IX

He can long for people almost as much as if they were no longer alive.

Though not quite.

The worst is not being something but always to be taken for so being.

How marvelous that they will all be resurrected! But do they all have to be judged right away?

Leonardo, who was much affected by animals and by the vileness of humans who oppress them.

His incessant thinking which nevertheless did not pervert him.

“Concerning donkeys, which we beat. Oh, woe for our indifferent nature … and yet they spend their entire life doing good to their oppressors.”

“Concerning sheep, cows, goats, and innumerable other such animals, whose little ones are taken away from them and then quartered in the most barbarous manner!”

This is the time when our words go galloping away.

No, don’t rein them in! Run in stride with them!

That man interprets death.

It is said: “When a person suddenly remembers his or her earlier incarnation and mentions it, death is sure to follow.” And what if that person keeps it secret?

Somadeva

To learn from history that one cannot learn anything from it.

The power of dreams—so he believes—is tied to the multiformity of animals: with their disappearance one may soon expect the dreams to dry up as well.

That others will fiddle around with my life fills me with dismay. In their hands it will become a different life. Yet I want to keep it the way it really was.

How to find a means of concealing one’s life so that it reveals itself only to those intelligent enough not to distort it?

Gilgamesh is in no way less compelling than the Bible. In fact, it has one advantage: a hostile goddess against whom the hero openly struggles. The female element, however it may be viewed, is present. In the Bible it is there only in a reduced form, as Eve.

Provided it has remained fallow long enough, one single delusion of grandeur may nourish millions.

He collected all opinions to show how few there are.

They search all over me for their ruins. But I am my own.

Compassion must overwhelm or it is not compassion. Which is why we need the word “mercy.”

Unfathomable what becomes of authors in other authors. It is not so much a matter of repetition, of flowery ornamentation, of arabesque added to arabesque, of borrowed passion—it is mainly a matter of misunderstandings, so insoluble they ultimately bear fruit. Strange and baffling creatures come into being as a result of this, authors who are greater than their prototypes.

It is not the candor of Stendhal alone, it is the candor of any masquerade.

When it comes to the dead and what is being done to them, I am merciless in my rage.

But they have to be my very own dead. With others, I merely watch—with fear or with pity.

Philosophers who know everything in between.

It is possible that through brevity he missed out on everything that is worthwhile in sentences, their swelling and their ebbing, their rise and fall, their misery and their happiness. It could be that sentences should be neither compressed nor distilled, but should pour forth in everlasting fullness. If that should be the case, then in all the years of his writing he has been deprived of its greatest joy, and his preaching the asceticism of frugality has been in vain.

Today I found a most horrible story in the memoirs of Misia Sert. I call it the agony of flies and quote it here verbatim: “One of my little bed companions has become a real master in the art of catching flies. Patient studies of these insects has enabled her to find the exact spot where one could insert a needle into their bodies to thread them without causing their death. In this way she manufactured strings of living flies and delighted in the heavenly feeling on her skin caused by the desperately scrabbling little feet and the tiny trembling wings.”

The woefulness penetrates from all sides. But it doesn’t affect you personally. It affects the other people, people you watch while they live. You cannot stand the pains they suffer. You want to avert anything that could cause them suffering. What is this?

It is the result of your inability to acknowledge anything as it actually is. Nor are you able to acknowledge that which was and already is past. All of history for you is false. You read it with a trembling heart. You would like to rescind it. But how can one rescind history? Through new sufferings?

People should not make a virtue out of their sensitivity. They may experience it and preserve it as it was experienced. But they should not adorn themselves with it. Sensitivity will make an addict out of anyone who displays its medals on his chest. He will require more and more objects to enable him to demonstrate his sensitivity, and if he runs out of them, he will simply make things up—and his sensitivity will then reveal itself for what it is: precious, brittle, and rotted through and through.

Yes, you may place sentences next to each other, they may see each other and, if they should feel that urge, they may even touch each other. But no more.

