Radical Shadows Read online

  December 14 1967

  The Jew the extremely successful synthesis of a Frenchman and a German: vivacity and tenacity mingled and combined.

  The Frenchman has this in common with the Jew: he believes everything is his due.

  January 3 1968

  I have just seen Celan for the first time in a year; he has spent several months in a psychiatric hospital, but doesn’t mention it. This is a mistake, for if he talked about it, he wouldn’t have that embarrassed expression (which one always has when one conceals something crucial which everyone is supposed to know).

  True, it’s never easy to discuss one’s crises. And what crises!

  March 14 1968

  Every noble attitude is false. Insults are unforgivable, except those from strangers; never if they come from a friend or an acquaintance.

  One can forget, one cannot forgive a low blow. All forgiveness is no more than a posturing. What we are made of fails to mix with forgiveness, we are physically unsuited to forgiveness.

  Never hurt anyone: how to manage this? By not manifesting yourself. For every action hurts someone. By abstaining, one spares everyone. But perhaps death is even better than abstention.

  What an extraordinary sensation, for a writer, to be forgotten! To be posthumous in one’s own lifetime, no longer to see one’s name anywhere. For all literature is a question of names and of nothing else. To have a name, the expression speaks volumes (sic). Well then, no longer having a name, if one has ever had such a thing, may be better than having one. Such is the price of freedom. Freedom, and even more: deliVerance. A name—all that remains of a being. It’s stupefying that one can toil and torment oneself for such a trifle.

  April 13 1968

  At noon today I observed to Mounir Hafez that Jews and Germans had this in common: that they couldn’t realize themselves, no, couldn’t establish themselves in history. This was apropos of the State of Israel, whose destruction Mounir foresees in the immediate future (three years, he says; I answer that it will last much longer).

  September 9 1968

  The other day I caught sight of Beckett on a side-path of the Luxembourg; he was reading a newspaper more or less the way one of his characters would do it. He was sitting there on a chair, looking engrossed and absent, the way he usually does. A little sickly too. I didn’t dare approach him. What could I have said? I am very fond of him but it’s better that we don’t speak to each other. He is so discreet! And conversation, being a game, requires a minimum of posturing and unconstraint. But Sam is incapable of that. Everything about him betrays the man of silent monologue.

  November 22 1968

  To understand other people, you must be obsessed by yourself to the point of disgust, such disgust being a symptom of health, a necessary condition in order to look beyond your own troubles.

  November 26 1968

  What I like about Christianity is its morbid side, its institutionalized maladjustment.

  December 13 1968

  Sleepless night.

  Incredible how, in the middle of the night, suicide seems the most normal thing in the world.

  The truth is in neither revolution nor in reaction. It resides in the questioning both of society and of those who attack it.

  After a sleepless night one is almost always a victim of the need to prophesy.

  Health, like freedom, has no positive content, since you don’t consciously enjoy it when you possess it. It contributes nothing to you, it can enrich no one. So it would be absurd to say that someone made some discovery or had some vision because he was feeling well. It is when you feel ill that you discover something new, health being a state of absence, since you are not conscious of it. You would have to be able to tell yourself at any moment at all: I am feeling well, and from this derive a real, conscious well-being. But such consciousness would be in contradiction with health and would merely prove that health is or is about to be compromised. Any conscious health is a threatened health. Health is a good, certainly, but those who possess it have been denied the opportunity of knowing their happiness. And one might speak without exaggeration of a just punishment of the healthy.

  December 20 1968

  Glanced at a book about Saint Paul. Always the same antipathy to this sinister, terrifying figure—whom I understand so well.

  December 29 1968

  My profound interest in the Jews and in everything Jewish. Cases, every one of them. Simone Weil, Kafka. Figures from a world elsewhere. They alone are mysterious. Non-Jews are too obvious.

