Radical Shadows Page 25
September 1 1960
God, “our old neighbor,” as Emily Dickinson calls him.
September 1 1960
Adam was just a beginner, it is Cain who remains our universal sovereign, the true ancestor of our race.
April 4 1962
My strength: to have found no answer to anything.
October 11 1962
To live is to be capable of indignation. The sage is a man who no longer protests. Hence he is not above but alongside life.
October 22 1962
When I think that in my youth I regarded the anarchist as humanity’s fulfillment! Is it progress or is it decline to have arrived at a resignation which makes me consider any act of rebellion as a sign of infantilism?
And yet, if I no longer rebel, I continue to be indignant (which perhaps comes down to the same thing). This is because life and indignation are virtually equivalent terms. Nothing that is alive is neutral. Neutrality is a victory over life, not life.
October 26 1962
Proust’s system of three adjectives which seem to cancel each other out and which actually complete each other. One example among hundreds, among thousands. Charlus’ irony is characterized as: “bitter, dogmatic, and exasperated.”
November 13 1962
“Sadness will last forever.” These seem to have been Van Gogh’s last words. I could have spoken them at any moment of my life.
November 13 1962
I am part Slav, and part Magyar, not Latin at all.
December 19 1962
I, I, I—how tiring!
December 31 1962
The moment I am well, inspiration abandons me, even subjects founder. With good reason have I been crucially influenced by Pascal’s answer to his sister when she urged him to seek medical attention: “For you do not know the disadvantages of health and the advantages of disease.”
How well I remember reading that, in the library of the Carol Foundation in Bucharest—I had to struggle to keep from crying out.
December 31 1962
No friend ever tells us the truth. That is why only the silent dialogue with our enemies is fruitful.
February 1 1963
The role of insomnia in history. From Caligula to Hitler. Is the inability to sleep the cause or the consequence of cruelty? The tyrant lies awake: that is what defines him as such.
April 7 1963
I hate the young, those who remind me of my past enthusiasms.
April 7 1963
A defense of France: a nation of misers cannot be superficial.
June 1963
My cowardice in the face of life is congenital: I have always had a horror of any responsibility, any task—an instinctive horror of whatever did not immediately concern me. The contrary of a “leader.” And if, when young, I often envied God, was it not because God, being over all, seemed to me Irresponsibility itself?
October 1963
Insomnia.
“When the bird of sleep sought to nest in the pupil of my eye, he saw my lashes and feared the net.” (Ben al-Hammara, twelfth-century Andalusian poet.)
November 5 1963
Terrible night, like so many others. I take too many pills; my system no longer endures them. I should leave my ills in peace.
December 1963
Reread a few poems by Emily Dickinson. Moved to tears. Everything that comes from her has the capacity to overwhelm me.
February 1964
Yesterday evening, at the Church of Saint-Roch, The Messiah. Two hours of jubilation. I am ashamed of having put so much stock in depression for so many years. True, I do so effortlessly (and daily), whereas I could count on my fingers the times I have really known jubilation. But then I was the Soul of the World.
February 1964
The melancholy of being understood—for a writer, there is none greater.
March 21 1964
“A polymorphous pervert”—Freud’s admirable definition of the child.
April 1 1964
A fit of melancholy which the Devil himself would envy.
April 1964
During my peregrinations in the Jura I saw a cat hit by a car, which flung it high in the air. It uttered an unforgettable cry; then lay there motionless beside the road staring into space; that stare, too, was unforgettable.
January 1 1965
The Jews, because ill-treated by the Gothic kings, “collaborated” with the Arabs when they invaded and occupied Spain. When the occupation began, they took over police functions in the towns. Seven centuries later, the Catholic kings ordered their expulsion. (And it’s the Jews who are accused of having too good a memory, unable to forgive or forget!) Impossible not to discover constants in history. What the eighteenth century called “fanaticism,” “superstition.” But these flaws are not the appanage of religion, since one discovers them in any form of faith, wherever there is any kind of enthusiasm.
