A man’s wife dies. Now he has no one. He knows a young woman who lives far from him, half a continent away. He calls her every night. She speaks with him, they have long talks together. He no longer wants to talk to anyone living closer. Being in communication with her night after night from this distance makes him feel hopeful about his dead wife. Now he does nothing during the day, he just waits for the night. When he can’t get through or she isn’t home yet in the evening, a fearful desperation comes over him. She alone can calm him, but only at this remove. When she is closer to him he does not know who she is. He tells her everything, every night, and talks with her for hours and hours. He has his wife’s ashes, letters, and pictures in his home, and he knows very well that it is not she with whom he converses. The speaker is far younger, her voice is different, she comes from a totally different country. He never confuses her with someone else, he knows her as well as he does himself, and her moods are as familiar to him as his own. He listens to her, responds, listens more, sometimes gets impatient with her when she has nothing to say or takes too long to say it, and makes threats. It is not easy to say what he threatens her with. For even when he says he won’t call her for a few days, they both know better.
To make a secret of waiting so no one in the world knows about it except the person expected and the person waiting—an emotion exceeding all others in intensity. And when love is involved, especially love at great distances, say requiring a plane trip from one continent to another, then the final arrival is the greatest happiness human beings can experience, for that other joy, which would be even greater, the return of the dead, is denied them.
The question of belief, which has always occupied me, which I have wanted to resolve, and whose center I am now plunged into. Things are such that my life depends on my belief in a certain person. But nothing is as difficult for this particular person, who is by nature a poet, as “truth.” I am confronted, so to speak, with the self that I once was; and from this person, who is a kind of deputy of myself, I must force the absolute truth. But he is totally incapable of it. I need belief where I know I cannot find it, and the old obsession that has plagued me for decades is replaced by a new one, no less hopeless: belief. But this way I can still get closer to the nature of belief: by observing and noting every phase of this struggle for it. For my insight into its hopelessness takes nothing away from its seriousness.
The young yield to every impression in order not to be obsessed by anything. Are they right? Is this kind of person more natural? Are they the forerunners of future generations without beliefs? Are they the only ones to have gotten rid of the biblical God? We might think so if we didn’t know that they, too, can become a crowd, just as irretrievably as we, as irretrievably as everyone before us.
To say the most horrible thing such that it is no longer horrible; it gives one hope because it was said out loud.
But there are days too much enriched at the expense of other days, days filled retroactively with the years that came after, to the point that less is left of these years than of those days. We should eradicate these forged days.
“History” is made of these forged days.
Diaries which are too accurate are the end of freedom. Thus we should keep them only intermittently, so that the “empty” intervals become the fullest entries.
The sufferer whom people admire because he never forgets himself.
Why? he says to himself, why do I walk this road when there are a hundred thousand others? Are they all really so similar that it doesn’t matter? Or is this road so special that I would go wrong on all the others? He will never know; but for fifty years he will continue on this road, sure and certain of his goal, one man, one pace.
A man whom all abandon so he can learn to be silent. Yesterday this story of a young German woman’s search for her father’s remains. Her mother, brother, boyfriend, and she drive from northern Germany to Collioure in Roussillon, on the Spanish border, where her father, who had been called up toward the end of the war into the field corps, was captured and died. He was taken to a prison camp in February 1945 and died at the end of the year. He did not know what had happened to his family, and vice versa. Late in 1946 they received a card saying “Décédé.” Four years later, from Paris, someone sent them his briefcase with scraps of paper on which he had occasionally written notes. On his daughter’s birthday he had embossed her name on a piece of metal; she was nine then. The four traveled to Collioure in 1957 and looked up one of his prison guards. North of Perpignan they also found the cemetery where more than five hundred German prisoners of war were buried. There was his grave and his name. He had never previously traveled farther than Bavaria, where he had hiked on the Zugspitze with his wife. His imprisonment was his only foreign southern vacation.
The young woman now has an eleven-month-old child, and she keeps the scrap of metal that her father embossed with her name hidden in her home. She hardly dares to look at it and has hidden it so well that all of a sudden she will forget where she put it and will live in mortal fear that it is lost. At which point she conducts a complete search of her entire, very large apartment; on finding it, she immediately hides it again.