  “Democracy” is a phenomenon of ageing, let’s say, of maturity, of instinctual apathy (!), of exhaustion. France was ripe for a parliamentary regime after Napoleon. Democracy is possible only if a nation is exhausted by its adventures, if it has lost the taste for provocation and conquest. This is true for many countries, except England. An important qualification, for England is the only country which can allow itself the luxury of conquest and debate. (And the Roman Senate?)

  January 2 1969

  “My life is the hesitation before birth.” (Kafka)

  … As I have always felt.

  January 4 1969

  Kafka: Jewish and ill, hence doubly Jewish or doubly ill.

  January 7 1969

  An historian aptly remarks that the first Christians were not sorry to be taken for Jews, since the religion of the Hebrews was acknowledged by the laws of the Roman Empire. But at the same time, the historian notes, the Christians suffered the effects of the great unpopularity attached to everything Jewish.

  It was during Nero’s persecutions that the division between Christians and Jews became very clear. Nero persecuted only the Christians.

  January 30 1969

  I have just glanced at Kafka’s biography (youth). The pictures of Prague and customs they evoke remind me of Hermannstadt. I lived at the other end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  February 9 1969

  All my life I wanted to be something else: Spanish, Russian, German, cannibal—anything but what I was. In permanent revolt against fate, against my birth. That madness of wanting to be other than what you are, to embrace in theory every condition but your own.

  There is only one word to describe the nation I come from and to which I remain loyal since I recognize in myself all its defects: minor. Not an “inferior” nation, but a nation in which everything occurs in miniature (not to say in caricature), even disaster.

  February 13 1969

  Life is extraordinary, in the sense that the sexual act is extraordinary: during, and not after. Once you position yourself outside of life and consider it from an external point of view, everything collapses, everything seems deception, as after the sexual performance.

  All pleasure is extraordinary and unreal, as is the case for every act of life.

  February 17 1969

  Colette is supposed to have said of Bach: “A sublime sewing-machine.”

  There is nothing worse than Parisian wit.

  Bach’s library included Josephus’s History of the Jews. Understandable for such a great reader of the Bible. And then the Jews are present in his Passions.

  February 21 1969

  At all costs one must free oneself of one’s origins. Loyalty to a tribe must not degenerate into idolatry (the Jews). Nationalism is a sin against the mind—a universal sin, unfortunately.

  The Stoics were not so bad as that, and no one has improved on their conception of man as a citizen of the cosmos.

  However ridiculous we find the notion of progress, Christianity represents an enormous step beyond Judaism: the whole distance from a tribe to humanity.

  Nazism is the spirit of the Old Testament applied to the Germans; Nazism is the German Jehovah.

  February 28 1969

  People reproach me for certain pages of Schimbarea la faţā a României [Transfiguration of Romania], a book written thirty-five years ago! I was twenty-three years old, and crazier than anyone. I glanced at this book yesterday; it seemed to me that I wrote it in a pre
vious existence; in any case, my present self does not recognize itself as the author. Inextricable, one discovers, the problem of, responsibility.

  How many things I was able to believe in my youth!

  For twenty years now—no, for thirty—I have been slandered and pilloried as a reprobate. The strong taste of injustice. In a certain sense, I should not like people to be fair to me. It is much more fruitful to be rejected, and even forgotten, than accepted. I hold no brief for being well regarded by my kind.

  March 1 1969

  You have to let people say what they will. Eventually the truth will be reestablished. Anything is better than humiliation. Injustice is necessary to the mind; it fortifies, cleanses it. A victim is always, with regard to lucidity, above his persecutors. To be a victim is to understand.

  Ionesco, with whom I had a long telephone conversation about the Iron Guard, and to whom I said that I feel a sort of intellectual shame at having allowed myself to be seduced by it, answered very aptly that I “went along” because the movement was “completely crazy.”

  Just met Lucien Goldmann at Gabriel Marcel’s, and afterwards we walked together and then went into a café. He walked me home. A man of certain charm. For twenty years he has given me a reputation of being an anti-Semite, and made enormous difficulties for me. In an hour, we have become friends. How strange life is!

