On the whole it may be said that less is known today, now that there are droves of blinkered, jargon-spouting appointees to knowledge. What has been gained in the specific has been lost in the general.
That the behavior of dictators is perfidious is no longer surprising. But that mankind still craves authoritarianism, despite their appalling record of failure, is incomprehensible. With these monstrous examples right before our eyes, how are we so stupid, and how is it possible, faced with all that has happened, for us to lie to ourselves again and again?
When she is far away, she visits often. But once here, she takes her leave again.
In the Japanese city of Tsuretsuregusa there is record of a hermit who was not unwilling to depart this earth but felt sorry about giving up the heavens. (By this he meant the visible, earthly sky.)
The most attractive thing about Japanese drawings is their sensuousness. Even hermits see and breathe it and tell of it.
Great writers who disappeared because their pupils were more successful. Writers who disappeared because they were themselves too successful.
Writers who only exist because they became known so late.
If we know everything about someone, what is left of him? Just what we forget.
A god who could be any animal but never like a man.
The pre-traitor: a man who betrays secrets he has not yet been told.
He begins with the revelation of a secret that has yet to exist, so he has to create it after the fact. He deals in retroactive secrets, so to speak. The trick in all this is that eventually he has to persuade the people who supposedly entrusted him with the secrets to believe those secrets that he has already “revealed.”
So in order to have any role at all, he has to conspire with those whom he wants to trick.
The question of time and who has sent him. He uses the money he receives for his pre-betrayals to make the secrets come true. (He could be thought of as a kind of poet, trying to influence reality to strengthen his inventions.)
He gives the impression of being quite experienced, for he makes up all the experiences himself. He never wears disguises. He is never interested in the outcome of his plots; he needs newer, bigger conspiracies and, in the end, is gladly brought down by their consequences.
The false builder who lures people into houses that he has constructed in such a way that once inside them the people wreak their own destruction.
The man who becomes good through the vanity of others.
It would be very important to find a way to make use of evil, so that one would get better and better from the baseness of others.
“Voluptas ex felicitate alieni”—Leibniz.
(Ecstasy from the happiness of another.)
I can only believe her if I believe her very much. I have to overdo it, go to nearly ridiculous lengths. I cannot just believe.
The memory wants to come undisturbed, in its own moment, and must not be bothered by anyone who was present then.
Perhaps the gods of old, in just that shrunken, starved form they had, could still be very useful as gods of poverty.
Now the planetarium has become a terrarium, and we cannot gaze upon the planets without feeling somewhat confined and oppressed by their attainability.
By our reaching for the planets, astrology itself will be proved right. As our colonies, they may well turn out to be our fate, though something different from astrology’s claims. In any case, without it, the planets would never have been important enough to us.
Unfathomable the extent of the spoken word, as if the intention was once to persuade the whole world of something.
Find one abstemious man who has never said anything that was not necessary for survival.
I knew him back when he still recognized me. Now I have known him so long that he doesn’t recognize me anymore.
He ran away from everybody until he learned to his astonishment that somebody ran away from him.
Find statements so simple they never can be one’s own again.
Whatever he experiences quickly assumes the dimensions of a tree. Is this what we call mythic potential? Are these trees myths? Some of them or just one? Which ones? Are the leaves involved and what is the tree without them? Some use a different word, not growth but exaggeration. But the tree doesn’t just grow up, it reaches out on all sides, winding and twisting and becoming one with its surroundings. What matters is its rampant growth, its luxuriance, and part of this is the confusion, combination, and interpenetration of all its components.
A guilt built on nothing but justifications, which alone keep it from resolving itself.
To get a more accurate picture of a new person, one should approach him in various disguises that he cannot see through. As oneself, in one’s real persona, one forces limitations on him that one then holds against him.
How often one is quick to revive grudges against those one has injured. Sensing the injustice of what one is doing, one justifies it with a dormant grievance from the past.
