Anathemas and Admirations (2 page)

Amateur paleontologist, I have spent several months pondering the skeleton. Result: no more than a few pages. . . . The subject, it is true, scarcely warrants prolixity.

Applying the same treatment to a poet and a thinker strikes me as a lapse in taste. There are realms from which philosophers ought to abstain. To dissect a poem as if it were a system is a crime, even a sacrilege. Oddly enough, the poets exult when they do not understand the pronouncements made upon them. The jargon flatters them, gives them the illusion of preferment. Such weakness demeans them to the level of their glossators.

To Buddhism (indeed, to the Orient in general), Nothingness does not have the rather grim signification we attribute to it. It is identified with a limit-experience of light or, if you like, with a state of luminous absence, an everlasting radiant void: Being that has triumphed over all its properties, or rather non-Being supremely positive in that it dispenses bliss without substance, without substratum, without support in any world at all.

Solitude: so fulfilling that the merest rendezvous is a crucifixion.

Hindu philosophy pursues deliverance; Greek — with the exception of Pyrrho, Epicurus, and a few unclassifiable figures — is a disappointment: it seeks only . . . truth.

Nirvana has been compared to a mirror that no longer reflects any object. To a mirror, then, forever pure, forever unemployed.

Christ having named Satan “Prince of this world,” Saint Paul, to go one better, struck home: “God of this world.” When such authorities designate our ruler by name, who is entitled to
disinherited
status?

Man is free, save for his depths. On the surface, he does as he likes; down there,
will
is a meaningless syllable.

To disarm the envious, we should take to the streets on crutches. Only the spectacle of our collapse can humanize, to some extent, our friends and our enemies.

Rightly, in every age it is assumed we are witnessing the disappearance of the last traces of the earthly paradise.

Christ again: according to one Gnostic source, he ascended— in abhorrence of
fatum
— to trouble celestial arrangements and to prevent any questioning of the heavenly bodies. In such confusion, what can have happened to my poor star?

Kant waited until the last days of his old age to perceive the dark side of existence and to indicate “the failure of any rational theodicy.” . . . Others have been luckier: to them this occurred even before they began to philosophize.