“I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside.” This remark of a mental patient weighs more heavily than a whole stack of works of introspection.
When everything stales around us, how tonic our curiosity to know how we lose our reason!
If only we could abandon at will the nothingness of apathy for the dynamism of remorse!
Compared to the kind that lies ahead of me, the boredom inhabiting me now seems so gratifyingly intolerable that I dread consuming its terrors.
In a world without melancholy, nightingales would belch.
If someone incessantly drops the word “life,” you know he’s a sick man.
We are interested in Time because we are snobs of the Irreparable.
How long does it take to be initiated into depression, cottage industry of the Vague? Some require only a second, others a lifetime.
Many times I have sought refuge in that lumber room which is Heaven, many times I have yielded to the need to suffocate in God!
I am myself only above or beneath myself, in rage or prostration; on my habitual level, I am unaware that I exist.
It is not easy to acquire a neurosis; should you succeed, you possess a fortune which everything favors: victories as well as defeats.
We can function only with regard to a limited duration: a day, a week, a month, a year, ten years, or a lifetime. But if, by mischance, we refer our actions to Time, time and actions evaporate: that is the venture into the Void, the genesis of the Negative.
Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth …
Awareness of time: assault on time …
Thanks to depression — that alpinism of the indolent — we scale every summit and daydream over every precipice from our bed.
To be bored is to guzzle time.
The armchair, with so much to answer for, that promoter of our “soul.”
Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.
How easily one would accommodate one-self to sorrows if one’s reason or one’s liver did not succumb to them.
I’ve sought my own model within myself. As for imitating it, I’ve relied on the dialectic of indolence. It is so much pleasanter not to accomplish oneself!
To have devoted to the idea of death all the hours which any vocation demands … Metaphysical outbursts are the attribute of monks, debauchees, and bums. A job would have turned Buddha into a mere malcontent.
Compel men to lie down for days on end: couches would succeed where wars and slogans have failed. For the operations of Ennui exceed in effectiveness those of weapons and ideologies.
Our disgusts? — Detours of the disgust with ourselves.
When I catch myself nursing an impulse to Revolt, I take a sleeping pill or consult a psychiatrist. Any means will do if you pursue Indifference without being predisposed to it.
Premise of idlers, those born metaphysicians, the Void is the certainty discovered — at the end of their career, and as a reward for their disappointments— by honest people and professional philosophers.
In proportion as we liquidate our shames, we discard our masks. The day comes when the game ends: no more shames, no more masks. And no more public. — We have presumed too much on our secrets, on the vitality of our woes.
I have daily converse with my skeleton — something my flesh will never forgive.
What spoils joy is its lack of rigor; on the other hand, just consider the logic of gall.
If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing it.
I gallivant through the days like a prostitute in a world without sidewalks.
You side with life only when you utter — with all your heart — a banality.
Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.
Has your life amounted to something? — You will never know pride.
We take refuge behind our countenance; the madman is betrayed by his. He offers himself, denounces himself to others. Having lost his mask, he publishes his anguish, imposes it on the first comer, parades his enigmas. So much indiscretion is irritating … It is only natural that we consign him to strait jackets and isolation wards.
Any and all water is the color of drowning.
Call it insensitivity or a passion for remorse, I have never undertaken to rescue what little Absolute this world contains.
Becoming: an agony without an ending.
Unlike pleasures, pains do not lead to satiety. There is no blasé leper.
Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.
Nothing flatters us so much as an obsession with death; the obsession, not death.
Those hours when it seems futile to get up sharpen my curiosity about the Incurable. Nailed to their beds, and to the Absolute, how much they must know about everything! But I approach them by no more than the virtuosities of torpor, the ruminations of a lazy morning.
As long as boredom is confined to affairs of the heart, everything is still possible; once it spreads into the sphere of judgment, we are done for.
We rarely meditate in a standing position, still less walking. It is from our insistence on maintaining the vertical that Action is born; hence, to protest its misdeeds, we ought to imitate the posture of corpses.
Despair is misery’s flaunt, a form of provocation, a philosophy for indiscreet epochs.
We no longer dread tomorrow once we learn to take Nothingness into our arms. Boredom works wonders: it converts vacuity into substance, it is itself a fostering void.
The older I grow, the less I enjoy performing my little Hamlet. Already I no longer know, with regard to death, which torment to try …
Occident
Modern pride: I have lost the friendship of a man I esteemed, having insistently reminded him I was more degenerate than he.
In vain the West seeks a form of final agony worthy of its past.
Don Quixote represents a civilization’s youth: he made up events; — and we don’t know how to escape those besetting us.
The East has consulted flowers and renunciation. Our response? Machines and effort, and that galloping melancholy — the West’s last spasm.
