictly said seems to me more and more inconceivable: I can no longer support what is implicit, indirect, what is precisely not said, I hear poetry without the means and the subterfuges that it usually has.

Originality is incompatible with “good taste”, the perogative and malediction of ancient civilizations.
There is no genius without a strong dose of bad taste.

This world has no more consistency than an episode of a smile.

X — I admire him because he does not know the point at which he is ridiculous.

To perish! this word that I love so much, and that evokes in me, quite curiously, nothing irreparable.

To have taste is to sacrifice to the conventional and to love mediocrity delicately.
To oppose great taste, the very highest taste, as the magnificent Hugo calls it.

Among minds I love only affability or vehemence.
In the order of affability: Joubert, Valéry.
”          ” of vehemence: Tertullian, Nietzsche.

December 19, 1959
I understand mystics, for indeed like them, I am consumed by concupiscence, while detesting the flesh. One can die of the torments of sensuality, “temptations”.