  A Marxist cannot understand boredom as such, anxiety as such. I spoke of this to Goldmann, quoting Pascal. He maintains that the economic and social conditions Pascal lived in have changed, that there is no reason to cling to “anguish.”

  April 2 1969

  Certainly we are marked by the “cultural” (?) space we come from. Transylvania retains a strong Hungarian, “Asiatic” stamp. I am Transylvanian, hence … The older I grow, the more I realize that I belong not only by my origins but also by my temperament to Central Europe. Thirty years’ residence in Paris will not erase the fact of having been born on the periphery of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  April 11 1969

  What I owe to the Iron Guard. The consequences I have had to draw from a simple youthful enthusiasm were and are so disproportionate that subsequently it has become impossible for me to make myself the champion of any cause whatever, however harmless or noble or God knows what.

  It is good to have paid very dear for a youthful folly; afterwards, you are spared more than one disappointment.

  Nationalism is a sin of the mind. To belong to a specific people has no profound meaning (except perhaps for the Jews). The only true community is the one based on the “spiritual family” and not on the national or ideological one. I feel solidarity only with those who understand me and whom I understand, with those we believe in certain values inaccessible to the mob. All the rest is a lie. A people is doubtless a reality—an historical, not an essential reality. When I think of how excited I was in my youth on account of my tribe! What madness, good God! One must wrest oneself free of one’s origins, or at least forget them. I have a tendency to refer back to mine, probably out of masochism, a taste for slavery, for “chains,” for humiliation.

  The superficial moments in my life, the hysterical moments were those in which History counted more than anything—that was the period of my aberrations.

  April 28 1969

  Attachment is the origin of all servitudes. The more you want to be free, the less you tie yourself to beings and things. But once you are tied to them, what a drama it is to be released!

  We begin living by creating ties for ourselves, the older we grow, the stronger they become. A moment comes when we understand that they represent so many chains, that it is too late to shake them off, for we are too used to them.

  May 7 1969

  Only Bach can reconcile me to death.

  The funereal note is always there in Bach, even in joy. A funereal and seraphic note. To die above life, and death, a victory beyond being.

  To transcend life—and death—at the center, at the heart of death.

  A dying man weeping for joy—Bach is often that.

  May 30 1969

  The Wrong Demiurge—work of a melancholic viper. As much could be said of all I have written.

  June 5 1969

  On the usefulness of the enemy.

  Only he who creates the void around us does us a service.

  My gratitude to those who have made me more alone, who—in spite of themselves, but no matter—have contributed to my spiritual consolidation.

  July 2 1969

  “Life is a perpetual deviation which does not even allow us to become conscious of the meaning from which it deviates” (Kafka).

  Enesco, speaking of Bach, called him “the soul of my soul.” This simple and apparently naïve expression precisely translates how I feel about the Cantor.

  October 1969

  Samuel Beckett. Nobel Prize. What a humiliation for such a proud man! The sadness of being understood!

  Beckett or the anti-Zarathustra.

  The vision of post-humanity (as one says post-Christianity).

  Beckett or the apotheosis of the infra-man.

  October 24 1969

  O. C. said to me that Sorin Pavel was a “failure.” I told him that the only interesting Romanians I have known were failures, that what people call by that name is the authentic mode, the true way in which a Romanian can give his utmost, that in this fashion the true genius of the nation is manifested.

  All the Romanians who have mattered in my life: Sorin Pavel himself, Ţuţea, Zapraţan, Crāciunel and the greatest of all, Nae Ionescu, were “failures,” which is to say that they realized themselves in “life” without rising or sinking to an “oeuvre.”

  November 28 1969

  Two things which have mattered a great deal in my life: music and mysticism (hence ecstasy)—and which are growing distant …

  Between twenty and twenty-five, an orgy of both. My passionate desire for them was linked to my insomnia. Incandescent nerves, constantly swollen to the point of bursting, desire to weep because of an intolerable unhappiness …

  December 8 1969

  Listening to Ruggiero Ricci today on the radio, playing Bach’s first Partita, I felt that one must not give up, that one has no right to surrender, and that, as far as I am concerned, it is my duty to get a grip on myself.