How sad to see great nations begging for a little extra future!
Our epoch will be marked by the romanticism of the stateless. Already apparent is the image of a universe in which no one will have droit de cité.
Inside every citizen nowadays lies a future alien.
A millennium of warfare consolidated the West; a century of “psychology” has ripped it to tatters.
By means of sects, the mob participates in the Absolute, and a nation manifests its vitality. It was sects, in Russia, which prepared the revolution, the Slavic deluge.
Once Catholicism offered its splendid rigor, sclerosis set in; yet its career is not over: it can still wear mourning for Latinity.
Our disease being history’s, the disease of history’s eclipse, we must fall back on Valéry’s remark, must exacerbate its bearing: we know, now, that all civilization is mortal, that we are hurtling toward horizons of apoplexy, toward the miracles of the worst, toward the golden age of terror.
By the intensity of its conflicts, the sixteenth century is closer to us than any other; yet I see no Luther, no Calvin in our time. Compared to those giants, and to their contemporaries, we are pygmies promoted, by the fatality of knowledge, to a monumental destiny. — If we lack style, we nonetheless score one point over them: in all their tribulations they had the excuse, the cowardice, of counting themselves among the elect. For them Predestination, the one still-tempting Christian idea, retained its double face. For us, there are no more elect.
Listen to Germans and Spaniards explain themselves; your ears will be ringing with the same old refrain: tragic, tragic… It is their way of making you understand their calamities or their stagnations, their style of success …
Now turn to the Balkans; in every sentence you will hear: destiny, destiny… By which certain peoples, too close
to their origins, camouflage their ineffectual depressions. It is the discretion of troglodytes.
From contact with the French, one learns to be unhappy politely.
The nations which lack the taste for dalliance, for frivolity and approximation, which live their verbal exaggerations, are a catastrophe for the others — and for themselves. They lay stress on bagatelles, inject seriousness into the accessory and tragedy into trifles. Because they are still encumbered with a passion for fidelity and with a hateful repugnance to betrayal, there is nothing more to be hoped from them, save their ruin. In order to correct their merits, to remedy their depths, they must be converted to the South and be inoculated with the virus of Farce.
Had Napoleon occupied Germany with the citizens of Marseilles, the face of the world would be altogether different.
Might the solemn nations be meridionalized? The future of Europe hangs on this question. If the Germans return to their labors as before, the West is doomed; similarly if the Russians fail to recover their old love of sloth. With the former as with the latter, we must encourage a taste for the farniente, for apathy and siesta, luring them both with the delights of versatility and decay.
… Otherwise be resigned to the solutions which Prussia, or Siberia, will inflict upon our dilettantism.
There is no enthusiasm and no evolution which fail to be destructive, at least at their moments of intensity.
Heraclitus defies time with his becoming; Bergson’s joins the gullible experiments, philosophy’s old toys.
Happy those monks who, late in the Middle Ages, ran from town to town announcing the end of the world! Was the fulfillment of their prophecies … delayed? At least they could vent their passions, give free rein to their terrors, releasing them upon the crowd; — illusory therapeutics in an age like ours, when panic, now among our mores, has lost its virtues.
To control men, you must practice their vices and add to them. Consider the popes: as long as they fornicated, gave themselves up to incest and murder, they ruled their age; and the church was omnipotent. No sooner did they respect its precepts than they declined, and still do: abstinence, like moderation, has been fatal to them; now that they’re respectable, who fears them? Edifying twilight of an institution.
A prejudice in favor of honor is the feature of a rudimentary civilization. It vanishes with the advent of lucidity, with the regime of cowards, of those who, having “understood” everything, have nothing left to defend.
For three centuries, Spain jealously guarded the secret of Ineffectuality; today this secret is possessed by all Western nations; they have not filched it, they have discovered it by their own efforts, by introspection.
By barbarity, Hitler attempted to save an entire civilization. His enterprise was a failure; — it was nonetheless the West’s last initiative.
No doubt Europe deserved something better. Who is to blame if it could not produce a higher-quality monster?
Rousseau was a scourge for France, comparable to Hegel for Germany. As indifferent to hysteria as to systems, England has come to terms with mediocrity; her “philosophy” has established the value of sensation; her politics, that of the affair. Empiricism was her answer to the Continent’s lucubrations; Parliament, her challenge to Utopia, to all heroic pathologies.
No political equilibrium without first-rate nonentities. Who provokes catastrophes? Those possessed by restlessness, the impotent, the insomniacs, the failed artists who have worn a crown, a uniform, or a saber, and, worst of all, the optimists, those who hope on others’ backs.
