But I don’t see anything anymore: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.
I do not cease to experience my being-for-others; my possibilities do not cease to “die”, nor do the distances cease to unfold toward me in terms of the stairway where somebody “could” be, in terms of this dark corner where a human presence “could” hide. Better yet, if I tremble at the slightest noise, if each creak announces to me a look, this is because I am already in the state of being-looked-at.
Unity may be achieved under a strong man, but the time comes when a people must stop looking for a savior and take responsibility for their own future.
What makes or breaks a man is not what people think of him, but what he thinks of himself.
I have never before had such a strong feeling that I was devoid of secret dimensions, confined within the limits of my body, from which airy thoughts float up like bubbles. I build memories with my present self. I am cast out, forsaken in the present: I vainly try to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.
The cards fall on the woollen cloth, spinning. The hands with ringed fingers come and pick them up, scratching the cloth with their nails. The hands make white splotches on the cloth, they look puffed up and dusty. Other cards fall, the hands go and come. What an odd occupation: it doesn’t look like a game or a rite, or a habit. I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can’t be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.
Hands don’t catch thoughts.
And yet I am troubled; it would take so little to make the record stop: a broken spring, the whim of Cousin Adolphe. How strange it is, how moving, that this hardness should be so fragile. Nothing can interrupt it yet all can break it.
I felt that the success of the enterprise was in my hands: the moment had an obscure meaning which had to be trimmed and perfected; certain motions had to be made, certain words spoken: I staggered under the weight of my responsibility.
The Myth of Sisyphus, that it was not acceptable for the absurd person to commit suicide, but that to live, and live rebelliously, “with my revolt, my freedom, and my passion,” was the best way of both acknowledging and rejecting death.
Before beginning this treatise, he wanted the advice of The Baboon, his philosophy prof. “Excuse me, sir,” he said at the end of a class, “could anyone claim that we don’t exist?” The Baboon said no. “Goghito,” he said, “ergo zum. You exist because you doubt your existence.
I am on the same plane specific object and free subject but never the two at the same time and always the one haunted by the Other.
Those who wants to be loved, must want the freedom of the other, because love emerges from it, if I subject it, it becomes an object, and from an object I can not receive love.
Man lives in the midst of images. Literature offers him a critical image of himself.
The Intellectual is someone who meddles in what does not concern him.
The Other is the hidden death of my possibilities.
I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered.
If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.” – Jean-Paul Sartre.
The only being which can be called free is the being which nihilates its being.
My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.