Anathemas and Admirations (28 page)

This thinker has taken refuge in prolixity as others do in stupor.

When you have circled around a subject for a certain amount of time, you can immediately offer a judgment on any work that relates to it. I have just opened a book on the gnostics, and I immediately perceived that it was quite unreliable. Yet I read only one sentence and am only a dilettante, an incompetent in such matters.

Now imagine an absolute specialist, a monster — God, for example: whatever we do must to Him seem botched, even our inimitable successes, even those that ought to humiliate and embarrass Him.

Between Genesis and Apocalypse imposture reigns. It is important to know this, for once assimilated, such dizzying evidence renders all formulas for wisdom superfluous.

If you have had the weakness to write a book, you will not fail to admire that Hasidic rabbi who abandoned the project of writing one since he was not sure he could do so exclusively for the pleasure of his Creator.

If the Hour of Disappointment were to sound for everyone at the same time, we should see an entirely new version, either of paradise or of hell.

Impossible to enter into a
dialogue
with physical pain.

To withdraw indefinitely into oneself, like God after the six days. Let us imitate Him, on this point at least.

The light of dawn is the true, primordial light. Each time I observe it, I bless my sleepless nights, which afford me an occasion to witness the spectacle of the Beginning. Yeats calls it “sensuous” — a fine discovery, and anything but obvious.

Learning that he was going to marry soon, I decided to conceal my amazement by a generality: “Everything is compatible with everything.” To which he replied, “You’re right, since man is compatible with woman,”

A flame traverses the blood. To go over to the other side, circumventing death.

That favorable look one assumes on the occasion of a blow of fate. . . .

At the climax of a performance superfluous to specify, one longs to exclaim
“Consummatum est.”
The clichés of the Gospels, and singularly of the Passion, are always good to have at hand for those moments when you might imagine you could do without them.