People don’t change at all, and they change enormously; it is completely confounding that both can be true at once. The core of my nature is that I cannot humble myself but must transform myself nonetheless. I cannot look to death for my transformation. Therefore, with unwavering obstinacy I see death as the end.
I know that I have still said nothing about death. How long will I defer my final judgment? Or must I deny myself this, out of hatred for death?
Creatures made of one eye, rolling along.
The ship that never sinks: malice.
And in what place would you not suffocate? And what is the use of digging for the roots of things everywhere? Roots are all so awfully similar.
The chaotic way we depart the world, leaving people of all ages behind.
With nothing left to confess, he has no need of friends.
If there is one thing I never want to be, it is “timely.” For any time should suit me. It is not I who should suit it, as I am not worthy of it—it could as well be another time, and anyone bringing it to me would be more than it, and I, I would be merely incidental to it.
Since he started saying du to himself, he hasn’t got anything to say.
The impossibility of preserving what he knew. But it can be forgotten in such a way that it is transformed.
There are countless things the world is heading toward that can only fill one with the deepest disgust. But this is not enough: one has to think them through and fight them. Mankind, more and more the creator of this world, should say, “It is not good.”
“Where do I find the man who forgets words, that I might converse with him?”
Chuang-tze
The man living outside the ordinary concepts of time. He never knows what day of the week it is. He knows neither month nor day, let alone year.
But he knows people and lives among them. How does he do it? He is removed from the passage of time; it does not register with him. Clocks are as foreign to him as calendars, and history does not exist for him.
He is a worthy counterpart to the man who constantly tries to get things at the lowest price. I have always considered this type a spendthrift. But isn’t the man who lives without time also a kind of spendthrift? The mere fact of always having time differentiates him from everyone else: perhaps his story should be called “The Man Who Always Has Time.”
Chuang-tze contains both the very small and the very large. One half is like Kafka, but there’s another half as well—thus, he’s all the more complete.
Nowhere but in Confucius does there exist such a conscious and systematic depiction of models. Through him, the rulers of the ancient world (and there are any number of them) all partake of a certain similarity—basically they are like him.
That state of mind which was never quite credible in Aristotle is entirely so in Democritus.
The couples who need a new blessing. Where should they find it, and what blessing should it be? Is it the blessing of separation, since everything else is quite permissible? Do they need an “outward” distance since the “legal” one no longer exists? Would couples then have to be separated from each other right after they met? Would it be necessary for them to transform their distance into desire, which they would have to resist since it is, after all, irresistible?
What is the significance for them of letters and the telephone? Do these turn out to be the real locus of their love?
Probably it is impossible to live without goals. But to stay fresh in their pursuit, we learn to juggle. We toss them up into the air, doing whatever we must to catch them again. The balls, all confusingly similar, don’t really matter; it is the movement that does.
An eye that twitches when it doesn’t like what it sees.
New vehicles in which we move more slowly than we walk: salvation.
For every accusation an innocent party is carefully selected. The guilty are freed immediately, on principle.
Totally empty countries alternate with overcrowded ones. The empty ones have to stay empty.
A select few are chosen by lot to be fathers; no one but they may procreate.
Good deeds are forbidden, to make them more attractive.
After every “appearance” (if this was indeed necessary), a “spiritual” man would be required to desert his followers in such a manner that they could not find him again. If they did find him, he would have to disguise himself so they thought him someone else. If they were still able to unmask him, then he would have to make himself small, sickly, weak, just to get away. Far removed from them, protected from their impertinent adoration, he could slowly become himself again.
“Contamination” by opponents, one of the most effective political phenomena, not well enough understood.
Happy and in love now, he says “God” less frequently.
He puts words on and takes words off, letting language operate on its own, and thinks this striptease is Literature. Without ever having a thought of his own, he draws his wisdom from the common tap and is happy that everyone understands him straight off.
