Anathemas and Admirations (61 page)

What I
know
wreaks havoc upon what I
want
.

Returning home after a cremation: instant devaluation of Eternity and all the other great words.

Nameless prostration, then dilation beyond the limits of the world and the resistance of the mind.

The thought of death enslaves those whom it haunts. It liberates only at the beginning; then it degenerates into an obsession, thereby ceasing to be a thought.

The world is an accident of God,
accidens Dei
. How right the formula of Albertus Magnus seems!

By virtue of depression we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

In our veins flows the blood of monkeys. If we were to think of it often, we should end by giving up. No more theology, no more metaphysics — which comes down to saying no more divagations, no more arrogance, no more excess, no more anything. . . .

Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by
someone else?

Tolstoy’s excuse as a preacher is that he had two disciples who derived the practical consequences of his homilies: Wittgenstein and Gandhi, The first gave away his possessions; the second had none to give away.

The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it, Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?

There comes a moment when one imitates nothing more than oneself.

When you waken with a start and long to get back to sleep, you must dismiss every impulse of thought, any shadow of an idea. For it is the formulated idea, the distinct idea, that is sleep’s worst enemy.

A hair-raising figure, the misunderstood man brings everything back to himself. His sneers fail to counterbalance the praises that he never ceases to grant himself and that exceed those not offered him. O for the lucky ones — rare, it is true — who, having triumphed, are able on occasion to stand aside! In any case, they do not exhaust themselves in recriminations, and their vanity consoles us for the arrogance of the misunderstood.