January 4 1965
I am metaphysically Jewish.
January 4 1965
Job—my patron.
January 4 1965
I shall never console myself for the mediocrity of my enemies.
April 5 1965
The antidote to boredom is fear. The remedy must be stronger than the disease. My whole life will have been nothing but a vacillation between the two.
June 23 1965
Sleepless night.
Insomnia dries up my veins and strips me of what little substance is left in my bones. Hours tossing in bed with no hope of ever losing consciousness, of drifting off into sleep. A real pillage of body and mind.
June 25 1965
The enormous sadness in the eyes of a gorilla. An elegiac animal. It is from this stare that I am descended.
Insomnia, insomnia.
What is odd about these nights is how one manages to be reconciled with death. For such reconciliation is, or should be, the supreme goal of humanity.
October 1965
I have almost always ended by adopting the opinions of those I most opposed. (The Iron Guard [the Romanian extreme-right movement], which I had detested at the start, became for me a phobic obsession.) Having attacked Joseph de Maistre, I suffered his contagion. The enemy insidiously triumphs over a man without character. By dint of thinking against someone or something, you become its prisoner, and reach the point of loving that servitude.
October 27 196
The ultimate simplification—Death.
October 27 1965
The sick humor of the vanquished.
October 27 1965
There is something worse than anti-Semitism: anti-anti-Semitism.
November 22 1965
“Nature is a haunted house, art a house that tries to be haunted” (Emily Dickinson).
November 29 1965
Someone telephones to ask if I know a Romanian writer named Mihail Sebastian, whose mother happens to be in Paris … I was stirred. Sebastian had just been appointed Cultural Attaché to Paris when he was run over by a truck during the Liberation. He would have had a great career, for it is hard to imagine a Romanian more French than he. What a fine mind; what an admirable, distraught man! And he is unknown. And here I am complaining all day long and cursing my fate, what a lesson! One must get used to thinking about the injustices others suffer in order to be able to forget one’s own. I shouldn’t complain, I’m not entitled to; on the other hand, I can hardly utter hosannas. I must find the right tone between horror and jubilation.
January 5 1966
I learned at a dinner last night that Paul Celan has just been confined to a sanitarium after having tried to kill his wife. Coming home late that night, I was overcome by a real fit of terror and had a terrible time falling asleep. Waking this morning, I encountered the same fear (or anguish, if you like), which never slept at all. He had great charm, this impossible man. So complicated and difficult to know, but whom one forgave everything once one forgot his unfair, senseless grievances against everyone.
January 5 1966
/> Around 1934 I happened to be in Munich. I was living under a tension which even now, when I think about it, makes me shudder. It seemed to me then that it wouldn’t take much for me to found a religion, and that possibility filled me with the greatest terror … Since then I have calmed down … dangerously so.
February 12 1966
Romanians. Upon contact with us, everything turns frivolous, even our Jews. We have sterilized them, we have made them lose their genius, especially their religious genius. No miraculous rabbis among us, no Hasidism. The visceral skepticism of our race has been deadly. Their sojourn among us more pernicious than an assimilation. We have made them almost as superficial as ourselves; anything more, and we might have assimilated them altogether.
May 19 1966
For some, the prospect of dying (Proust, Hitler …) impels them to a frenzy of activity: they want to conclude everything, complete their work, and thereby become eternal; not a moment to lose, they are stimulated by the notion of their end—for others, the same prospect paralyzes them, leads them to a sterile sagesse, and keeps them from working: what’s the use? The idea of their end flatters their apathy, instead of disturbing it; whereas among the first group, it rouses every energy, good as well as bad.
