219. The epic is for the rich, the fable is for the poor.
220. You feel disgust for that which you need, then for that which you desire too ardently, then for that which you love, then for yourself.
221. I have been reduced to a state of human existence so dismaying and demoralizing that what now dominates my life is disorder, which I once struggled to combat, and which instead I now allow to weigh down heavier day after day, seeking in it a sort of bitter and almost grimly vindictive satisfaction. I plunge greedily into the chaos of my home. My books, which to tell the truth have never been especially dear to me, instead make me snicker with glee when I see them stacked high, from floor to ceiling, swaying and collapsing and tumbling down . . .
(I was able to identify, by a lucky chance, the source of the following thoughts, numbered here from 222 to 238, nearly all of them brief; they come from Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace, which I happened to start reading again, after many years, at night, while during the day I was perusing the thoughts of my old teacher. I believe that the Italian edition he had before his eyes, when he jotted down these notes, was the same one that in the meantime I happened to be reading, that is, the 1942 Einaudi, republished in 1990 as a two-volume paperback, considering that some of the words and expressions found in the translation by Enrichetta Carafa, which actually dates back to 1928, correspond to the wording used by Cosmo. I realized that the source must have been War and Peace from fragment 229, where it is clear that the subject is unmistakably Nikolai Rostov, brother of the famous Natasha, on the eve of the Battle of Austerlitz: from that moment I went back and forth in the book in search of tidbits that had caught Cosmo’s fancy, and the task was fairly easy, even though in a few cases my links are just guesses, when my teacher’s reflections wander very far from what might have been their origin, which might just as easily have come from somewhere else. The spark could have been struck anywhere. It’s singular, in any case, the way that he collected and appropriated, from the colossal novel, fragments, a few individual phrases or observations made by this character or that, often expressing them in the first person, while completely forgetting to comment on the magnificent scale of the work with all its historical and metaphysical implications, which seem to be of no interest to him. Or else he just thought there wasn’t much more to add.)
222. In drawing rooms, the few times I have had occasion to set foot there, I felt like “either a housekeeper or an idiot” (this, reformulated by Cosmo in personal terms, is the recommendation that Prince Andrei offers Pierre Bezukhov against marrying, because he would wind up right in the midst of the social whirl of dances and gossip).
223. On the faces of unctuous people you can see that, depending on what you say to them, they’re equally ready to burst into laughter or tears, and sometimes they can be so quick to change expression that they can anticipate what they think they’ve understood, but have instead misunderstood. At that point, their face will remain uncertain, their eyes speculating about the best next move while their mouth tightens into a seesawing succession of smiling or sorrowful grimaces (Mademoiselle Bourienne, p. 109).
224. “What I need, I won’t ask for; I’ll just take it for myself” (a phrase uttered in a contemptuous tone by Dolokhov—while we’re on the subject, one of my favorite characters in War and Peace, along with Nikolai Bolkonsky and the beautiful Hélène Kuragina—on p. 137. This pride very much matched Cosmo’s character. He was convinced that everyone had to make their way under their own power, that they should not complain, that you should just take the things you desire and be done with it, if you have the strength to do so, that all art was like that, and so was life: there was no point in waiting for kind concessions, if anything, a stroke of luck, for example, to have a little talent, or beauty, or intelligence. One time, commenting on an essay I’d written in class, Cosmo said: “Never offer explanations. Don’t try to justify yourself. The things that you do must be self-evident as you do them, adding them later is a form of deceit. One sentence can’t be helped out by other sentences. You should take your essay and throw it in the rubbish and write it over again from scratch. You should throw it away precisely because it isn’t bad. I know that you write well, but I also know that that’s your main shortcoming. It’s as if your writing is justifying what you wrote, as if it’s absolving it of all sins. Often the ones who write about something are the very people who know and understand least about it, while the people who know remain silent. A superficial experience is easier to report than a profound one, and you are driven to communicate by a force that is inversely proportional to the force of the thing that you are communicating. Those who communicate a great deal, communicate very little.”).
225. I’m not interested in the whys, but the hows (p. 175).
226. The closer we get, the less we see (in this, which could be a general rule of sight, perhaps we can see an implicit reference to the episode of the Battle of Schöngrabern, to whose chaotic unfolding the Russian commander, Prince Bagration, accompanied by Bolkonsky as aide-de-camp, attempts in vain to give a certain meaning with his orders: in the slaughter and smoke and roar of the artillery, no one is any longer capable of understanding what is taking place: “The colonel . . . couldn’t have said with any certainty whether the attack had been repulsed by his regiment or his regiment had been destroyed by the attack.” Uncertainty, random chance, mass scenes that are actually the unpredictable aggregation of individual acts).