When he says “Hell” it sounds as if he had already served his sentence down there and had been released to everyone’s satisfaction.

There are servants of wealth and servants of fame. Neither are innocent: both wait for scraps.

In the expectations you have of any new person you meet, you have remained a child. But in the disappointments that followed, you very quickly became a cantankerous old man.

He lacks the ability to move away from himself. Even when he travels, he always stays close to himself. He never forgets that he is there. Whatever he takes is his due, because he took it. The world is there for his sake; the others are mere illustrations.

In growing, knowledge changes its shape. True knowledge knows no uniformity. All leaps in knowledge occur sideways: the way knights move on a chessboard.

Anything that grows in a straight line and in a predictable manner is without significance. It is the skewed and particularly the lateral knowledge that is decisive.

There, people read the newspapers twice a year, then they throw up and recuperate.

There, countries have no capitals. The people all settle at the borders. The country itself remains empty. The whole border is the capital.

There, it is the dead who dream dreams and resound as an echo.

There, people greet each other with a scream of despair and part from each other in jubilation.

There, the houses are empty and cleaned every hour: for future generations.

There, someone who has been insulted closes his eyes forever, and opens them in secret when he is alone.

There, people bite quickly and furtively, and then say: “It’s not me.”

There, people say “You are” and mean “I might be.”

There, people recognize their forebears, but are blind to their contemporaries.

Stay, someone says, as he goes to fetch the hangman.

One person who travels constantly, so as not to grow old. Someone else, with the same intent, who doesn’t move a muscle.

In old age, prejudices become dangerous. You are proud of them. You are grateful to them, as if it were they who kept you alive. In the oddest way—very belatedly—they become active, a kind of late blooming of prejudices. You no longer struggle or resist them. You draw them forth separately and examine them tolerantly, they, the products of a rich life, precious valuables you can count on, inexhaustible remains. If someone reproaches you for them, saying: “These are nothing but prejudices!” you assent delightedly. If only there were more of them! If only a few of them hadn’t been lost on the way! The owner of prejudices proudly feels his own weight. The young, who hardly have accumulated any prejudices as yet, for him are nothing but straws blowing in the wind. The possessor of prejudices is determined not to give up a single part of himself that might irritate others.

All those unforgotten faces! There hasn’t been a new one added now for quite some years. Whoever enters my life now goes and fetches a face from the pile of old ones. I help him find one. He is not himself, he is like someone out of the heap.

How ludicrous that a person wants to be loved, even though he knows himself.

Ants spend most of their time being inactive. A revolution in our conception of ants?

No dream is ever as absurd as its interpretation.

Out of the enormous legacy left by antiquity, the transformations have retained the most vitality.

Their effects are still inexhaustible. They will never be exhausted.

He who learns of them early is never lost—not even today. Of all the miracles, this is the only one which has remained credible.

In every sentence, a wind that blows things open. Only in Büchner. Not a breath, but a wind, or perhaps wind instead of breath. You don’t think about it; it just blows, carrying away all our weakness and arrogance.

A comparable wind blows in the Bible, but it is heavier; it cannot be escaped without great effort; the reader must struggle for his freedom. Büchner’s wind is freedom for everyone.

He who speaks much of animals is ashamed of mankind.

He sorts the moments until they become extinguished.

S. immediately comes on with terror, right away he unveils the most horrible threats he intends for the other. Hitler concealed his terror at first and revealed it only gradually. He always kept its intensification to himself.

One of S.’s main weapons is the respect for human life shown by Americans (and Englishmen), which only points up his own side’s readiness to sacrifice. The reconquest of Fao alone cost 53,000 victims, much more than the Americans lost during their ten-year war in Vietnam.

Never before have piles of corpses been computed so nakedly. S. is an Assyrian and he has not forgotten how the Mongols became masters of Baghdad. History never ends. It is most forcibly effective in rulers who find in it their models and their incentive.

