Better to keep away from justice. - A hard life, outright stupor, - with a dried-out fist to lift the coffin lid, lie down, and suffocate. No old age this way, no danger: terror is very un-French.
If only God would grant me that celestial calm, etherial calm, and prayer, - like the saints of old. - The Saints! They were strong! Anchorites, artists of a kind we no longer need!Does this farce have no end? My innocence is enough to make me cry. Life is the farce we all must play.
Better to keep away from justice. - A hard life, outright stupor, - with a dried-out fist to lift the coffin lid, lie down, and suffocate. No old age this way, no danger: terror is very un-French.
I will tear the veils from every mystery: mysteries of religion or of nature, death, birth, the future, the past, cosmogony, and nothingness. I am a master of phantasmagoria.
I ought to have a special hell for my anger, a hell for my pride, - and a hell for sex; a whole symphony of hells!
"I don't love women. Love has to be reinvented, we know that. The only thing women can ultimately imagine is security. Once they get that, love, beauty, everything else goes out the window: all they have left is cold disdain, that's what marriages live on nowadays."
It is recovered.
What? - Eternity.
In the whirling light
Of the sun in the sea.
O my eternal soul,
Hold fast to desire
In spite of the night
And the day on fire.
You must set yourself free
From the striving of Man
And the applause of the World
You must fly as you can...
- No hope forever
No orietur.
Science and patience,
The torment is sure.
The fire within you,
Soft silken embers,
Is our whole duty
But no one remembers.
It is recovered.
What? Eternity.
In the whirling light
Of the sun in the sea.
I became a fabulous opera: I saw that everyone in the world was doomed to happiness. Action isn't life: it's merely a way of ruining a kind of strength, a means of destroying nerves. Morality is water on the brain.It seemed to me that everyone should have had several other lives as well. This gentleman doesn't know what he's doing: he's an angel. That family is a litter of puppy dogs. With some men, I often talked out loud with a moment from one of their other lives. - That's how I happened to love a pig.
Since I've got back two cents' worth of reason - how quickly it goes! - I can see that my troubles come from not realizing soon enough that this is the Western World. These Western swamps! Not that light has paled, form worn out, or movement been misguided... All right! Now my mind wants absolutely to take on itself all the cruel developments that mind had undergone since the Orient collapsed... My mind demands it!... And that's the end of my two cents' worth of reason! The mind is in control, it insists that I remain in the West. It will have to be silenced if I expect it to end as I always wanted to.I used to say, to hell with martyrs' palms, all beacons of art, the inventor's pride, the plunderer's frenzy; I expected to return to the Orient and to original, eternal wisdom. But this is evidently a dream of depraved laziness!And yet I had no intention of trying to escape from modern suffering. I have no high regard for the bastard wisdom of the Koran. - But isn't there a very real torment in knowing that since the dawn of that scientific discovery, Christianity, Man has been making a fool of himself, proving what is obvious, puffing with pride as he repeats his proofs, and living on that alone! This is a subtle, stupid torment; and this is the source of my spiritual ramblings. Nature may well be bored with it all! Prudhomme was born with Christ.Isn't it because we cultivate the fog! We swallow fever with our watery vegetables. And drunkenness! And tobacco! And ignorance! And blind faith! - Isn't this all a bit far from the thought, the wisdom of the Orient, the original fatherland? Why have a modern world, if such poisons are invented!Priests and preachers will say: Of course. But you are really referring to Eden. There is nothing for you in the past hsitory of Oriental races.... True enough. It was Eden I meant! How can this purity of ancient races affect my dream?Philosophers will say: the world has no ages. Humanity moves from place to place, that's all. You are a Western man, but quite free to live in your Orient, as old a one as you want, - and to live in it as you like. Don't be a defeatist. Philosophers, you are part and parcel of your Western world!Careful, mind. Don't rush madly after salvation. Train yourself! - Ah! Science never goes fast enough for us!- But I see that my mind is asleep.
"Nothing is vanity; on toward knowledge!" cries the modern Ecclesiastes, which is Everyone. And still the bodies of the wicked and the idle fall upon the hearts of all the rest... Ah! quick, quick, quick there; beyond the night... that future reward, that eternal reward... will we escape it?
The battle for the soul is as brutal as the battles of men; but the sight of justice is the pleasure of God alone.