In a single night of reading he learned more about fleas than he had in the entire sixty-four years of his life. The concentration of the learnable. But twenty-five years earlier he found in Donne the most powerful love poem of the English language, called “The Flea.” So should he now balance this Donnean flea against the plague?
A tightrope walker whose words no longer support him. To the right and left of them he tumbles to the floor. He increases their tension again, tries, and tumbles once more. Perhaps it is this last creation of words that he has made, this huge, powerful love, that is the most dangerous. But at least it is bold and lives by its own resources. At least it consumes, without reserve or restraint, that which nourishes it. If he knew he would die of it tomorrow, he still could not take back any of it.
The curse of being a public person—the opinions and positions people expect of you! As if you had anything to say that had not already been said a thousand times better!
Not all our insights come to us naturally. Occasionally we unexpectedly come across one anew and are amazed to see we have already noted it in our work.
There are stationary insights, ones that we float past, as if they had been placed on the shore and we merely see them as we flow by them like a stream.
“Whoever feeds tigers should be careful not to give them living creatures, on account of their ferocity, which is aroused through killing. Care should be taken not to give them whole creatures, on account of the ferocity aroused by tearing them apart. Their hunger must be stilled in time to head off their ferocity.”
Chuang-tze
Late fame is impotent, because it reveals itself to be accidental.
To enjoy fame requires innocence and stupidity. One has neither when fame arrives late.
A creature that, through its intake of food, expands to infinite size.
The speck of dirt that catches the light like a coin.
He has withdrawn from everything new and now lives off his own saliva.
The satisfaction of one who plays chess with his own assertions.
Collect all the things in your life you’ve avoided.
The most peaceful place on earth is among strangers. Alone, one has the most vivid conception of others, and thus one is least alone.
Now Africa has become—for how long?—the primal home of man. Patiently we await archaeological discoveries on the moon.
For a photograph of the entire world, of every type of people on earth, I would need another hundred years. So I’ll have to content myself with the first straw fire of curiosity.
It’s the formulas of other languages that we cannot master, at least not sufficiently for them to yield the wisdom submerged within them.
He selects for himself new languages to be silent in.
Malraux’s conversations with “great” men like Corneille. His consciousness of “history.” He believes in “the great”; he approves of them, wants them, seeks them, ingratiates himself with them: a journalist with a higher agenda.
The woman who offered her solicitude to the bushmen, bringing along her mother and brother so as not to frighten them, who took them into her family and as a result was taken into theirs: I record her name here and hope never to forget it:
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas of Boston.
After more than twenty-five years I am still an apprentice of the bushmen. More than I can learn from them I don’t want to know. But I have not come very far in my knowledge of them, for atom bombs and moon voyagers disturb me and constantly interrupt my study.
Wonderful to arise half asleep, to sit at my desk half asleep, to write half asleep.
A country where you never see people eating. The secrecy of eating.
What in our land is just the secrecy of elimination, is there the secrecy of the entire process from beginning to end.
Everyone there has just the amount of space that fits under an umbrella. No one goes out without one, and everyone puts his up. No one comes too close to anyone else. A distance is preserved. There is freedom everywhere. When acquaintances meet, the umbrellas are made to bow. How dignified are these greetings from umbrella to umbrella.
Accusations increase one’s illustriousness.
“A friend of mine”: one of the greediest English expressions when spoken.
It sounds as if this friend were being denied to the person being addressed. The friend remains indefinite, unnamed; he is private property, protected. The only noticeable thing about him is that he is “mine.” It is announced that he exists, but he is concealed, as if he were being kept behind one’s back and one were about to use him for an ambush.
A man who remembers only words in new languages, and in the process, the old ones gradually crumble away. He is alive so long as sounds have new meanings for him. He has the optimism of new definitions and unheard-of accents. He has escaped the tyranny of the beaten path. So the way I spoke before was all wrong, he tells himself. At last I am really learning to speak.