I paced from one side of the room to the other, dreaming out loud incoherent and impossible things – deeds I’d forgotten to do, hopeless ambitions haphazardly realized, fluid and lively conversations which, were they to be, would already have been. And in this reverie without grandeur or calm, in this hopeless and endless dallying, I paced away my free morning, and my words – said out loud in a low voice – multiplied in the echoing cloister of my inglorious isolation.
Everything was sleeping as if the universe were a mistake.
We should be content with the incomprehensibility of the universe; the desire to understand makes us less than human, for to be human is to know that one does not understand.
Why try to be like others if you’re condemned to being yourself? Why laugh if, when you laugh, even your genuine happiness is false, since it is born of forgetting who you are? Why cry if you feel it’s of no use, and if you cry not because tears console you but because it grieves you that they don’t?
We don’t even know if what ends with daylight terminates in us as useless grief, or if we are just an illusion among shadows, and reality just this vast silence without wild ducks that falls over the lakes where straight and stiff reeds swoon. We know nothing. Gone is the memory of the stories we heard as children, now so much seaweed; still to come is the tenderness of future skies, a breeze in which imprecision slowly opens into stars.
It’s human to want what we need, and it’s human to desire what we don’t need but find desirable.
I have to choose what I detest – either dreaming, which my intelligence hates, or action, which my sensibility loathes; either action, for which I wasn’t born, or dreaming, for which no one was born.
One man reads in order to know, all in vain. Another enjoys himself in order to live, again all in vain.
Recognizing that reality is a kind of illusion, and that illusion is a kind of reality, is simultaneously necessary and pointless.
One who has never lived under constraints doesn’t know what freedom is.
I live always in the present. I know nothing of the future and no longer have a past. The former weighs me down with a thousand possibilities, the latter with the reality of nothingness.
It’s like being intoxicated with inertia, drunk but with no enjoyment in the drinking or in the drunkenness.
We all live far away and anonymous; disguised, we suffer as unknowns. For some, however, this distance between oneself and one’s self is never revealed; for others it is occasionally enlightened, to their horror or grief, by a flash without limits; but for still others this is the painful daily reality of life.
Like all men endowed with great mental mobility, I have an irrevocable, organic love of settledness. I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. 122.
Deze bladzijden, waarop ik dingen noteer die slechts helder voor me zijn terwijl ik ze schrijf, heb ik juist herlezen en nu vraag ik mij af: wat is dit en waar dient dit voor? Wie ben ik wanneer ik voel? Wat sterft in mij wanneer ik ben? Zoals iemand die van grote hoogte het leven in een dal tracht te zien, zo beschouw ik mijzelf vanaf een bergtop en ben daarbij een onduidelijk rommelig landschap.
Each drop of rain is my failed life weeping in nature.
La maggior parte delle persone si ammala per non saper esprimere quello che vede e quello che pensa.
Our Lady of the Hours that Pass, Madonna of stagnant waters and dead algae, Tutelary Goddess of vast deserts and dark landscapes of barren rocks, free me from my youth.
To give someone good advice is to show a complete lack of respect for that person’s God-given ability to make mistakes.
Yes, tedium is boredom with the world, the malaise of living, the weariness of having lived; in truth, tedium is the feeling in one’s flesh of the endless emptiness of things.