To find your spiritual unity again, to know what you are thinking about, to pry figures from the dreams of decades, consort with them, entrust your life to them, lose your fear of them.
I have read my old sentences again; they are no longer mine. Since they were printed a piece of my life has fallen away from me.
The public sucks the blood from a man’s soul, and what is left is just a shadow, which bows down to them.
False acquaintances and expectations still surround him like a wall of vileness. Until it collapses not a single truth will be granted him.
To bring past years to present moments.
The young person, delighted by the countless idiotic remarks he is allowed to make—suddenly he sees his great future before him.
Loneliness, the sword we draw against those who love us. The cruelty that horrified me in Picasso was my own; still, he was able to protect her from himself with his enormous activity. But I? With what?
Behind every woman he likes talking to he sees a literary figure. He surrounds himself with the elect society of such people. It is obvious he hasn’t a clue about real people. His life is led exclusively in the conceptual realm, and his only passion is getting ahead. A thinker who can’t start from the concrete is no thinker for me, and a single fragment, a single phrase of a Greek philosopher of whom nothing else survives is more to me than all the works of the living A.
A thinker must forget that he is clever, else no matter what the field he will think only about his own cleverness.
What happens to names in all their relations? The sole accomplishment of certain minds is pulling together all sorts of names. While this might come naturally and gradually to most people, these types do it with force. It cannot be denied that in this way things sometimes come about that might not have otherwise.
For names are spiteful and greedy and cannot leave each other alone for a moment. They bite off whole chunks of each other like the most predatory fish. They sense, more than see, each other’s presence. It is unthinkable that they could quietly look at one another. They are potentates, pretentious and irreplaceable, and their pervasiveness makes them more dangerous.
An insecure name is not a name, or it is felt to be a freak by the others. When exposed, some names get frightened and try to hide. If they can, they gather strength in darkness and become invincible. Other names, swallowed whole by bigger ones, prove indigestible. The time can come when they are all that remains of their predator, for, like a dangerous parasite, they have destroyed him from within.
One might ask what makes man so addicted to names, why he becomes a slave to them, inside and out.
A conversation about a name we know absolutely nothing about. The way it comes up in the conversation (which we overhear), how often and when it is mentioned again, after having been just “he” for a while.
We write because we cannot speak out loud to ourselves. Speaking to others leads to the most unpredictable estrangements. They gradually lose their own separate existence because of all the countless words with which we attack and overpower them. A kind of slow murder, it is among the most terrible things in human life. It is like someone’s pressing down to close off our air passages but taking years until we stop breathing entirely. We stay more innocent when we write.
“I know what you mean.” A catchphrase of this psychologizing time, really signifying that we have given up trying to understand the other person before we have even heard him. For we have understood everyone before they have even said a thing.
It is necessary that we leave our learning alone from time to time, that we put it away, not use it, almost forget it. It is precisely this compulsive quality of much learning that makes it necessary to let air into it, loosen it, fill it with the breath of years. It can be part of our nature only when it has given up its compulsiveness.
Most people say “God” to hide from themselves.
Love: a snake with two heads that unceasingly keep watch on each other.
A person is good even when all praise him for being so.
A country where everyone walks backward, to keep an eye on themselves. A country where all turn their backs on one another: fear of eyes.
First, only misunderstandings are left. These will die away; then the work will remain.
A labyrinth made of all the paths one has taken.
She can forget the same thing a hundred times: how he envies her that!
A man who on his own must make up for all the wars he once evaded.
His timidity about bringing any more hopelessness into the world, even by the most honest work, has grown insuperable. How does he differ from Gogol, with his flaming fears?
You have described so many things that move you. Have you left out the most important?
That raving maniac in Munich, placing the hope of the world on Alexander and the diadoches (relief troops), on Augustus.
In Nestroy, you think, you have all Austria. You are deceived; in him you have the delight one finds in malice.
The special interconnection of the social classes in Nestroy, more clearly outlined than anywhere else. Flattery and guile, the forms flattery takes, and the schemes of double-crossers.
Words in Nestroy that I never even knew were Austrian, many of my naive and natural words—I read in the notes with astonishment what they mean.
In the sixth book of the life of Apollonius of Tyana the discussion of the animal gods of Egypt. Apollonius attacks the naked Ethiopians’ ways and derides their animal gods. This angers them, and in response they argue that the customs of the Greeks (the scourging of young men in Sparta) seem to them absurd and undignified. They cannot decide on this point and no one’s mind is changed.