He positively hisses with kindness. To what avail? Nobody believes such grimacing.
Praise of one’s rival as self-praise: Stravinsky on Schoenberg.
Don’t seek the silent syllables within yourself; you will find them only in the babbling of others.
Self-satisfied: a self worn out.
Orestes: Euripides
Read Euripides’ Orestes today. Reaffirms for me that in every way Greek tragedy deals with death. The variations are countless, from murder to death to lament. The originality, the invention of the dramas, depends on where they begin. In this case, Orestes and Electra are just about to be stoned to death, the people of Argos will judge them, and they await the verdict without much hope. Later Pylades joins them, wanting to die along with them. Remarkable, the last-minute plot to murder Helen: the idea of taking vengeance on her, for whom so many Greeks have fallen.
On first reading, her removal by the god Apollo, at the point of greatest danger, appalls me. (She is transported to the realm of the gods, there to live in eternal bliss.) The justification he gives for this: she was just the instrument of the gods, who used her to set the Greeks and the Trojans on one another. Humans were too wicked and there were too many of them, so what Helen brought about was also in line with the gods’ intentions. It ends up in a ghastly happy ending. Orestes marries the daughter of the very Helen whom he had just threatened to murder.
If these scenes are not the scorn of a god hater, then they make no sense. No diatribe against the gods could be more affecting. Granted that at the last moment Apollo saves Orestes, whom he had incited to matricide. In the logic of the play, Apollo brings on a kind of apotheosis at the end. But with the end of Helen, with the end of the Trojan War, in the house of the murdered Agamemnon the full measure of the gods’ wickedness is taken, and fairest Helen is now one of them.
Helen: Euripides
The action takes place at the grave of Proteus. At Hera’s behest, the real Helen has been abducted to Egypt and has been living there for seventeen years. Everything that has occurred meanwhile at Troy actually involved an apparition of Helen, her double, with whom Menelaus has now begun the journey home. A shipwreck lands him on the coast of Egypt, and he encounters the true Helen dressed in rags. She is being wooed by the king of the country, Proteus’s son, but she resists him; for this reason he threatens death to any Greek who lands. When Helen and Menelaus recognize each other, there is only one way for them to escape: they say that Menelaus is dead. Menelaus, himself in rags, plays the messenger of his own death, and Helen convinces the enemy king that she can become his wife under one condition, that a shipboard funeral for Menelaus be held on the open sea. Then she will be free to become the barbarians’ queen. For the funeral sacrificial offerings, she and the false messenger (in fact, Menelaus) are granted a ship with oarsmen. They both board the ship, along with the shipwrecked Greeks, who have been hiding on the coast. Once on the high seas the crew is overpowered and the couple escape.
The crux of the drama is a living person who is pronounced dead and plays the part of another against his enemy, a new variation on the central theme of Greek tragedy. Since the hero is really alive and the reports of his death are feigned, the outcome is positive.
This “appearance” of the dead Menelaus is a curious extension and reversal of the apparition of the false Helen, who has hardly left the scene when it is decided that Menelaus is no longer alive. Only thus can he win back the real Helen and return home with her.
The Trojan War and all that came after it was no more than a continuation of the intrigue between Hera and Aphrodite. The actions of the gods are emotionally less offensive to us when we see the gods simply as the true powers that still hold sway over our earthly rulers. They are no different from them; they have the same characteristics and treat kings just as kings treat their own subjects and slaves. But they have also decided on war, because there are too many mortals.
For J.-M., every woman is more than any man, even the lowest, most hard-bitten outcast of a woman, and without hesitating he would throw a genius to a whore to devour and still fear he had wronged her. His Christianity, his humility, his feeling of being a sinner make him put all women in the right, because he is a man.
If you were a hundred years old, you would be so well understood that everything would be wrong again.
I know nothing, and I know least of all what I have found out myself.
What does this mean? That I must find it out again? Or that it only has meaning when others rediscover it?