362. At the cost of ruining the fable, I can’t help but imagine a version where, after the little match girl strikes the last match, a benefactor comes along.
363. The axe at the base of the tree will be withdrawn, and the trees will be allowed to go on growing for some time at least, because even the apocalypse needs to be heralded and then allowed to slip away, so that there is time to meditate on its deception and become thoroughly disabused of the illusion. The first time we were caught unawares, the second time we’ll already be tired of waiting.
364. You can come to know God without recognizing your own misery. Many, contrariwise, know their own misery in great detail but do not therefore come to know God, indeed, it is precisely the fact that they’re miserable that precludes them from finding the path to know God, who, if He existed, would be nothing more to them than the target of their rancor, because He would be thought to be responsible for their misery. If it were ever to happen, the meeting might last no longer than the arc of a profanity. The misfortunes that befall us can bring us closer to God or distance us light-years from Him, as if what had already happened weren’t bad enough, as if celestial clouds and clusters and nebulae formed of millions of stars weren’t enough to separate us from His being, but He still had to precipitate even farther from us, even deeper into the remote abysses, withdrawing from the disaster that He has caused us. Practically speaking, on the lam, taking it on the run. For that matter, if the world is so cruel and absurd, why would anyone be interested in getting closer to its Creator? Much less worship Him? And therefore, between God and human misery there is an abyss that cannot be bridged, or else it is obvious to suppose that it might be bridged only by hatred: hatred of the Almighty who crushes His unsuccessful creations; the hatred of creatures who cannot stop cursing Whoever brought them into the world. The curser is a singular figure of connection. By filling the void with contumely, he makes it practicable, like someone who throws rocks and junk into a stream. He isn’t all that different from someone who prays: he seeks, in other words, to establish a relationship, however brutally. But we seriously do need a high-level mediator between God and human misery, and that would be Jesus Christ, Who is at the same time God and human misery, the problem, the cause of the problem, and its remedy. Therefore it is completely useless to seek God without following the path of Christ. The God that you might encounter by following a different route all alone would be incomprehensible or frightening because devoid of any humanity: a God for theologians or philosophers or mathematicians, a God for kings and high priests who need to subjugate the masses by terrorizing them. Those who set off on this solitary path can only end up crushed or hurled into the depths. Your own personal suffering, sealed into your individual dimension, would just be useless ballast weighing you down on this steep climb, while the suffering of Christ, once His cross has been acknowledged, would help you to lift that burden, or rather, it would invert the polarity of that weight. Instead of hindering you, the pain would serve to provide signposts. Let us allow Him to carry at least a little of our pain. Let Him blaze the path for us. Let us mirror ourselves in His pain, let us learn to recognize in it the entire spectrum of our pain and sorrow: when we suffer, we are insulted, mortified, betrayed, when our friends abandon us and our home is destroyed and our bed is invaded and our body tortured. These are all things that happened to Him, and He experienced them one by one. He who doesn’t know and acknowledge Christ, then, knows nothing. He knows nothing of God, he knows nothing of the world, but he also knows nothing of himself. Or perhaps we should say that he can only know his own senseless misery and his own equally senseless pride, as if they were incommunicable elements. In fact, only that which establishes communication can be understood: between one thing and another, between oneself and oneself, between oneself and things, between one person and another, between oneself and people and things. Only affliction, without consolation, only tenacity without honest recognition of one’s own weakness: if you leave these elements disjointed, the world remains incomprehensible. Jesus is the only connecting figure. Of ourselves to ourselves, first and foremost. And then to others. P.S. If I were a pastor, what I have just written might provide good material for a sermon. Since I’m not one, however, who am I preaching to? My pulpit is the kitchen, my congregation, a line of tuna cans.
365. However much it may annoy me how Christian rhetoric gives inspired definitions of disasters and human suffering as “gifts of God,” precious opportunities supposedly offered us expressly to understand, grow, mature, open up to others, etc., etc., things that appear to me at once fanatical and consolatory, if not actually hypocritical seeing that they are trying to palm off an objective misfortune as an advantage, there is no doubt that the most solid communities are formed in resistance to sorrow and grief, by passing through them. Those who pass through them alone, then, what benefit can they gain therefrom? And what benefit will they transmit to others? I’d like to say none, but it’s of this “none” that I’m afraid, I’m afraid even just to say so.
368. Like a shooting star, hope passed over their heads.
369. To love those who hate you, as Christ preaches, is a very difficult thing, but maybe you can give it a try, you can make an effort, it’s an experiment that is still conceivable; but to love those you hate, no, that’s just not possible, unless you choose to camouflage and twist an emotion, palming it off as its own diametric opposite, thereby becoming a whited sepulcher. At the very outside you might try to hate them a little less, or forget about them, dislodging them from your mind and your life.
370. Let’s put it this way: the only visible and indisputable law that has been imposed upon us is injustice. And who are we to dare to strip ourselves of the only law we possess? (from the turn of phrase and the subject, I presume that this thought was inspired by Franz Kafka).