What I like in the account of Apollonius’s life is the unbroken variety of gods, despite many echoes of Christianity (contempt for money, violence, and sex).
What I don’t like are all the stories of his second sight. This was probably crucial to the godlike qualities ascribed to him. There are intellectual miracles of a different sort from Christ’s, showing off his philosophic superiority: Apollonius always knows best.
In this role he meets secular rulers on an equal level, even Romans like Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian. Far from despising power, he wants to influence it for good.
His falling out with Euphrates, one of his closest and most important pupils, is traced to Euphrates’ love of money. This quarrel has disturbing aspects, and though Euphrates’ villainy is held accountable as far as the argument is concerned, we are never quite convinced of Apollonius’s greater virtue.
A drama that overplays the differences in size among people. People are as different from one another as if they were dogs.
The avaricious, who conceal themselves so well that eventually they disappear.
How much we can ask of one person simply because we despise the others.
A.’s art: to say as much as possible as cleverly as possible for as long as possible, without ever saying one word that really strikes the spirit. So I loathe him even more than if he had nothing to say at all.
The infusion of Platonism in Cervantes is interesting only in the places where it becomes negative. When ideas are delusion, they lose the hollow, worn-out falseness they have accreted in the course of an overlong literary tradition. Of course, this is the great thing about Don Quixote: the idea and the ideal as madness, in all its consequences, uncovered and skewered. Whether this is ridiculous or not is not the issue: to me it seems terribly serious.
The moral quality of Cervantes is his desperate attempt to cope with the wretched circumstances of his daily life, his conforming to the official conventions of the powers of his time. This is why he is careful that virtue wins out and why he behaves like a Christian. Fortunately his substance, the misery of his real life, is so immeasurably great that conformism could never quite smother it.
Tremendous affection for Cervantes because he knew better than the conventional wisdom of his age and because his hypocrisy, which perhaps he himself didn’t see through, is nonetheless transparent. I admire his spatial breadth; his fate, which so drove him hither and yon, gave him breadth instead of lessening him. Also I love the fact that he became known so late and that despite, or even because of, this he never gave up hope. Despite the many falsifications of life that he allowed into his “ideal” tales, he loved life as it is.
For me, this is the sole criterion of the epic talent: a knowledge of life even at its most horrific, a passionate love for it nonetheless, a love that never despairs, for it is inviolable even in its desperation. Nor is it really tied to a belief, for it originates in the variety of life, its unknown, astonishing, wondrous variety, its unpredictable twists and turns. For those who cannot stop pursuing life, it changes in the pursuit into a hundred new, overwhelmingly remarkable creatures; and for those who just as tirelessly chase after all hundred of them, they will change into a thousand others, all just as new.
The superior “higher” people in Cervantes’ novellas are no less “high” than in Shakespeare. But it is welcome when, in Cervantes, the children of these higher characters run off for at least a few years of “low” living. The young nobleman who for love becomes a gypsy (though his lover turns out not to be a gypsy after all) or the young man in “The Highborn Barn Maid” who bolts for freedom, returning three years later without his upper-class parents’ suspecting where he really was. If we could only know what lies he tells them before running off again! With Cervantes, love is really a “lowlife” concern, but to become famous for knowing it so well, he sets the “high” impossibly high, to flatter those who could be his patrons. But there is more here than mere flattery: he would rather be in their shoes. Should we think it lucky that his wretched lot never did improve?
We really cannot say. The effect of privation on invention is different with everyone, and without knowing the person at hand well, we will never know whether there was too much or too little of it, whether it helped or hindered the power of invention.
A person escapes fame by changing names but gets more famous with every one.
As long as I am writing I feel safe. Perhaps I write for just that reason. But it doesn’t matter what I write. It’s important only that I not stop. It can be anything as long as it is for me, not a letter or something imposed or required from outside. But if I have not written for a few days I become confused, desperate, down, vulnerable, mistrustful, threatened by a hundred perils.
I know that everything is changing, and because I feel the ineluctable coming of the new, I turn to the old wherever I can find it. It might be that I just want to save and preserve it because I can’t bear the passing of anything. But it could also be that I am testing it, to use against death, still unbeaten.
Other writers have written memoirs. Memoirs attract me too. I just find it hard to take them seriously enough, given the omnipresence of death.
