There's a tiredness of abstract inteligence, and it's the most horrible
of tirednesses. It doesn't weight on you like the tiredness of the body,
nor does it worry you like the tiredness of knowledge and emotion. It's
a weightiness of the conscience of the world, an inability of the soul
to breathe.
-
The idea of any social obligation, just the idea of it embarrasses my thoughts for a day, and sometimes it's since the day
before that I worry, and don't sleep well, and the real affair, when it
happens, is absolutely insignificant and justifies nothing; and the case
repeats itself and I never learn to learn.
-
Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law
of things we know. Every day they're mentioned and forgotten, and the
same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their
secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can't be
explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the
broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.
-
For the moment being, given that we live in society, the only duty of
superior men is to reduce to a minimum their participation in the
tribe's life. Not to read newspapers, or read them only to know about
whatever unimportant and curious is going on. / [...] The supreme
honorable state for a superior man is in not knowing who is the Head of
State of his country, or if he lives under a monarchy or a republic. /
All his attitude must be setting his soul so that the passing of things,
of events doesn't bother him. If he doesn't do it he will have to take
an interest in others in order to take care of himself.
-
.. And I, who timidly hate life, fear death with fascination. I fear
this nothingness that could be something else, and I fear it as nothing
and as something else simultaneously, as if gross horror and
non-existence could coincide there, as if my coffin could entrap the
eternal breathing of a bodily soul, as if immortality could be tormented
by confinement. The idea of hell, which only a satanic soul could have
invented seems to me to have derived from this sort of confusion - a
mixture of two different fears that contradict and contaminate each
other.
-
I have now so many fundamental thoughts, so many really metaphysical
things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write more,
not to think more, but allow the fever of saying to make me sleepy, and
fondle, with closed eyes, as if to a cat, all that I could have said.
-
To be understood is to prostitute yourself.
