Anathemas and Admirations (21 page)

He has been living his last days for months, for years, and speaks of his end in the past tense. A posthumous existence. I am amazed that, eating virtually nothing, he manages to survive: “My body and my soul have taken so much time and so much effort to get together that they can’t succeed in separating.” If he doesn’t have the voice of a dying man, it is because it has been so long now that he is no longer “in life.” “I am a snuffed candle” is the most accurate thing he said about his latest metamorphosis. When I suggested the possibility of a miracle, “It would take more than one” was his reply.

After fifteen years of absolute solitude, Saint Seraphinus of Sarow would exclaim, in the presence of any visitor at all, “O my joy!” Who, continually rubbing up against his kind, would be so extravagant as to greet them thus?”

To survive a destructive book is no less painful for the reader than for the author.

We must be in a state of receptivity — that is, of physical weakness — for words to touch us, to insinuate themselves into us and there begin a sort of career.

To be called a deicide is the most flattering insult that can be addressed to an individual or to a people.

Orgasm is a paroxysm; despair, too. One lasts an instant; the other, a lifetime.

She had the profile of Cleopatra. Seven years later, she might just as well be begging on the street. Enough to cure you forever of idolatry, of any craving to seek the
unfathomable
in a pair of eyes, in a smile, etc.

Let us be reasonable. No one can see through everything completely. Nor, without universal disillusion, can there be universal knowledge, either.

What is not heartrending is superfluous, at least in music.

Brahms represents
“die
Melancholie des Unvermögens.”
the melancholy of impotence, according to Nietzsche. This judgment, passed on the brink of the philosopher’s collapse, forever dims its luster.

To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.

Those imbecilic people one passes —how have they come to this? And how to imagine such a spectacle in antiquity — in Athens, for example? One moment of acute lucidity among these damned souls, and all illusions collapse.

The more you loathe humanity, the riper you are for God, for a dialogue with no one.