Who is right here, where is reason? It is hard to say, especially since both reactions are justified. Everything depends on our inclinations, on our nature. In order to really know someone, you have to know what the thought of his end releases in him: is it exciting or benumbing? Lucky those who set to work because they think they’re going to die, who in this idea find a truly dynamic impulse! Less fortunate those who lay down their arms and wait, for they have too much time to envisage their conclusion. They die during all the moments they dedicate to the idea of death: moribund in the full sense of the word, inexhaustibly moribund.
June 10 1966
My cowardice in the face of the authorities. I lose all my powers in front of anyone in an official position. Whereby I am indeed a descendant of a nation of slaves, defeated and humiliated for centuries. As soon as I am dealing with a uniform, I feel I am in the wrong. How well I understand the Jews! Always living in the margins of the State! Their drama is my own. In truth, descended from a nation whose curse is ordinary, but a curse all the same—I was made to understand a curse par excellence.
How I hate my timidity, my hereditary lack of dignity.—This afternoon I suffered spasms of self-disgust, I actually loathed myself to the point of a murderous frenzy. I wonder sometimes by what miracle I still manage to endure myself. Self-hatred bordering on shrieks or tears.
Whatever I do, I shall never take root in this world.
June 19 1966
Jakob Taubes told me an upsetting thing: the recent ordeals of the Jews have produced no original prayer capable of being adopted by the community and recited in the synagogues.
June 26 1966
How correct Simone Weil’s observation, that Christianity was to Judaism what Catharism must have been with regard to Christianity …
September 2 1966
All nations are accursed. The Jewish people more so than the rest. Its malediction is automatic, obvious, entire. Self-evident.
The Romanian Jew is anti-Romanian; the American Jew anti-American, and so on. But the French Jew is not anti-French. He doesn’t dare. Why?
France has—or rather, has had—a prestige monopoly, creating a prejudice favorable to itself, by which everyone aims to benefit.
October 18 1966
One in the morning—Death of my mother.
I learned about it from a telegram which arrived tonight. She had lived her life. For several months she had betrayed disturbing signs of extreme old age, yet even this morning I received a postcard from her dated October 8th which revealed no mental weakening. She wrote that she was suffering from a depression which she was told, she added, was merely that of old age.—Tonight, J. M. came over. We were celebrating his birthday. Someone rang; I did not go to the door. A few minutes later I went to see if there was a message, or something. Nothing. An hour later, having gone to look for a book, I saw a telegram had been slipped under the door. I already knew what was in it before I opened it. I came back into the room without a word about what had happened. But around eleven o’clock J. M. said he was leaving, that I must be tired, that I was pale. Nonetheless, I concealed my distress as best I could, and I think I was quite gay the whole time. But a secret struggle must have been going on within me, which appeared in my face.
Everything good and bad in me, everything I am, I get from my mother. I have inherited her illnesses, her depression, her contradictions, everything. Physically I resemble her, feature for feature. Everything she was is aggravated and exacerbated in me. I am her success and her defeat.
November 3 1966
It is snowing. The city is completely white, buried. How well I understand the Russian abulia, the aciaïnya, Oblomov, Katorga and the Orthodox Church!
November 30 1966
Types I resemble: Oblomov, Kirilov, Adolphe and … Only more cowardly, more hopeless.
November 7 1966
Paul Bourget (c. 1910?): “Four barriers separate us from barbarism: the German General Staff, the English House of Lords, the French Institute and the Vatican.”
December 14 1966
Brooding over the years 1933/34/35, I remember the madness which came over me, my excessive ambitions, my “political” delirium, my positively demented aims—what vitality in derangement! I was tirelessly crazy. Now I am crazy and tired. To tell the truth, I am not even crazy, I merely preserve the residue of my old madness. Fatigue, of course, far from having withdrawn, is on the contrary expanding, in full swing. Where it will take me, I have no idea.
December 17, 1966
Hitler’s marriage with Eva Braun took place a few hours before their suicide. An official was hurriedly summoned, and asked each of them separately the obligatory question: “Are you Aryan?” They answered in the affirmative. If Hitler had said: “No,” that would have been the most extraordinary answer in History.