372. Who am I? Tell me. And if I like being the person you tell me I am, I’ll come. Otherwise I’ll stay here.
373. Feelings become stronger when they contain something horrible.
374. Telling a story of which you’re the main character is a sign of either great confusion or arrogance.
377. Even happiness leaves its trail of victims behind it, because the happy individual is often happy at the expense of some other individual: the rich man, the beloved man, the chosen one, the winner, the pregnant woman—they’re all happier than the poor man, the unloved man, the discarded one, the loser, the sterile woman. Therefore happiness produces unhappiness, and unhappiness reproduces itself.
378. There are very few occasions in which we are conscious of the real reason for our joy; it is even harder to understand how often it is caused by someone else’s pain, and how often we enjoy something only because we took it away from someone else; there are practically no pleasures that don’t make someone else suffer: the animal that has been slaughtered, the peasant who gathered the bunch of grapes, the bunch of grapes that was squeezed, the woman we cheated on, the woman we cheated on her with, and even the one we remain faithful to: to say nothing of ourselves, the very first ones to be devastated by our wishes, by those ungranted as well as those attained. More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones (that last phrase is a quotation from St. Teresa of Ávila, used by Truman Capote in the opening of his unfinished novel Answered Prayers).
379. We are not only capable of concealing a part of ourselves from others, but also of housing it inside us as if it were a stranger. That concealment, then, is above all a concealment of ourselves from ourselves: seeing that the boundaries of our own selves laid out by our brains can easily include objects that are not part of them at all (see, for example, the experiment known as “the rubber hand illusion”), likewise the brain can be persuaded that some parts of one’s own identity are actually extraneous, alien, intrusive elements.
381. An American writer once tried to tease out the suffering due to illness in all its possible meanings, as various metaphors: as a contract, an inheritance, a promise, a task, a
gift, a mistake, an ornament, or a dream (I imagine, a nightmare, in that case). Depending on how we interpret it, we can respond by: fighting, reacting angrily, resigning ourselves, surrendering nicely, expressing our thanks, trying to come to terms with it through any of various moral, religious, or intellectual instruments, that is, through deception, forgetfulness, illusion, disillusionment, narrative, sublimation. I believe that I have assumed at least once and for various amounts of time each of these attitudes, rotating them. Lately, I tend to see it rather as an ornament, or maybe I should say a garment, which means: something that doesn’t belong in the narrowest sense to my physical person and which I wear, because I am required to, but appropriately, in other words, like a uniform. It distinguishes me from others while at the same time establishing a bond with everyone else who wears it. And like a genuine uniform, suffering can’t simply be taken off from one day to the next: it would be as if you’d been stripped of rank, your decorations ripped from your chest. It would be a dishonorable discharge.
381. My last words, I’m almost certain, will be negligent and negligible. Perhaps that is what scares us: not silence, or a scream, or a nice weighty phrase, but rather, “Oh, good morning to you, Doctor,” and that those might be our last words.
382. If I no longer experience genuine proper emotions, that may be because they have been transmuted into physical sensations, which the body may interpret as cold, heat, annoyance, the need to urinate or vomit, relaxation of the muscles, air in the belly, falling asleep, sugar on the tongue. All things that I might once have called by such names as hope, or anger, or sweetness, or fear. I wonder what physical shiver friendship is equivalent to: a sentiment or rather an attitude truncated forever but which might perhaps resurface in some specific point in me as a perception of which I’m barely aware: maybe as the breeze that comes in suddenly through the window on a stifling hot day.
383. I don’t have too much of a reason to complain about physical pain. In that sense, I can consider myself lucky. If this illness hits one in a hundred, that is, me (bad luck), then I’m the further one in a hundred of that 1 percent, who, once sick, suffers little or almost not at all (good luck within the bad luck). Moreover, I wouldn’t know what to say about the pain I do suffer, I wouldn’t venture to describe it, it would be pointless, in fact, the few times that I seriously do suffer, before squeezing the dose into my body, the last thing that would occur to me is to force myself to find the words to explain what it’s like, in order to tell someone about it or write it down here. With the shift nurse who comes to give me my treatment, we have an understanding by now on a mute signal that I give her to let her know how things are going and how much pain I’m feeling: I raise an arm to a certain height and she understands. When I am no longer capable of administering the necessary doses myself, she’ll take over, and in the meantime my growing extraneousness will, I trust, make it an automatic, almost bureaucratic process, which I’m happy about—or, to avoid using a word as out of place as “happiness”—which I’m satisfied with. Even now. Even now, in any case, the whole thing is rather impersonal. The random nature and the patent injustice of this disease, of any disease that strikes anyone at any age, with or without good cause, whether you went looking for it or else it came looking for you, out of the blue, instead of getting me worked up, reassures me, lightens me, and if it weren’t for the fact that I’d feel a certain shyness at being mistaken for a courageous or defiant person, it almost makes me laugh. The many many senseless things that punctuate our lives and even, as in my case, bring those lives to an end, free us of the obligation to find an overarching meaning for this exhaustion, this agitation that we call life. It seems sufficiently faithful to follow its wave as it rises and then crashes, letting myself be taken and then overwhelmed. Does it make me seem too wise to think this? Do I seem like a wise old Chinese man? Screwing just like a Chinaman, as the man says in that movie?