227. The things I say seem intelligent while I am preparing them in my mind, and suddenly stupid when they come out of my mouth (Pierre, p. 235).
228. Strange, but I think that perhaps I could have been a good parent. Me? Yes, me. And how? By imitating other parents. Not naturally gifted that way, and possessing no personal inclination, I might easily have chosen the best examples and shamelessly copied them, the way my most ignorant students used to do. The ones who run the greatest risks of failure are, in fact, those who think they know something about it, who think they’re up to the task (if this is a consideration based on War and Peace, I haven’t been able to track down the source in the book with any confidence. Cosmo’s thoughts, like for that matter anyone else’s, hurry quickly away from the source from which they were drawn. Unless the source lies in a note about Prince Vasili Kuragin, accustomed to addressing his daughter Hélène with a tenderness that, Tolstoy writes, did not come spontaneously, but that “in his case had been worked out by imitating other parents,” p. 245).
229. Before the Battle of Austerlitz, Rostov half asleep on horseback, his drowsy head irresistibly sinking down against the animal’s mane: here we have, a good fifty years ahead of its time, and condensed into twenty lines, the famous internal monologue of Molly Bloom in Ulysses (p. 307).
230. Other people’s cheerfulness can be very tiresome and, in the end, induce melancholy (p. 542).
231. At peace, at home, warm and dirty (Pierre in Moscow, p. 627).
232. There are men who purposely put themselves into the most dismal conditions of life in order to have a right to be dismal (about Marshal Davoust, p. 723).
233. When you are asked to forgive something, it means that there was something deserving punishment (p. 739).
234. Take no prisoners: this alone would make war less cruel (paraphrase of thought of Prince Andrei, p. 911, who puts the blame on our hypocritical magnanimity and sensitivity: “Take no prisoners, but kill and be killed!” War should be this and nothing more, without rules and without rights).
235. Every great war aspires to be a war of peacemakers, endowing those who fight with a definitive security and harmony. Every great war is inspired by sound common sense (see the page in which Tolstoy transcribes from Napoleon’s memoirs from St. Helena certain considerations about the Russian campaign, “. . . la plus populaire des temps modernes . . . celle du repos et de la securité de tous,” p. 959 of the Einaudi edition).
236. I believe I know how to die no worse than anyone else (p. 1168).
237. When
a child falls and hurts himself, to console him and to bring a smile promptly back to his face, his mother will scold and smack the floor where he landed (p. 1176. Ah, smacking the floor: how long since I last thought of this delightful practice . . .).
238. Very often in history great armies have ceased to exist without losing any battle (p. 1206. In this last notation taken from War and Peace, perhaps Cosmo wasn’t thinking of military history alone, but rather of single individuals, of their inclination toward self-destruction, each in his fashion. Perhaps he was thinking of himself).
239. The self-suspension of justice has a name, and it is called a pardon. A pardon is always profoundly unjust, arbitrary, capricious: those who receive it have no reason for it to have been given, those who administer it place themselves above all laws.
240. Comforts, luxuries, lavish wastefulness, exclusive rights, and privileges are things you can enjoy only if you’re already filled with joy, only if you are already disposed by your nature to a limitless increase of joy, wealth is a gift that you deserve only if it goes onto a pile of countless other gifts, if in other words the good fortune that has come to you is shameless, boundless, capricious, sublime. Only in that case do riches manage to vanish into an estate, into a vaster, more boundless fortune, until they almost seem part and parcel with the essence of those who enjoy them. In the case, however—and it is a far more common state of affairs—where privilege falls upon someone incapable of accepting it and absorbing it, of letting it vanish into himself because he is made of the exact same material, much as light disappears into a greater light, merging with it, then it remains an excrescence, an outgrowth, an ornament, the display of which has something painful about it. One ought to be that splendor, not just own it. What we often call well-being is a state that is really only well-having. There are some who wear richness like a hunchback, like an artificial limb.
247. As in the story of the merchant who flees to Samarra to escape Death, the original course of one’s life takes detours, twisting, turning roads and random side roads, before reaching its destination, its point of arrival, which, in contrast, has always remained and still remains the same. The effort to stand out against nothingness, which lasted the whole first phase of your existence, is followed by the effort to return to it, disguised as a flight, while it is actually a return.
248. Obstinacy and pride ensure that each of us demands the right to find his own way to death.
249. A part of us pursues the natural route that leads to the terminus of our development, which is to say, extinction, and in the meantime another part tracks back toward the origin, toward the mysterious beginning of that development. A single individual is dragged downstream by the current of the river, like a log, while also wriggling and leaping upstream, trying to climb that same river, like a salmon. These equal and contrary movements are present with equivalent force in sexual desire, which is a lust at the same time for annihilation and for reproduction: it traces its path back to the source of life and rushes headlong toward the earliest possible encounter with the boundaries of death.
