159. Nowadays, in our horror to see either of the contenders annihilated, we intervene to counterbalance the outcome of any battle. Thus, wars without victors go on endlessly.
160a. The law, reduced to a scarecrow, instead of sowing terror, becomes something familiar and habitual, so that the crows use it as a perch.
160b. The law, reduced to a scarecrow, upon which, through habit, by no means frightened, the crows use it to perch upon (this thought is formulated twice in a row in the notebook and I have decided to transcribe both versions, imagining that my teacher couldn’t make up his mind, and seeing in his indecision a great deal of his personality, perfectionist and, at the same time, open to possibility).
161. Power engenders pleasure, limits it, represses it, negates it, exalts it, and sometimes is instead exalted or erased entirely by pleasure. Both those who exercise power and those who are overwhelmed by it can experience one of these positions in the relationship of pleasure. There was a time when these warps and wefts had a place in which they could be woven into a story, in fact, to be exact, two places: one private, the confession booth, the other public, the novel. The novel is nothing more or less than the commercialized transcription of the confession, and for that reason, it so often preserves the same formal aspect as the original: which is to say, in its continued use of the first person singular.
162. The experience of grief and pain and the indelible memory that accompanies that experience constitute the principal barrier thrown up to hinder the flow of life: only a truly rampaging narrative, only a genuinely impetuous flow of words can sweep away such a stubborn obstacle and reopen the path that leads to a happy state of forgetfulness. It is in this that the essence and the function of the confession and of the novel coincide.
164. Unlike stories, ideas have no end. In reality, even stories should never come to an end, except that at a certain point in the course of them, the storyteller simply stops telling them. But where, exactly? And why? Because the storyteller decides that she has said all that she had to say. But that’s really not true. Every drama could easily be followed by another, further drama, and each generation could be followed by the one that replaces it. You can always write a sequel. Conventionally, the end of the adventures are made to coincide with the end of their protagonist. When Hercules dies, his skin flayed by the famous shirt, that death puts an end to the Labors of Hercules. And the movie ends with Carlito Brigante in his death throes on the train platform, putting a final end to his flight, which is the same thing that happened to Accattone and Macbeth, the Consul Firmin and Martin Eden, Michel Poiccard in Breathless, Bluebeard, and Anna Karenina. Or else it might be a wedding that spells the end of the story, that is, a good point to draw the moral of the story, or the number of pages that can easily be printed without crushing the reader under their weight. Ideas come to an end only when the thinker is worn out.
165. What renders adolescence unique and inimitable, giving it its original and vital spirit, is by no means the thing about it that is strongest and best able to withstand the passage of time, but rather that which is destroyed by that passage of time. The most precious qualities are bound up with fragility, its precarious nature: the recondite meaning of things is concealed in their transitory nature. You’ll never understand a thing if you stubbornly insist on seeking out that which lasts, that which endures and does not wither away; if you’re at all capable, watch and seek, rather, that which sooner or later vanishes. Adolescence is no exception to this rule, if anything its first and more precocious application: in fact, adolescence is exactly that which is eventually dissipated. Its principle resides not in that which continues to live, but rather in that which is destined irremediably, naturally to perish. (I once thought this, while observing my students, and now I think it while remembering them.)
167. For a sociologist, mediocre literature is always more interesting than fine literature, which is less representative of the times, of society, of common thought.
168. I’ve long observed my best students, which is to say, those with the greatest natural gifts and those who show the greatest application and determination, two heterogeneous categories that, in fact, are almost the opposites of each other, but which often produce similar academic results and therefore might as well be considered as a single whole.
Well, I have noticed that in excessively reasonable behaviors the embers of rebellion are always there, ready to leap into flame (I can’t get it out of my head that here Cosmo was referring to Arbus).
169. As is demonstrated by memoirs—such as, for instance, the impeccable memoirs of Marshal de Grouchy, who was one of the officers responsible for the French defeat at Waterloo by stubbornly insisting on attacking the Prussian rearguard far from the main battlefield—the quality of the prose rises when the person writing feels called upon to justify their mistakes. In the act of excusing themselves (just as, sometimes, in the opposite exercise of self-denigration) many writers attain their highest levels.