  January 4 1970

  Among the sons of Bach, one feels the will to distinguish themselves from their father, not by deepening but by multiplying the obvious differences. Originality is always easier than profundity. Invention is an escape, and it is achieved following any sort of disorder, to descend into the intimacy of things or of oneself supposes a concentration, an extreme exertion not so much of the mind as of the soul.

  I get along better with Romanian Jews than with Romanians “strictly speaking.” This was already the case thirty-five years ago, before the misunderstanding created by the Iron Guard. With the Jews, everything is more complex, more dramatic and more mysterious than with those shepherds and peasants sunk in their wretched, yet nondescript destiny.

  January 23 1970

  Yesterday, Ionesco was elected to the Academy. He told me, in terror: “It’s forever, for eternity.” I reassured him: “No, not at all, think of Pétain, of Maurras, of Abel Hermant and some of the others. They were driven out. You too may have the occasion to commit some act of treason.” Ionesco: “So there’s hope.”

  February 19 1970

  Ionesco telephoned yesterday, a little drunk. He told me he keeps being amazed, when he thinks about his career, from a schoolteacher in Romania, then a workman at Ripolin, then a proofreader at the Hôtel de Ville: to end up, finally, in the Academy. I replied that there was no essential difference between his new status as an academician and his old semi-clochard situation, and that he should pay no attention to such promotions, which are best forgotten.

  March 8 1970

  The moment of supreme lucidity for an author is the one when he perceives without illusion the precise value of his work. H
e behaves toward it as would an honorable enemy.

  March 11 1970

  Yesterday evening, Waiting for Godot. A very great play. After fifteen years, not a single wrinkle.

  April 26 1970

  French people who have known Romanians do not like them. Understandable: they have neighboring defects.

  May 7 1970

  Paul Celan has drowned himself in the Seine. His body was found last Monday.

  I cared for this charming and impossible man, so fierce yet with sudden fits of gentleness, and I avoided him lest I wound him, for everything wounded him. Each time I encountered him, I was on my guard and kept such a close watch on myself that after half an hour I was exhausted.

  May 11 1970

  Terrible night. Dreamed of Celan’s wise solution.

  (Celan went to the end, exhausted his possibilities of resisting destruction. In a certain sense, there is nothing fragmentary or unsuccessful about his existence: he completely fulfilled himself.

  As a poet, he could go no further: in his last poems, he was perilously close to Wortspielerei [playing with words]. I know of no death more touching or less sad.)

  Klee liked to quote: “the art of drawing is the art of omission” (Liebermann). Which is how one might define the art of the aphorism.

  For me, to write is to omit. That is the secret of laconicism, and of the essay as a genre.

  May 12 1970

  Thiais Cemetery. Funeral of Paul Celan.

  In the bus, from the Porte d’Italie to the cemetery, the ugliness of the suburbs seemed so dreadful to me that once we reached the cemetery, which is beautiful, I had feeling of deliVerance.

  June 26 1970

  The ancient Greeks and the Jews—the most gifted of all peoples.

  July 8 1970

  A long discussion yesterday evening with a Hungarian poet (Pildusky) about Simone Weil, whom he considers a saint. I said I admired her too, but that she wasn’t a saint, that she had too much of that passion in her, that intolerance she hated in the Old Testament from which she emerged and which she resembles in spite of her contempt for it. A female Ezekiel or Isaiah. Without faith and the reservations which faith implies and imposes, she would have been fiercely ambitious. What stands out in her is the will to force acceptance of her point of view at all costs, by overwhelming or even doing violence to her interlocutor. I also told the Magyar poet that she had as much will and energy and determination as a Hitler … Whereupon my poet opened his eyes wide and stared hard at me, as if he had just had an illumination. To my astonishment, he said: “You’re right.”