The world has assumed a frenzied motion. Such accelerations usually signal wars and revolutions. Now, however, it is motion by itself, preceding wars or entirely unconnected to them, and revolutions, too, have become ambiguous. They are movements of masses, according to new dynamics, which no one has yet been able to fathom, for they are difficult to understand and marked by swiftly changing portents. We welcome these movements because they loosen what has become ossified; only someone truly fossilized would refuse to greet them with some satisfaction. Yet no one can tell where these movements will lead. Only one thing is incontrovertible: the course of history defies prediction. It remains open at every point. No one acts according to its inner logic, because no one knows it. Probably this logic doesn’t even exist. If that is the case, then history, in its openness, is always subject to influence; it is, so to speak, always in our hands. Perhaps our hands are too weak to accomplish anything. But since we don’t even know that for sure, we should at least try.

In a mind full of contents, prejudices fulfill a different function: barriers for waiting things out.

Now all of them rise together, and instead of blaming him, they look at him in surprise.

Look at me, it’s me. Recognize me, so that I may recognize you. Tell me where you’ve been. Did you sleep long? I have watched over you and you lost not a single hair. You are here. You are here. You are here.

You have come along different paths. I looked out for you, each night I fell asleep to keep a lookout for you and, disappointed, I limped from night to night.

Now finally I see you and am waiting for a word. It will be the most beautiful word, the most beautiful in all languages, and since you are delivering it to me, a new language will spring from it.

Can this be called longing, my having waited for so long? No, it is more. For this waiting has protected you from all change.

Last of all, he lost the names. Without his being aware of it, they dissolved into his own name. He no longer felt their borders, and when he heard them, he no longer recognized them. He no longer noticed how angry they were with him. He forgot what vindictiveness was. No one was hungry. Well-fed people on all streets. He invited passersby into his house, but they preferred to lose their way. The shadows walked apart from the people.

He needs people greater than himself in order to boast of them.

When he surrendered his last hostage, he broke down and gave up the ghost. — World dominion by means of hostages.

Of course it is true that I belong to the most controversial. But for that reason only.

Otherwise I belong to anyone who has a face.

He repeats it time and time again, he repeats it a thousand times: even if this life were more shameful than it already is, he wouldn’t give it up.

It is confusing and remains unfathomable.

If there’s any purpose at all in this intelligence with which humans have been endowed, then it must be to contest everything it perceives.

Instead of keeping animals, he keeps their shapes. These are impossible to murder.

What poet has not spoken to his pet fly?

Whom would I not recognize by the fly he keeps?

Who does not keep a fly which scrabbles for him?

He blossomed forth when he was very old and told one lying story after another. He ran after anyone who wanted to listen to him. People pestered him even in his sleep, and he went on talking. For as long as he talked, he was unable to die. He became as old as the oldest person ever, even older. A veritable stream of lies poured forth from him, almost all of them new, and whoever saw him then did not despair, but confidently counted on another two to three hundred years.

Anything excites him: a letter, a conversation. Anything coming from outside makes him restless. He becomes most restive when being lured into talking. Then he breaks free and realizes how full of unspent forces his life is. The life he leads is false. He should be at his peak, allowing himself that intensification to which he is continually prompted. But he says no, he says no left and right, and, crowing with dignity, takes pride in his restraint.

We are obliged to endure even though others who are quite different from us endure; we have to realize this and yet are not permitted to be like those others; we must equal them, even though the others will remain different—how hard, how unspeakably hard!

Whenever his curiosity slackens, he rereads one of the Greeks. Then he wants to know everything all over again.

Maybe he knew nothing at all. But one thing he knew very well: what it means not to be around anymore.

The greatness of Pascal lies in his self-restraint. Never has anyone been more eloquent. He constantly interrupts the flow of his writing, so that it reads as if it had been penned this very instant and as if he himself had broken it off. All the shorter and longer sentences, as well as their parts, sound as if they were written this very day.