Perhaps, too, I fear diluting the seriousness and sincerity of my thinking by revealing its sources in my life. It is unimportant how I have arrived at something that concerns everyone as well as myself. So I would need to write memoirs in a way that would reinforce my convictions in the eyes of others. I still mistrust the selective cleverness of any new insight. Thus, I don’t pay enough attention to formal speculations on the renewal of an art form that once was my own. They seem like game playing. I like games well enough but I don’t want to forfeit any of my real goals to them. I could try saying: Forget death for a year and use this year for everything you have neglected on account of it. But can I? Can I really?
The figure of a lover who suddenly is struck with the horrible realization that others are lovers too. The minute he can no longer deny the truth of this, as soon as he sees it, his own emotion dissolves.
The variety of Stendhal’s travel books. His apodictic pronouncements and judgments. His passion for fictional national characteristics and for famous people. His even greater passion for victims and women. His naiveté: not one of his emotions embarrasses him. His love of disguises, at least in names. We like him because he says it all. He doesn’t try to make every little thing conform to his own vanity. Though full of reminiscences, Stendahl doesn’t get bogged down in them. His reminiscing has that rarest quality, open-endedness. He is always finding something new because he loves all kinds of things. He is often delighted. No matter what his good fortune, he never feels guilty. He doesn’t tire us with long discussions, because he hates the theoretical. His thinking is lively, but he sticks to that which he himself has felt. He does not live without gods, but they come from all kinds of spheres, and it never occurs to him to relate them by family or marriage. He sees cities only if he finds people in them. He doesn’t let a good story go untold. He writes a great deal, but is never pompous. The absence of religion keeps things light.
Stendhal was not my bible, but among writers he was my savior. I have certainly not read all of him, let alone more than once. But I have never opened anything by him without feeling light and bright. He was not my law. But he was my freedom, and whenever I felt smothered I found it in him. I owe him far more than I owe those who influenced me. Without Cervantes, without Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Büchner, I would be nothing, spirit without fire or contour. But I could live only because there is Stendhal. He is my justification and my love of life.
I will never succumb to adjectives, especially in threes. They are Proust’s Orientalism, his love of jewels. These say nothing to me, for I love all stones. The “precious” stones for Proust are the aristocrats among his characters. My “aristocrats” are those unknown people of “the beginning”: bushmen, Aranda, Tierra del Fuegans, the Ainu. My “aristocrats” are all those who still live by myths, who would be lost without them. (And now they are, mostly.) The society in which Proust made his way, his snobbishness, was his way of experiencing the world. That world leaves me cold. I am only interested in it when I read him or Saint-Simon.
All the people we have known return under new names, in unexpected circumstances. We look at them questioningly, hopefully: don’t they recognize us, since we recognize them?
Perhaps people are able to distinguish only among a discrete number of faces, and when that number is exceeded, perhaps after a certain age they are receptive only to the old faces they already know, and in the new see only those.
Every sharp mind soon oppresses us, makes us ashamed, as if we had broken a promise. But regardless, every mind properly exists for itself, even an “inferior” one that hasn’t quite reached such refinement.
She said that even the English can show grief about death and gave me many examples of mourning for dogs.
Since he went into mourning he no longer knows who his friends are.
This aversion to modern literature that you don’t like to admit—an aversion to modern man.
Memoirs of the Florentine world traveler Carletti. He started at age eighteen as a slave trader with his businessman father in the Cape Verde Islands, sailed with his first cargo to Cartagena and then to Panama, Lima, Mexico, Manila, Japan, and Macao, where his father died. He met another Florentine there, in whose company he spent more than a year. Then he journeyed back via Ceylon and India, and near Saint Helena his ship was captured by Dutch pirates and taken to Zeeland. There he fought in court for years to reclaim his stolen possessions but met with little success, and finally, fifteen years after he left, he returned to Florence, where he told the grand duke about his journey. He saw much that was interesting, but his narration seems somehow pale, warmed-over: the thing that interested him the most was prices. A true merchant, and the forerunner of today’s tourists, who mainly record and convert the prices in foreign countries. Having lost all his journals, he reports everything from memory: he still has all the prices in his head, citing them everywhere, and it is quite possible that they were the chief point of interest for his grand duke as well.
All that’s left of him are bones—but the noise they make! The bustle, the bother, the disturbance! With them alone he wants to accomplish what his flesh never could: his bones should grow rich and famous.