170. Liberty is an exciting game and an anguishing burden: in cases where you have the option of choosing, you will be tormented by the nightmare of having chosen poorly, the doubt that you may have made a mistake and that you will live to regret it. That which is imposed upon you, you will be able to tolerate to the limit of your resources, and you won’t feel any responsibility for it, while that which you have chosen to suit yourself, or out of a whim, can soon become intolerable, and the fault is entirely yours. It’s a law of statistics: coercion starts from the lowest point and it is perceived as intrinsically negative, so that under its yoke there may sometimes be improvements; free choice, in contrast, must necessarily be positive, and therefore has a high probability of deteriorating.
172. Often, what is stated is obscure, but what it means is clear.
174. It is a problem to be slow on the uptake, but not as much of a problem as it is to grasp things too quickly, because it is this excess capacity that generates boredom in those who possess it and exercise it. If you can understand everything in the blink of an eye, all the rest of the time your resources lie idle: dead time. I had a student who was like that. His name was Arbus. I don’t know what ever became of him, and I therefore deduce that he never wound up achieving anything significant. Probably he was killed by all that dead time.
175. From my past as a teacher, one thing I remember is how uncomfortable it made my students when they were being examined to be asked the one question that ought in theory to have been the most benevolent, the most encouraging: the easy question by definition, since it’s not really a question but an invitation to a party: “Talk to me about any subject you like.” I would ask it when I was tired and I just couldn’t think of yet another quiz. Well, when I asked it some of them panicked: that was because, if they get the answer wrong to a question that they had actually chosen themselves, that they’d asked themselves, their failure would have just been that much more spectacular. Who is such a donkey that they don’t even know what they know? Not even one thing out of a thousand, one page out of an entire textbook? And after all, it wasn’t even true, because this singular syndrome struck those in particular who had studied, at least a little; in other words, the ones who I thought were actually reasonably well prepared, but who were caught off guard, wrong-footed if I let them talk about whatever they liked. The freedom to choose unraveled all their plans. The first few times I was taken by surprise. Then I started to understand, and I stopped asking that vague and embarrassing question. Rather: “What is the ideal of solidarity that Leopardi suggests in his short poem ‘La ginestra’ (Wild Broom)?” “Who killed Julius Caesar and why?” “Speak to me about the Counter-Reformation . . .” “What do the three wild beasts represent that Dante encounters while climbing the ‘mountain of delight’ in the first canto of the Inferno?”
Why, of course, it’s better like that, much better that way.
176. In his effort to understand the world, man runs into an excess of signification. He collects too many signs an
d he has too many at his disposal. There are countless hints and nudges, indications that the world offers, hinting that it’s trying to tell us something, compared with how much of it we’re actually capable of understanding. Everything seems to mean something, but maybe it’s only an appearance, it might be a misunderstanding caused by the frenzy to understand, and many of those coded signals don’t mean anything at all.
179. Perhaps, when we’re depressed, as I am now, we have a far more realistic vision of what surrounds us; or perhaps we should say, we’re less inclined to be blinded by illusions devoid of any basis. Or perhaps even this attempt to find melancholy to be advantageous is an illusion, a meager consolation.
182. I have performed my duty only because I was ill-suited to do otherwise, and therefore because of a limitation and not a choice.
183. The light of a person you’re in love with passes through a prism.
184. The value of an action is independent of the fact that one might have been driven to perform it by sheer will, ambition, whim, or desire.
185. Time renders legitimate what was originally criminal.
186. The only truly new thing in life is birth.
189. E il povero insetto che sbadatamente schiacciamo
Nella sua sofferenza corporale prova una fitta forte
Come quella di un gigante che muore . . .
(I’ve managed to track down the source of this, which in fact struck me as a quotation: these are several lines translated into Italian from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, act 3, scene 1, 82–84: And the poor beetle that we tread upon / In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great / As when a giant dies . . .)
