It all depends on this: with whom we confuse ourselves.
How ordinary a person becomes when we see him often; it is as if he meant to avenge himself for the inflated image we have of him.
Changing one’s beliefs according to the time of day.
For many people, the struggle to locate truth is like collecting beetles. Their beetles all look the same: gray and dubious.
Most men, he said, are slaves of an ancient misfortune unknown to them.
Somebody wants to get him to define things for money. But he won’t even define things for free.
This tenderness toward everything we have seen before, and this revulsion toward so much we are seeing now.
Caesar makes me uncomfortable: the monstrousness of action. It assumes we have nothing against killing.
But do I experience less because I am just observing, or do I just experience differently? It’s certainly not true that I shy away from people, that I avoid them. I actually get quite involved with people, but always only so I don’t have to kill them. We may call this a priestly attitude. I find it humane. But we are deluded if we expect it from others. One must have the strength to see how they are. My cowardliness starts when I turn my eyes away. That is why I read till my eyes are sore, listen till my ears ring.
But can a person who doesn’t kill ever accomplish anything? There is only one power stronger than the power of killing: reviving the dead. I am consumed with desire for this power. I would give anything for it, even my life. But I don’t have this power, so I have nothing.
Even Caesar, who pardoned so many men, knew this power. How angry Cato’s suicide made him!
Today I detected a downright murderous lust in myself as I was reading Plutarch’s Caesar. When the conspirators went after him with their daggers, as one after the other stabbed him again and again, as he tried to escape their blows “like a wild beast,” I experienced a sense of joyous arousal. I felt not a hint of pity for him. The unsuspectingness of this horribly intelligent “beast” did not move me to feel for him. His blindness was, in a way, a kind of retribution for all those whom he had blinded and trapped.
“Great”: he who escapes seemingly imminent death often enough. How he brings about this danger in the first place is his affair.
His fear of all his endless little notebooks! By now they are mounting into the hundreds, every page covered, and he never opens a one of them! This prolific writer of nothing, what is so important for him to tell no one?
Anything to do with order is best learned from the Chinese.
I haven’t read enough magic spells. Last night I was captivated by the Atharvaveda, the Indian book of magic. Uncanny things in that book—nowhere are human wishes expressed more openly. It is a completely elementary world, and if we really want to learn about humankind, then we should look not only at myths but also at spells, which are naked.
Love for the forgotten gods, as if some kind of inner greatness had caused them to retreat.
I admire those very broad people who through the decades become broader and broader yet do not give in. But the unyieldingly narrow are horrible.
A sucker for cemeteries—anywhere else, he’s afraid.
A world without gifts.
I think it is the nearness of myths that has caused this uneasiness in me. I am drowning in them; all their power is turned against me. What an undertaking, to want to know them all—me, a small, solitary man of fifty, a nothing!
I am fascinated by the ancestor stones of the Aranda.
The naked old men crouch on the ground around the stones, the churingas. They gaze at them solemnly, picking some of them up in their hands and weeping.
How poor I am compared with an old Aranda! All the myths and traditions are constantly with him, in all their clarity, and for him, what they say is what they mean. Compare that with our noncommittal sciences, their feeble attempts at “interpretation,” their endless vacuous analogies. When does one finally know what is important, what is immutable? No matter where one turns in our world, it is all equally huge, equally tiny; everything is equally distorted and out of proportion.
The Arandas of old are all dead. Now they exist only in books. These books are my churingas, my ancestor stones.
What I find most repulsive about people are their plans.
As they do anywhere else, people here live under pressure, but they don’t yell about it, they just exchange pleasantries.
But what is the use of this sterile life of proofs, when we know everything beforehand anyway?
There is something sickening about all advocacy: only pure admiration is real.
I cannot even say how indifferent I am to the question of whether I will prevail. I want to find what I sense is there, that’s all.
It is important to say all the great thoughts again, without knowing that they have already been said.
Whoever knows the truth about someone destroys that person, unless he keeps quiet. But it is hard to be silent around those we see often. We have to say things to them that help them without changing them. They receive so much help that they form a false self-image, and for this image we must take responsibility. At every moment we see just how false, and it is precisely this insight from which we must constantly protect them. No matter that we have protected them from themselves so long; they need this protection indefinitely. So we must lie, and this kind of lying is what makes life unbearable: continuing to spin false, bad fiction.
She walks as if she were being allowed to for the first time.
Now that I have thrown myself completely into my “field” and am getting deeper and deeper into it, I sometimes ask myself: am I, too, a specialist? And how much have I set aside permanently, never to be interested in again? Or can someone whose passions are religion and mythology in fact never be a specialist? Do not myths include everything, as I often like to tell myself, or is there something that exists beyond all myths? Is there a new myth, completely unheard of, and is it my purpose in life to search for it? Or will I end up a pitiful wretch, with a mere inventory of all myths?
I don’t want to know the answer to this question.
The heat of eight suns: “In the mists of prehistory the sun had seven sons, which each burned down upon the earth just as hotly as the sun itself.”
from the Batak
Is it characteristic of “the beautiful” that it can never be seen again? Our perception of it is at once sudden and serene: we want to see it as a whole, without interruption, forever. Seen again, it is never the same—unless we failed to see it whole the first time.