There is a lack of elegance in overdoing bad luck; certain individuals, like certain nations, indulge in it so deeply that they dishonor tragedy.
Lucid minds, in order to give an official character to their lassitude and impose it upon others, ought to constitute themselves into a League of Disappointment. Thereby they might succeed in attenuating the pressure of history, in rendering history optional.
Be that as it may, I have worshiped and abhorred numerous nations; — it has never entered my mind to deny the Spaniard I'd have loved to be …
I — Vacillating instincts, corroded beliefs, obsessions, and anility: everywhere conquerors in retreat, rentiers of heroism confronting the young Alarics who lie in wait for Rome and Athens; everywhere paradoxes of the lymphatic. There was a time when salon sallies traversed whole countries, foiled stupidity or refined it. Europe, coquettish and intractable, was in the flower of her age; — decrepit today, Europe excites no one. Even so, certain barbarians await their chance to inherit the finery, impatient at her long agony.
II — France, England, Germany; Italy perhaps. The rest… By what accident does a civilization stop? Why did Dutch painting or Spanish mysticism flourish only a moment? So many peoples who survive their own genius! Hence, their decline is tragic; but that of France, of Germany, and of England proceeds from an inner irreparability, from the completion of a process, from a task fulfilled; it is natural, explicable, deserved. Could it have been otherwise? These countries have prospered and have ruined themselves together, by a spirit of rivalry, of fraternity, and of hatred; yet, over the rest of the globe, the fresh rabble was storing up energies, multiplying, waiting …
Tribes with imperious instincts were agglutinating in order to form a great power; the moment comes when, resigned and ramshackle, they sigh for a subaltern role. When one no longer invades, one consents to be invaded. Hannibal’s drama was to be born too soon; a few centuries later, he would have found Rome’s gates open. The Empire was vacant, like Europe in our time.
III — We have all had a taste of the West’s disease: art, love, religion, war — we know too much about them all to believe in them now; then too, so many centuries have worn them down … The epoch of the finite in plenitude is past; the substance of poems? Exhausted. — To love? Even the riffraff repudiates “sentiment.” Piety? Search the cathedrals; only ineptitude kneels there now. Who still wants to do battle? The hero is out-of-date; only impersonal carnage holds sway. We are clairvoyant puppets, scarcely capable of performing our curtsies before the irremediable.
The West? A potential without a future.
IV — Unable to defend our wits against muscles, we shall be less and less fit for any purpose whatever: the first comer will bind us hand and foot. Contemplate the West: overflowing with knowledge, with dishonor, with phlegm. To this was to come the crusaders, the knights, the pirates: to the stupor of a mission accomplished.
When Rome called back her legions, she was unaware of History and the lessons of twilight. Such is not our case. What grim Messiah is about to fall upon us!
Whether out of inadvertence or incompetence, he who however briefly halts humanity on its march is humanity’s benefactor.
Catholicism created Spain only the better to smother her: a country one travels to in order to admire the Church and to divine the pleasure that can be taken in murdering a priest.
The West is making progress, timidly sporting its senility — and already I feel less envy of those who, having seen Rome founder, believed they were enjoying a unique and intransmissible desolation.
The truths of humanism, the confidence in mankind and all the rest, still possess only the vigor of fictions, only a prosperity of shadows. The West was these truths; it is no more than these fictions, these shadows. As helpless as they, it has not been given to the West to vivify them. It drags them along, exposes them, but no longer imposes them; they have ceased to be threatening. Hence, those who cling to humanism make use of an exhausted expression, without an affective support — a spectral substantive.
This continent of ours may not have played its last card after all. What if it were to set about demoralizing the rest of the world, spreading its corruptions there? — That would be, for Europe, a way of preserving its prestige a little longer, exerting its influence.
In the future, if humanity is to begin again, it will do so with its failures, with the Mongols of the entire globe, with the dregs of the continents; a paro
dy civilization will appear which those who produced the real one will observe quite impotent, ashamed, prostrate, in order to take refuge, ultimately, in an idiocy where they will forget the glamour of their disasters.
The Circus of Solitude
I
You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.
I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I’d have killed myself right away.
The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.
To nourish in destitution a tyrant’s bad temper; to seethe beneath a repressed cruelty; to loathe oneself for lack of subalterns to massacre, of an empire to terrorize; to be a needy Tiberius …
The irritating thing about despair is its obviousness, its visibility, its “documentation”: what is it but reportage? Consider hope, on the contrary — its generosity in what is false, its mania for affabulation, its rejection of the event: an aberration, a fiction. And it is in this aberration that life resides and upon this fiction that it feeds.
All Gall Is Divided_The Aphorisms of A Legendary Iconoclast Page 3