251. I have crossed the sea of awareness. How was I able to do it? It was easy: the sea had dried up. Many decades since, perhaps even centuries. The human mind had drunk it dry.
252. When you are immersed in total darkness, the way I am now, it wouldn’t be the wisest thing to reject any offer, albeit of minimal light. But this offer leaves me indifferent. Not, let’s say, skeptical, but cold. Even wisdom strikes me as a pose, or an excuse. Like a mouse caught by surprise, and which looks around wildly for even the tiniest hole in which to take shelter, the excuse in its turn seeks a reason for the fact that it’s failed to gain any hold on me, and ends up finding it precisely in the darkness it was supposed to brighten, and blames it for everything, for my confused mental state, for my reluctance to indulge in revelations. All right, then, in that case, it’s become clear to me that in the darkness I move along at an even greater clip.
253. I hope that nothing of me survives. And yet there is no one so ephemeral, so fleeting, no one of whom not even the slightest trace remains.
254. That which I am not allowed, I desire ten times more ardently. The unattainable glows, full of life: and so that which is dead, that which has vanished forever, is animated with the most intense life.
255. “I love you.” Having said it in my life always meant I was in a state of turmoil, agitated, excited . . . very excited . . . and ready to die.
256. The bourgeois spirit is an ascetic spirit that can never seem to rid itself of the world, in fact, its purpose is to remain there, only at a slightly higher level each time.
257. The people we most detest are those we have done wrong. We no longer want to have anything to do with those to whom we have done some harm.
258. The thing that most often spoils literature is sentimentalism. The second most often, ingenuity.
259. I danced around the Golden Calf as long as there were other people dancing with me, joyously and enthusiastically, intertwining legs and arms, then once I was released from those embraces, I continued to spin and whirl for a while on my own, in the darkness that the torches, now close to flickering out, were no longer bright enough to illuminate, and then I raised my eyes, glazed with the wine whose effects were starting to wear off, gradually, against the glow of dawn that was rising in the wrong part of the sky, and then I realized that the Golden Calf, too, was now gone.
260. You cannot linger at length on the heights of heroism. The excess of virtue that allows a hero to win his magnificent victories, the excess that makes up the splendor in which his figure is shrouded, leads him outside and beyond justice and reason, hurls him into the depths of abuse, perdition, and infamy. And in the end, into death, always a horrendous death. If it were any other way, a cruelly statistical law would intervene in any case, the law of reversion to the mean, according to which once you’ve attained the loftiest summits, you can only go downhill. Glory does not proliferate ad infinitum, otherwise what would be miraculous about it? Little by little, a hero loses his extraordinary qualities, he shrinks, his powers fade, until he has returned to normality. And for a hero, normality is damnation.
261. If they asked you to choose, you’d want to be the man hanging up there from the cross. The hero, that is, alone before his fate. But it’s far more likely that you’d be one of the many mingling in the crowd at the foot of the cross.
264. The exclusive sentiment of love, from Romanticism onward, has replaced and surrogated religion, has substituted the religion of love, which is to say, Christianity, leaving space on earth for only one religion that can be practiced collectively, the religion of hatred. The religion of love, therefore, survives as a personal cult, which links single individuals together, in couples or in restricted numbers, while hatred is capable of binding together much vaster groups and entire communities.
265. The very least that you can expect of someone like me who is about to die, who can see the end coming over the edge of the horizon, is that he stop, once and for all, being Manichean.
266. A more boring conversation than the one you might have with a person who does nothing but list the things they like might perhaps be a conversation with someone who instead denounces all the things he detests. The enthusiastic tone of the former is in any case less annoying than the contemptuous smirk of the latter. If we really have to distinguish ourselves according to our tastes, I’d much rather talk to someone who does it with a series of “I just love it!” than someone who unfurls his “I just hate it!”
267. When nostalgia disappears, it doesn’t give way to serenity, it yields to the void. Having forgotten many things from my past doesn’t bring me any particular relief, in part because nothing can justify the bizarre selection according to which I continue to remember some all too vividly, those and those alone, and why? The willful ways of memory are an ironic and disconcerting phenomenon. No one will ever be able to bring order to that archive where the important things have vanished, so
that trifles and trinkets become important, indeed, precious, priceless, and only because they are still there.
269. If I have ever met a person I’d never known before and I have found them to be special, I have always had the sensation of “seeing them again.” The encounter has taken place now, but that person had always been in my life, at a point not yet explored.
270. Every single conversation we have or story we tell always runs the risk of being incomplete but at the same time excessive. We spend half our lives examining the other half.
The Catholic School Page 148