385. This is how it is: I don’t want to add any pain to the pain of being unable to express the pain. Not a drop more than what I deserve. Reflecting on his impotence does nothing to redeem the impotent man, if anything, it expands the range of his impotence from the corporeal to the intellectual.
386. In order to obviate the poverty of our way of expressing feelings like love and suffering, literature was invented. But it, too, makes an effort with great ingenuity and much effort to obviate that poverty. The bodies tormented by pain or in the throes of ecstatic pleasure plunge into silence or cliché.
387. The more civilization perfects itself, the higher the number of madmen and suicides, which some blame on the spread of narcotics use, but which might actually simply be the plague against which those substances were simply an attempted and temporary remedy.
392. (Machiavelli, Leopardi.) The obstinate and haughty realism that was the pride of all the greatest Italians, at an even higher level opens up to the realm of possibility in those same spirits. The determined insistence spent on proving that there are no alternatives to the acceptance of the harshness of reality, except in a lie, gives way to a more flexible, fluctuating vision, open to the “maybe,” the “you can’t rule out the fact that,” the hypotheses even just barely hinted at, when the various theses have grown arid with the fury devoted to sustaining and defending them, and they have therefore suddenly become as fragile as dry leaves.
393. Though it’s not a sure thing, we should certainly hope there is a God who sees and remembers everything, taking note of every tiny overlooked act of goodness, and threatening punishment for the crimes that men never even noticed or whose culprits couldn’t be tracked down. The community would feel more protected, and bad men would feel pursued everywhere and always: in such a system they could no longer get away with things, scrutinized by God’s all-seeing eye and eventually punished, perhaps not in this world but certainly in the next one. Whether or not such a thing actually happens is of no real concern, if what we were looking to obtain was a deterrence effect in the here and now, a way of discouraging evildoers. So God really ought to cut it out, once and for all, with all this hiding of Himself: all He’d need to do is show Himself, threateningly, maybe once every thousand years. Then, in the end, He could even forgive everything, it hardly matters.
394. Four different eventualities of repentance. Repent while resolving never to repeat those mistakes. Repent specifically to be able to repeat them again, then repent of them, and then fall back into them, and so on. Not to repent at all, and just to go on as before. Not to repent, and yet stop making those mistakes, because sin has become dull and boring or else it has used up all your energies, it has even worn out its own name, and even if it were to be repeated, it would no longer really even be a sin.
399. Why does pleasure always have to be followed by its opposite? Why is it discarded and abandoned almost immediately? Perhaps it is its unexpected nature that is so upsetting. Most people don’t know what to do with the unexpected. It’s simpler for them to just adapt to its absence. As quickly as they can. Happiness makes people uncomfortable. Do you want to compare it with the tranquillity of being frustrated? Its linear nature, its complete consistency? The way most people have of dealing with a pleasure that has taken them by surprise is to hide. One’s own vitality and that of others are impending threats.
400. If they are observed from close up, if one attentively turns them over in one’s hands, all the imperatives of philosophy, religion, and morality are utterly empty: inside the translucent coffer of their propositions, which claim to be necessary and universal, there is everything but also, at the same time, nothing, nothing specific at all: anything specific and concrete would undercut their totality. Whatever the case, as soon as they receive those commandments, people immediately fill them with contingencies, provide their abstractness with practical contents, succeeding sometimes in achieving the exact opposite of what the commandment prescribed.
401. The cadaverous obedience of the Jesuits. The mechanical obedience of all bodies to the laws of physics,
and of the elements to the laws of chemistry. Dispassionate and impersonal obedience to moral law. Obedience to the perverse law of pure desire. Obedience to the party and its leader. Obedience to the principles of liberty, which also demands obedience, and might indeed be the most tyrannical mistress.
403. The centuries are too short.
404. If Oedipus actually murdered his father in order to have sex with his mother, and nothing more, it would mean that the homicidal impulse moves economically, rationally, to attain some specific satisfaction: however, there must be subtler, more hidden reasons than this banal objective with a sexual undertone, more unpredictable motives that may, who can say, also be sexual in nature, but which have to do with destructiveness in a less mechanical fashion than this rustic idea of simply eliminating a rival. The idea of gratuitously destroying an individual (much like the idea of not destroying him even when to do so would serve one’s self-interest or the more general collective interest) transcends all logic and any economic principle. To kill someone or spare them might mean to follow a rule or break one. An example? The one provided by people of goodwill who stand ready, rock in raised hand, to stone the adulteress, that is, to implement a measure of justice prescribed by law, or else to gratify a homicidal impulse conveniently transformed into a moral instrument, all the more implacable precisely because it is legitimate. By putting down that stone instead of throwing it, they will give rise to the controversial relationship between Christianity and justice, as if to say, between disproportion and proportion.
405. It is pointless for the saints to kiss the pustulent sores of the filthy: not only us, but even God himself is disgusted to see them seeking paradise through such repugnant proofs of faith.
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