Would decency dictate that the writer go through what passes for his best writing, sentence by sentence, in order to refute it? No, for then he would be one of those people who spend half of their life fanatically fighting for one thing and the other half of that same life fighting just as fanatically for its opposite.

One should not rebut oneself. The only decent thing to do: to fall silent.

Did you really think that a war lasting eight years would leave no legacy behind?

S. is that legacy.

If I should yet encounter something truly great, so great that it has kept itself in reserve, if, in addition, I should discover that I am permitted to call it that, then there will be nothing left of me, and I shall know, in calm assurance, that I have lived my life just to approach that greatness.

Nor shall I then be ashamed to use the word “great,” for I have fought all my life against using it when it was impermissible to do so.

Those countries with their language banners, and how merrily they lay into each other!

One who has never been alone meets someone who always was.

All the lost people who have money: buying, buying, buying, until they suffocate.

All the happy people who are able to wish for that which cannot be bought.

Babel’s diaries of the year 1920. We learn from these that Babel was not considered a Jew by those Jews whom he met with Budënny’s cavalry.

The diaries from which the tales derived contain a great deal of the wild and rich life Babel led during the war among the Cossacks. Yet the tales seem more colorful and more immediate. Only remembrance endows experience with such immediacy.

Babel was arrested and shot in 1940 in the Lubyanka prison. I read him first more than sixty years ago. His high standing has not been diminished by anything that I have read since then.

Of all the recent Russian writers, he is the one closest to me. As I can see now, my memory of his deep respect for Gogol and of his admiration for Maupassant did not betray me. He hardly spoke to me of Dostoevski or Tolstoi.

With Babel, that which is seen is his world as it comes into being.

With him, that which is heard is the Jews. The originality of his tales lies in the manner in which what is seen by him mixes with what is heard.

The way he hides from the Jews, to whom he belongs no less than to the Russian Gorki and the Frenchman Maupassant. Nevertheless, he offers the Jews a Jewish mother—a connection which made him totally incomprehensible to them.

Nothing was more alien to Babel’s nature than war. And that is precisely what prompted him to expose himself to it. What was beastly pleasure to the Cossacks was sheer torment to Babel. But he had to see it in all its detail, for to him torment was not an empty phrase.

In the diaries, the seeing is at times too faithful; never so in the tales.

Babel’s feeling of persecution started early as a result of the pogroms. He tried to rid himself of this feeling by participating in the revolution. He got involved in the war, which only brought him closer to the pogroms. What he wrote in his tales provoked the enmity of leading figures in the war. This was the beginning of his downfall at the hands of the revolution’s henchmen. He fought for his life from the first publication of Red Cavalry all the way to his own demise. He fraternized with the thugs who persecuted him and associated with their commanders. He knew what awaited him. And he realized that it would happen because of his writings. His writing became crippled; he tried to disguise his paralysis with pretense and artifice. The fear that must have filled his life is unimaginable. He saw everything with absolute clarity. Even in prison he labored on manuscripts. They are the very words of danger. It is very probable that he would have remained alive if he had not written.

You did not foresee anything. You were happy that the immense danger looming over the earth was averted. You did not think through the consequences of this prevention to their ultimate conclusion, if for no other reason than because you wanted to keep your happiness.

But has anyone foreseen anything? Is it not true that all foresight has become impossible and that we make our plans in blindness?

It is as if nothing that passes through your mind is in any way binding. In a manner of speaking, it only happens to you.

There used to be an open end to all thoughts, and each thought blithely set off looking for others. This might be called the hope of thought. The more decisively I broke off a thought, the more hopefulness it retained. At each touch, it—but secretly!—expanded. There should be a description of the way thoughts grow between people.

But today each thought breaks off in vain. It has lost the desire for others, for the adventure in others. This may be a constant state for systematic thinkers. What to me is the listlessness of old age, to them appears as the legitimation of their thinking.