The oracle: he loves his own confusing inconsistency. He has succeeded in making an art of it. He fears nothing so much as losing it. He is his own cog in the wheel of time, and puts all his hopes in his inconsistency. Eventually, maybe, half sentences will have some kind of meaning.
He keeps people in subjugation, the better to despise them. These fools, who still believe or are bound to some belief, give him the strength to keep up the ragged show of confusion. For each one of them he has a word prepared, one that doesn’t fit with any other. He maintains that no man has ever understood what another has said; if men only understood this, they would be better off. But as it is, they hang on every strange word and poison their lives with whatever they suppose it means. He likes to listen when others miscommunicate. It delights him to recreate their helplessness. They suspect that he might hear confession, but he won’t hear anyone alone. If two people come and confess to each other simultaneously, however, he is all ears. His patience is infinite when they reveal to him their confusion. Then he smiles, friendly and cheering, saying over and over, “And then? And then?” Nothing bores him, nothing seems too long, so long as what he hears satisfies his passion to know.
It has happened that four or even eight people have appeared before him at once. He doesn’t refuse them; he is particularly attracted by the fact that they think they know one another and come as a group. He notes very quickly where their lines of division run and discreetly sets himself up as the ringmaster of their disunity. Some, who expect the opposite of him, are against him: these he quickly silences. It is so easy to expose their abysmal absurdity, and in one another’s presence they are even more easily shamed. He records his triumphs in short, nasty phrases.
What do the clever know of how much effort and cunning it takes not to succumb to the paranoia that is his natural tendency. How stubbornly he must struggle against his integrity, as others do against disintegration; how tireless and artful he has to be in distracting his mind so that it doesn’t focus on madness and evil; how he must divide himself up a thousand times to have enough breath to take in the world; how he tortures those he loves, because he loves them more intensely; how careful he must be not to see through things, because this destroys them for him; how he must keep on fighting death, the enemy, for only it has the universality to contain everything he hates.
F. sees reason in everything that is. Every institution makes sense; deftly his thought will find and administer its justness. He is peaceable and gentle; he doesn’t like fighting. Instead of weapons he relies on institutions. He compares but never attacks—there are so many sides to every issue that there is nothing left to attack. Tolerance keeps him away from religion: priests are as repugnant to him as soldiers. And he will say so of the former, but on the latter he is silent. He is ashamed of his cowardice but rather proud of his tolerance.
At home he is the opposite of a father. Certainly he loves his children, but he despises the authority every father has and he is reluctant to make use of it.
Books are his great passion: their appearance, their publication dates, prices, authors, reviews, and contents. Somehow he knows them, even if he can’t read them, since his profession doesn’t leave him much time for reading.
He really knows pictures and loves many of them with an awkward tenderness.
He is so loyal to the dead that they can never really disappear. He moves back toward them; they light up within him like pictures. In his eyes there is a grief that he will never give words to. But it was always there, even before their deaths, as if he had always known.
He is reserved, but he needs others who are not. In his youth, he was ill-used by moralistic pronouncements. So, while he hates intolerance, he has the acutest moral reactions to people.
He is tall and very thin; his limbs move about like snakes and drape themselves around chairs and other furniture. They are never still, constantly arranging themselves in new patterns.
Old friends are exciting, for we can know an infinite amount about them and see it all right there at once, and it seems to be more than could ever fit into one person.
Disturbing, this overflow in people we know for a long time—we could drown in it.
But we seldom think of all we know about people. We have forgotten most of it, and what remains is false, so we are as fresh for them as on the first day.
Memorial days: where misunderstandings intersect.
I am sick of these conversations with myself. I want to direct the conversations of others.
The “Notes” make most suspect the notion that everyone chooses something completely different for himself and then copies what someone else chose.
It’s against his nature to be a critic—he is too grateful.
Astounding, when things we recited to ourselves so often suddenly turn out to be true.
Hatred of destruction of any kind becomes dangerous itself: as reverence for everything that exists, the best as well as the worst.
You have to attack yourself so devastatingly that it’s really not fun. Without serious injuries that leave scars, you shouldn’t be allowed to get up again.
The animals he uses to ornament his thoughts curse him in silence.
Probably all satirists are one and the same person.
The evil eye I had no longer interests me. But I am enchanted when I read others who have it.