Anathemas and Admirations (29 page)

Skeptical observations, so rare in the Fathers of the Church, are today regarded as
modern
. Obviously, since Christianity, having played its part — which at its beginnings heralded its end — is now a subject of delectation.

Each time I see a filthy, raving, drunken bum, prostrate with his bottle in the gutter, I think of a future humanity experimenting with its future, and pulling it off.

Though seriously deranged, he utters nothing but banalities. Occasionally a remark that borders on cretinism and genius. Dislocation of the mind must indeed serve some purpose.

When you imagine you have reached a certain degree of detachment, you regard as histrionic all zealots, including the founders of .religions. But doesn’t detachment, too, have a histrionics of its own? If actions are mummery, the very refusal of action is one as well. Yet a noble mummery.

His nonchalance leaves me perplexed and admiring. He shows no haste, follows no direction, generates enthusiasm for no subject. As if at birth he had swallowed a tran-quilizer whose effect has never worn off, and which allows him to preserve his indestructible smile.

Pity the man who, having exhausted his reserves of scorn, no longer knows what to feel about others, about himself!

Cut off from the world, having broken with all his friends, he read me — with an almost indispensable Russian accent, given the situation — the beginning of the Book of Books. Reaching the moment where Adam gets himself expelled from paradise, he fell silent, dreamily staring into the distance while I thought to myself, more or less distinctly, that after millennia of false hopes, humanity, furious at having cheated, would finally receive the meaning of the curse and thereby make itself worthy of its first ancestor.

If Meister Eckhart is the only “scholastic” who is still readable, it is because in him profundity is matched by charm, by
glamour
— an advantage rare in periods of intense faith.

Listening to some oratorio, how can we admit that such beseechings, such poignant effusions, conceal no reality and concern no one, that there is nothing behind them, and that they must vanish forever
into thin air?

In a Hindu village where the inhabitants wove cashmere shawls, a European manufacturer made an extended stay while examining the weavers’ unconscious methods. Having studied them thoroughly, he revealed them to these simple souls, who thereupon lost all spontaneity and became, indeed, very poor workers. Excess of deliberation frustrates all actions. To expatiate upon sexuality is to sabotage it altogether. Eroticism, scourge of deliquescent societies, is an offense against instinct, an organized impotence. We do not reflect with impunity upon exploits that dispense with reflection. Orgasm has never been a philosophical event.

My dependence on climate will forever keep me from acknowledging the autonomy of the will Meteorology determines the color of my thoughts. One cannot be more crudely determinist than I am, but I am helpless to alter the case. . . . Once I forget I have a body, I believe in freedom, but I immediately abandon such belief when my body calls me back to order and imposes its miseries and its whims. Montesquieu belongs here: “Happiness or misery consists in a certain arrangement of organs.”

Had I done what I intended, would I be happier today? Certainly not. Having set out to travel far, toward the extremity of myself, I have begun, on the way, to doubt my task, all tasks.

It is under the effect of a suicidal mood that one usually becomes infatuated by a person, an idea. What a light cast upon the essence of love and of fanaticism!