He has allied himself with the word “anguish” and looks it up in Chinese.

The ravagers of words—what have I got to do with them? What remains of the myths under their knives?

Praise that insults by what it omits.

Tolstoi’s crude conception of sex in his old age: his strength. He is able to chide himself without becoming a windbag. A man who struggles against himself needs to have something against which to struggle. Tolstoi’s evil trait is his greedy passion, against which his wife takes revenge. Both wish to punish themselves for it: she for the rape to which she yielded, and he for the lust which compelled him to commit it.

He who will not be dissuaded from facing death has the strongest religion.

Between the temples of the millennia, the ludicrous runner. He wants everything as a souvenir for himself. The picture of the Pyramids—his funeral monument.

Little remains of youth’s dreams. But how great is the weight of that little!

This last confrontation, the passing of days—now there are only ten left—has destroyed the happiness of this past year. I’m beginning to be ashamed of this happiness as of a childish hope.

In my eyes, the moon has broken up in three pieces.

Death, as a means of power, cannot stop all of a sudden. But it is possible to imagine a process that may lead to that. A year ago, I still could believe that this path was being followed. But that year, that wonderful year, is now a thing of the past and we are back where we were before.

All those futile feelings, like those of animals about to be slaughtered.

The ruler deals with his enemies as he sees fit, one time this way, one time that way. Perhaps it finally will be decided that S. has to go. What will he take with him? Where will he spend the rest of his days? We can imagine him, a hundred years old, gently passing his hand over the brows of young boys.

His exemplary family life. The man who can bear millions of dead, because he put his faith in extermination by gas.

This desire to stay, a kind of bookkeeping.

Would it be better if nothing remained of our lives, nothing at all? If death meant our instant obliteration in the minds of all who have had images of us? Would this be more considerate of those who follow? For it may well be that what remains of us constitutes a claim on them, a burden they are forced to carry. Perhaps human beings are not free because they contain too much of the dead and because this surplus refuses ever to be abolished.

The thirst for forgetting—unquenchable?

There are some who are dead and for whom one never longs. Including some very dear ones.

Wit as bridle. He goads people for so long until they get the better of him. Then he can despise them.

He has more dignity than he can bear. When he takes it off, he crawls.

He wants to be sought, so as to better conceal himself.

His wildest passion: gratitude. It is amazing that it didn’t lead to his breakdown, as a passion for gambling might have done.

He uses old celebrities to make new ones grander. He uses new celebrities to confer recognition on the old ones. He’s in the exchange business.

A certain person doesn’t know a single picture. He has lived without pictures. He never knew that pictures existed.

His first picture.

I find myself first in myth. If something enters me as naturally as breath, I call it myth. If it closes itself off to me, I call it something else. I then put it aside and await the return of its simplicity. Myth is never confusion, even at its most horrifying; myth has direction and strength and, ultimately, meaning—just as long as it isn’t too obvious.

To find a different past, with people in it you have never thought of before.

The past of these three books paralyzes you. It is all too true.

How much they have upset me, those noble leave-takers from life: how much have I tried to defy them, and to dispute what they have experienced personally.

Now I think of them with tenderness. If they were still here—would I still try to persuade them?

Let just a single one come back, just a single one, and I’ll give it up.

But as long as none does, I remain.

They came running to him straight out of the Bible.

True spiritual life consists in rereading.

The great many fates we learn about combine to form a single lost destiny.

I have spent much time lending life a helping hand, so to speak. And this may well have been time lost. But it refuses to have been otherwise. Lightness undoubtedly is happiness. But I bow to heaviness.

By now he consists only of those few words he has repeated too often.

Restriction to merely that which concerns us as individuals? It is precisely both our misery and our glory that we are compelled to query that which does not concern us.

When he says that he does not believe in anything but transformation, this means that he practices a kind of slipping away, fully aware that he himself will not succeed in eluding death—but others, someday others.