December 29 1966
I have read a book about Treblinka. Fantastic nightmare, scarcely imaginable. Absolute, mechanical horror; the system. All these books are alike. The executioners are puppets, bureaucrats; conventional genre: poor bastard; the officers always “handsome” with the inevitable sarcastic smile; academicism of the horrible; equal forfeiture of the torturers and their victims. Nonetheless, always intense, one’s astonishment at the impenetrable fate of the Jews. All other nations have a history, they alone a destiny.
January 5 1967
My affinities with the Jewish mind. A taste for mockery, a certain tendency toward self-destruction, unhealthy obsessions; aggressiveness; depression tempered or aggravated by sarcasm, depending on the hour; weakness for prophecy, the sense of always being a victim, even in moments of happiness.
February 4 1967
The scapegoat. We cannot do without it, its existence is required by our biological constitution. Someone must pay for our faults and our failures; if we consider ourselves as alone responsible, what complications, what additional tortures! To have a good conscience, is all that we ask: the scapegoat serves that function. It takes an almost superhuman effort to be able to assume the blame ourselves for everything. But when we have made the effort we have the distinct sensation that we are approaching the truth. Alas! This does not make us more modest, only more vainglorious.
(In fact, today R. J. told me something disagreeable: I came very close to losing my temper. Yet she was right. I made an effort and overcame my angry impulse. To acknowledge oneself as guilty, at fault, sincerely to confess one’s wrongs, to accept every just criticism—that is a rare thing, an event. We are dans le vrai only when we understand our enemies or, harder still, our friends, severer judges.)
February 6 1967
There is a rumor that Paul Celan has committed suicide. This unconfirmed news stirs me more than I can say. For months I too have been
agitated by this “problem.” Not having to solve it, I try to decipher its meaning.
March 13 1967
Progress is a Judeo-Christian idea. The Prophets and the corrected, amended, emasculated Apocalypse are chiefly to blame. The Last Judgement as fulfillment, as crowning achievement: the Last Judgement en rose.
March 28 1967
What the Germans and the Jews have in common: they inspire violent feelings, for or against; never or almost never normal feelings.
March 28 1967
What can be held against the Jews: each of them tends to occupy too much room, nothing satisfies him; and he keeps spreading, manifesting himself. Jews know no limit in anything. That is their strength and their weakness. They go too far in everything, and inevitably they collide with others, those who also seek to advance, but who lack the means.
May 12 1967
The other day at the Collins, I said that all Romanians were imposters. Mounir Hafez asked me: “And do you consider yourself one?”—“In a sense I do,” I answered, without being able to make my point more explicit. What I would have liked to say is that the ordinary imposter, in an excess of lucidity or for some other reason, cannot manage to identify himself with anything at all. To my mind, an imposter is not someone who deliberately claims to be what he is not, but someone who cannot be the expression of anything, who keeps too great a distance from whatever he does to be able to embody an idea or an attitude. He is the man of simulacra, not deliberately but fatally. It should be added that, in everyday speech, this is not what is meant by imposture, which always signifies an intention to deceive.
June 2 1967
Telephone discussion with Ionesco about prospects for the State of Israel, whose viability I question after the recent events [the Six Day War, June 5-June 10]. “Everything must be done but there is nothing to do,” I concluded, since there is a “curse.”
October 30 1967
My love of Bach has overwhelmed me again. I love to listen to him in the dark. I turn off the light and take my pleasure in a tomb. Sometimes it’s as if I were listening to music after my death.
December 5 1967
In her preface to the American edition of The Temptation to Exist, Susan Sontag writes that my essay on the Jews is the most superficial, the most cursory chapter in the book. On the contrary, I believe it is the best, and by far. How lacking in instinct these critics are! Can a text so impassioned be “cursory”? I carried it within myself for years. And what an idea, to declare a thing superficial because one doesn’t like it!