Wholly perceived, beauty continues to exist only within ourselves—it has lost its connection to reality. While we are taking it in, the image becomes tangible, as if we had carefully picked it up, and only thus can we receive it entire. This does not occur through suddenness alone, no matter how sudden it may have seemed.
It probably has to begin suddenly, but without that subsequent moment of calm, it dissipates and disappears. For something to appear beautiful it must be permeated by both suddenness and serenity: the flash of the eye and the quiet patience of the hands.
If we surround ourselves with “beauty,” we live in a grave of beauty. Painful to think of Pharaoh’s soul, oblivious to all those objects placed around him: practical, supposedly, but not beautiful, not to him—but surely to the one who opens the grave.
A snail that can call and a snail that can jump:
“The large Achatina Marginata, for instance, possesses the power of screaming. This fact is well known to the natives, who were much amused at my start of surprise when one of these Snails screamed on being taken into my hand. It is supposed that the noise is produced by the creature scraping against its shell. Anyhow, the sound is loud enough to prove distinctly startling on a first experience.
“Another small land snail has the power of springing three to four feet.”
P. A. Talbot, In the Shadow of the Bush
He who would know all will lose his way in the expanding realm of his own ignorance. Every new insight I have won has come to me out of the unmediated observation of a single concrete phenomenon, not through analogy, not by assembling masses of documents about one and the same phenomenon. No one thinks in statistics; for the profound questions, all statistical methods are worthless. I must have the courage to continue to select that which seems important or meaningful to me. I must risk being decried as ignorant by every expert, in every speciality. This vain desire to know everything, which has pursued me since childhood, is something I must get over.
My library, which consists of thousands of books I have undertaken to read, is growing ten times faster than I can read. I have tried to expand it into a kind of universe where I can find everything. But this universe is growing at a dizzying pace. This pace will never slacken; I feel its growth physically within me. Every new book I add sets off a mini-catastrophe that only subsides when the book is seemingly brought into line on the shelf and temporarily disappears.
“If one is a djama (a prophet in Malinka society) one no longer knows the difference between what has been and what will be.”
Definition of the Prophetic
The scars of zealots are still visible on his spirit.
We often say things to ourselves to forget them. But sometimes we say them too well.
Someone who doesn’t know he is breathing.
He loves her; he can’t be as careful with anybody else.
Sometimes in this dreadful wasteland a name is heard, and every grain of sand blossoms.
Why are you always explaining everything? Why do you always want to find out what’s behind things—behind this? behind that? How about a life on the surface? Would that be happy? And would that be a reason to despise it? Maybe there is much more to a surface—maybe everything not on the surface is false, maybe you are just living in an ever-changing series of delusions, not beautiful like those of gods but empty like those of philosophers.
Perhaps it would be better for you to just arrange words one after another (since it has to be words), but you’re always looking for a meaning, as if what you invent could give the world a sense it does not have.
He collects his writers like butterflies, and under his care they turn into one great caterpillar.
The man who was so good he forgot his name.
The fearful angel of the eye: “Too much—you have seen too much.” No, much too little.
“One heart told me this, one heart told me that.”
Rwandan saying
We forget nothing, and we forget it less and less.
You want someone with whom to discuss everything afresh, everything that you have loved; you want to sing the praises of it all again. To praise is wonderful, irresistible. Happy the singer of the Psalms.
Why do we suddenly have to have that which we really don’t want at all? As if we had to acquire the habit of wanting everything.
Stories of people who do everything to stop being themselves. They transform themselves into their enemies.
Speeches, crazy speeches, and it all comes true. The prescience of words.
It is true that I wish to learn everything that men have believed in. But I want to experience it as it was when it deserved belief, and not in its exhausted form.
The conceptual holds so little interest for me that even at fifty-four I have actually never read either Aristotle or Hegel. It is not just that I don’t care about them; I distrust them. I cannot accept that the world was conceivable for them even before it was really known. The stricter, the more systematic their thinking, the greater the distortions they brought to the world. I want truly to see and think in a new way. That is not so much out of arrogance, though it might seem so, as out of an inextinguishable passion for humankind and a growing belief in its inexhaustibility.
Sahagun: a name of questionable wisdom.
The priceless sayings of fools, so long as they’re not repeated.
“Without the perfect law of freedom, man would be incapable of imitation, on which all education and received knowledge are surely based: for of all creatures, man is the greatest mimic.”
Johann Georg Hamann
You think you have everything, she thinks she has nothing. You live together. How do you live?
It is apparent that the object of hatred does change, but not too quickly or too often. Hatred needs time to attract things; this is not hard to comprehend. But how do these astonishing shifts in hatred arise? Why this one today, and that one next year? Undeniably, it is easiest to hate the people one knows well. We remove them from the fabric of habit, we isolate them. Their menacing quality is our own creation. It’s unimportant whether they are dangerous or not. We lend them our old, unforgotten fears. And on these they feed—but all of a sudden we release them. We should understand this moment: when and why do we let them go? Have we recognized their menace as our own? Have we unveiled them and discovered ourselves underneath?
But before this can happen, we make them perform a curious dance.