190. For a teacher, it’s a matter of changing the people that you observe, or of seeing the people that you observe changing. For the most part, what’s happened to me has been the second thing.
191. It’s unbearable, the struggle that we have to carry on every day with people who ought to be coming to our aid: our lawyer, our plumber, the insurance agent, the tile layer, the surgeon, the mechanic who fixes our car, and, albeit indirectly, the politician for whom we voted. All people we have to pester to get them to do the work we consulted and compensated them to do, to get them to finish it, or to do it over from scratch, because they did it badly the first time, or sloppily, or less than painstakingly, or else to get them to return their fee. Most of the disciplines and trades and professions that they exercise remain unknown to us in their fundamentals and their details: therefore we’d like to be able to have boundless faith in those who are experts, we’d like to be able to say to them: “Do as you think best to solve the problem.” Instead, unfailingly, we are forced to choose, by the so-called experts, among various options, basically blindly, given our ignorance, obliged to make a decision, while pretending we know what we’re doing: in such a way that we will not only bear the consequences of the errors committed by others, which are bound to redound to our harm, but we will also bear the responsibility. We must constantly find remedies for our remedies: every dentist who peers into our wide-open mouths unfailingly asks how it can be that his predecessor did such disastrous work. Every notary laments the sheer quantity of oversights or foolish mistakes contained in the document compiled sometime earlier by some colleague of his. And so we are surrounded by support figures whom we know in advance we won’t be able count on, who seem to grope their way blindly, jury-rigging provisional solutions, overrunning their budgets, delivering a day late, a month late, a year late, or never, who wouldn’t dream of replying to voicemail messages, and often just vanish entirely. Into thin air. Concerning the plumber who had installed the faucets backwards and so close to the wall that they scrape against it whenever I turn them, and whose cell phone number seemed to be out of service, I was actually told that he had left the country. For where? For Australia.
192. My job as a teacher: like a farmer who labors to prepare a field, weeding and clearing it, breaking the soil, planting seeds, watering . . . then, when after months of hard work, wearing his fingers to the bone and breaking his back, the green shoots spring from the soil and from those stalks the flowers, and the flowers in the end are transformed into fruit, wonderful, swollen, juicy, ripe, and lovely to behold . . . he doesn’t harvest them, seized by a sudden weariness that might just as well be lack of interest . . . and he lets them rot in the field, on the branches, he watches day by day as they rot away, without ever lifting a finger . . .
194. The stupidity of certain ideas is by no means redeemed by the stubbornness with which people remain faithful to them.
195. Money is always an excellent reason. But it’s almost never the real reason.
196. The enemy is so powerful that even the dead will have reason to fear if the enemy wins.
197. The instructions of the mystics—that in order to attain a purer and more intense and perfect second life you must snap the thread of the first one, that is, the ordinary life—can be extended in many ways also to those who stain themselves with the crime of murder, so that, aside from their own lives in a figurative sense, they literally snap the thread of the lives of others, and the sense of the terrible and the powerful, the clear and the definitive, the cruel and the wonderful, the fatal and the limitless, which appeared to be veiled in ordinary life, are now suddenly revealed to them in all their sharpened clarity, in their untranslatable lucidity. The perverted life and the perfect life resemble each other in this way: that they have broken their bridges with the ordinary life.
200. Certain things become mysterious only once you begin to feel the desire to understand them. Until then, they seemed obvious. They were just there, and that was that. Their very appearance was reassuring. It gave the impression that there was nothing about them to be discovered, no enigma. In much the same way, the people who seem to have the fewest secrets have the most. And the attempt to cast a beam of light upon them makes them withdraw into the depths, just as the shaft of light from a flashlight when shone into the mouth of an underwater den makes the fish hiding in there pull back into the shadows.
201. As long as you hurl your accusation against the world, instead of submitting to it yourself, you are in line with the world.
202. I know that truth and justice are quite invaluable things, certainly, I know that: but when I hear other people complaining, each from her or his own legitimate point of view, about personal matters or the larger, general situation, focusing on nitpicking accounts of misdeeds, wrongs done . . . I start to think that I have too little time on my hands to worry about who is right and who is wrong. The catalogue of misdeeds that nowadays makes up the content of discussions, conversations, television broadcasts: what can I do about it? It all just bores me. Let me make it quite clear, I too do nothing but complain all the time.
