Anathemas and Admirations (64 page)

To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!

On this immaculate page, a gnat was making a dash for it, “Why be in such a hurry? Where are you going, what are you looking for? Relax!” I screamed out in the middle of the night. I would have been so pleased to see it collapse! It’s harder than you think to gain disciples.

To have nothing in common with the Universe, and to wonder by virtue of what disorder one belongs to it.

“Why fragments?” one young philosopher reproached me.

“Out of laziness, out of frivolity, out of disgust — but also for other reasons. . . .”And since I was finding none of these, I launched into prolix explanations that sounded serious to him and that ended by convincing him.

French: the ideal idiom for translating equivocal sentiments with some delicacy.

In a borrowed language, you are
conscious
of words; they exist not in you but outside of you. This interval between yourself and your means of expression explains why it is difficulty even impossible, to be a poet in another language besides your own. How extract a substance from words that are not rooted in you? The newcomer lives on the surface of language; he cannot, in a tongue belatedly learned, translate that subterranean agony from which poetry issues.

Devoured by a nostalgia for paradise, without having known a single attack of true faith. . . .

Bach in his grave. So I shall have seen him (like so many others) by one of those indiscretions so familiar to grave-diggers and journalists; since then I keep thinking of those skulls that have nothing original about them except that they proclaim the nothingness he denied.

So long as there is a single god
standing
, man’s task is not done.

The kingdom of the Insoluble extends as far as the eye can see. Our satisfaction therein is mitigated, however. What better proof that we are contaminated by hope from the start?

After all, I have not wasted my time, I too have fidgeted, like anyone else, in this aberrant universe.

12

Caillois

Fascination of the Mineral

C
AILLOIS’S EARLY STUDIES were entirely
comme il faut,
to the point of acknowledging his reactions as a disciple — witness the pains he takes in the 1939 foreword to
Man and the Sacred
to reassure his masters, asking them to ignore the last pages of the book, where, exceeding the limits of “positive knowledge.” he permits himself several metaphysical developments,, Since at this time he appeared to believe in the history of religions, in sociology and ethnology, he might normally have confined himself to one of these fields and ended his career as a scientist and a scholar. That he took another path was due largely to external circumstances, but as always, they do not account for what is essential It is important to know why, at the outset, he already inclined toward the fragment rather than toward the system, and why, too, he exhibited that horror of massive constructions, that concern for elegance, that felicity of expression, that touch of breathlessness in demonstration, that proportion, finally, of reasoning and rhythm, of theory and seduction. These superior infirmities, these flaws, he might have camouflaged, provided he sacrificed himself, abdicated his singularity (like more than one possessor of “positive knowledge”). Not being disposed to do so, he was to deviate from his first preoccupations, betray or disappoint his masters, follow a personal path, choose diversity, turn away, in short, from science, accessible only to those who know and endure the intoxication of monotony. He would traverse a number of subjects and disciplines — poetry, Marxism, psychoanalysis, dreams, games — never as a dilettante but as an impatient and greedy spirit condemned by irony to
inadhesion
and, frequently, to injustice. One can readily imagine him raging against a theme he has seized upon, a problem he has elucidated, which he will abandon to the scrupulous or the obsessive, as spending any more time on it would strike him as indecent. This exasperation, based on lassitude, exigence, or tact, is the key to his permanent renewal, to his intellectual peregrinations. One cannot help thinking here of a converse procedure, such as that of a Maurice Blanchot, who in the analysis of literary phenomena has brought to the point of heroism or asphyxia the superstition of depth in a rumination that combines the advantages of the vague and the abyss.