203. In order to be conceived in the first place, even the crudest and falsest of doctrines must contain in principle a tiny dose of truth. It is out of that grain of truth that the most dangerous and misguided ideas develop. Error grows thickest around a slender but truthful green shoot.
204. Among some primitive peoples, the name of the chief deity means “He Whose Existence Is in Doubt.” That same name evolves in religions, taking on the meaning of “He Whose Existence Is Unquestionable.” Right up to the present day, when it means “Great Big Lie.”
205. In certain books, in certain writers, including some I dearly love, I end up detecting the automatism of style and qualities allowed free play: in other words, bravura, or shall we say, skill. From skill, which by no accident is often described as “consummate,” the authentic dramatic content is often removed, while in the same process being countless times reoffered and repeated, only in forms such that, instead of bringing that content to light, they conceal it, burying it ever deeper, where it can never again be attained. What with the constant insistence on grazing the thing that needs to be said, what with the constant saying of the thing without saying it, hinting at it, alluding to it, the heart of the thing is pounded away to a pulp. The real prob
lem with repetition is that it distances and uses up the object meant to be grasped, making it with every attempt a little slipperier, until it backs away to the far end of its lair, its hole, just like what happened years ago to that little boy who fell to the bottom of a well, when too many people frantically tried to save him, and when the right person finally arrived, it was too late, it was as if the poor boy had shrunk, squirreled away in the mud . . . In writing, every time you repeat something (a turn of phrase that was felicitous the first time, a well-tested invention), another shovelful of dirt is tossed onto the intimacy of the possible discovery: and the authentic thing will no longer be said, buried instead beneath a dense layer of words.
207. The world should be taken in small doses. An intuitive person ought to need no more than a small sampling.
212. My ideas and my convictions never aspired to possess the one quality that would make them worthy of widespread circulation, namely, certainty. As it was, they stayed here with me, in my vicinity, never venturing too far away, like pet cats, who simultaneously belong to the household and to no one, and often run away from their owner, but not because they’re looking for another one.
216. If the object of desire is one, then there isn’t much difference between being gratified by obtaining it and being punished by having it denied you, since that gratification produces a sense of guilt and therefore a frenzy for punishment, which can in its turn be rewarding. This ensures that punishment and satisfaction are frequently intertwined, mistaken one for the other, put one in place of the other, so that one winds up taking pleasure in suffering and pain, and sorrow in gratification. This happened to some of my students.
217. There was a time when men could live their whole lives continuing to do what they’d always done until then, that which it had been their duty to do without any other option or choice, without wasting time questioning themselves about the meaning of what they were doing, since before them countless generations had done the same, no more and no less. Only in recent years have we incurred the need to discover and understand ourselves, who we are, what we really want. Into our inner selves, the realm of controversy, only the occasional hero would venture, and not even all of them, far from it, the majority of great men steered well clear of that area, considering ridiculous or superfluous, and perhaps even offensive, the question “Who am I, really?” just a way of dirtying oneself with the mud of doubt, of uncertainty, the way a foundling might do, a nobody, the son of nobody. Today, on the other hand, the condition of nameless orphan is the starting point for each and every individual, and we are all expected to set out on a lengthy quest to find our own personality and destiny, and before each of us there is no beaten path, no road to give us direction. Of every young person, nowadays, we say, benevolently, with a nod to the pleasure of the liberty that is thought to come with and facilitate the young person’s choice, that “they just need to find their way,” yes, his or her way, as if we all had different ways, different roads, and only one of those paths, a single route, was destined to each individual—had been laid out and paved exclusively for him or her, like the Door of the Law in Kafka’s famous parable, so that he and no one else might travel it. But if there are millions of virtual roads, of which one and only one was intended for each of us, what vanishingly improbably stroke of luck is supposed to allow us to choose, unerringly, the right one?
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