All Gall Is Divided_The Aphorisms of A Legendary Iconoclast

by Richard Howard

  Contrary to the other centuries, which practiced torture negligently, ours, more exigent in the matter, exerts a purist’s conscientiousness which does honor to our cruelty.

  All Indignation — from grousing to satanism — marks a point in mental evolution.

  Freedom is the supreme good only for those animated by the will to heresy.

  How vague it is to say: I tend toward one system rather than another. It would be more exact to acknowledge: I prefer this police state to that one. History, indeed, comes down to a classification of police; for what does the historian deal with if not men’s conception of the gendarme through the ages?

  No longer speak of enslaved peoples nor of their craving for freedom; the tyrants are assassinated too late: that is their great excuse.

  In periods of peace, hating for the pleasure of hating, we must find the enemies which suit us; — a delicious task which exciting times spare us.

  Man secretes disaster.

  I love those nations of astronomers: Chaldeans, Assyrians, pre-Columbians who, for love of the sky, went bankrupt in history.

  An authentically chosen people, the Gypsies bear the responsibility for no event, for no institution. They have triumphed over the earth by their desire to found nothing upon it.

  A few more generations and laughter, reserved to the initiate, will be as impracticable as ecstasy.

  A nation dies out when it no longer reacts to fanfares: Decadence is the death of the bugle.

  Skepticism is the stimulant of young civilizations and the prudence of old ones.

  Mental therapeutics abound among rich nations: the absence of immediate anxieties sustains a sickly climate. In order to preserve its nervous well-being, a nation needs a substantial disaster, an object for its afflictions, a positive terror justifying its “complexes.” Societies consolidate in danger and atrophy in neutrality. Where peace and hygiene and comfort flourish, psychoses multiply.

  … I come from a country which, never having known happiness, has produced but one psychoanalyst.

  Tyrants, their ferocity slaked, become meek; everything would work out if the jealous slaves did not insist, they too, on slaking theirs. The lamb’s aspiration to become a wolf brings about the majority of events. Those who have none dream of fangs; they would devour in their turn and succeed in doing so by the bestiality of numbers.

  History — that dynamism of victims.

  For having classed intelligence among the virtues and stupidity among the vices, France has enlarged the realm of morality. Whence her advantage over the other nations, her vaporous supremacy.

  We might measure the degree of a civilization’s refinement by the number of liver sufferers, of impotent men or neurotic women. — But why confine ourselves to these deficient types when there are so many others who attest, by the failure of their viscera or of their glands, to the Mind’s fatal prosperity?

  The biologically weak, finding no satisfaction in life, go about changing its données.

  Why weren’t the reformers isolated at the first symptoms of faith? and why was there any delay in consigning them to a hospital or a prison? At twelve years of age, the Galilean should have had his place there. Society is poorly organized: it takes no action against the delirious who don’t die young.

  Skepticism spreads its blessings upon us too late, upon our faces deteriorated by our convictions, upon our faces of hyenas with an ideal.

  A book on war — Clausewitz’s — was Lenin’s pillow book and Hitler’s. — And we still wonder why this century is doomed!

  To make our way from the caves to the salons required a considerable amount of time; will we take as long to cover the path back, or will we take shortcuts? — An idle question for those who have no presentiment of prehistory…

  All calamities — revolutions, wars, persecutions — derive from an almost inscribed on a flag.

  Only the failed nations approach a “human” ideal; the others, those who succeed, bear the stigmata of their glory, of their gilded bestiality.

  In our fear, we are victims of an aggression of the Future.

  A statesman who shows no sign of senility is the one I am afraid of.

  The great nations, having the initiative of their miseries, can vary them at will; the minor ones are reduced to those which are imposed upon them.

  Anxiety — or the fanaticism of the worst.

  When the mob espouses a myth, expect a massacre or, worse still, a new religion.

  Violent actions are the appanage of the nations which, alien to the pleasure of lingering at table, are ignorant of the poetry of dessert and the melancholies of digestion.

  Without its assiduity to the ridiculous, would the human race have lasted more than a single generation?

  There is more honesty and rigor in the occult sciences than in the philosophies which assign a “meaning” to history.

  This century carries me back to the dawn of time, to the last days of Chaos. I hear the groans of matter; the calls of the Inanimate echo through space; my bones sink into the prehistoric, while my blood flows in the veins of the first reptiles.

  The merest glance at the itinerary of civilization gives me the presumption of Cassandra.

  Man’s “liberation”? — It will come the day when, rid of his finalist tendency, he will have understood the accidental nature of his advent and the gratuitousness of his ordeals, where each will shudder as a learned and nimble victim and where, for the populace itself, “life” will be reduced to its just proportions, to an hypothesis of labor.

  Not until you’ve seen a brothel at five in the morning can you realize toward what lethargies our planet is making its way.

  History is indefensible. You must react to it with the cynic’s inflexible abulia; either you side with the masses or you walk with the mob of rebels, murderers, and believers.

  Has Man-the-Experiment failed? It had already failed with Adam. Yet one question is justified: will we be inventive enough to appear as innovators, to add to that failure?

  Meanwhile, let us persevere in the mistake of being men, let us behave as jokers of the Fall, let us be terribly light!

  Nothing consoles me for not having known the moment when earth broke with the sun — unless it is the prospect of knowing the one when men break with the earth.

  Formerly, people shifted gravely from one contradiction to the next; nowadays we experience so many at once that we no longer know which to cling to, which to resolve.

  Impenitent rationalists, incapable of accommodating ourselves to Fate or of perceiving its meaning, we regard ourselves as the center of our actions and believe we collapse of our own free will Let one crucial experience intervene in our life, and destiny, once so imprecise and abstract, acquires in our eyes the prestige of a sensation. So each in his own way makes his entrance into the Irrational.

  A civilization at the end of its trajectory, fortunate anomaly that it was, withers into conformity, models itself on the mediocre nations, wallows in failure, and converts its fate into a unique problem. Of this self-obsession, Spain provides the perfect example. After having known, in the days of the Conquistadors, a bestial superhumanity, she has given herself over to ruminating upon her past, repeating her lacunae, letting her virtues and her genius gather mildew; on the other hand, in love with her own decline, she has adopted it as a new supremacy. How could we fail to perceive that such historical masochism has ceased to be a Spanish singularity and become the climate and indeed the code of a continent’s downfall.

  Today, on the theme of the senility of civilizations, any illiterate could rival shudders with Gibbon, Nietzsche, or Spengler.

  The end of history, the end of man? Can it be a serious matter to ponder such things? — These are remote events which Anxiety — greedy for imminent disasters — seeks to precipitate at all costs.

  Where the Void Begins

  I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide …

  Will man ever recover from the mortal blow he ha
s delivered to life?

  I cannot reconcile myself with things, were each moment to wrest itself out of time to give me a kiss.

  He is merely a mind crannied to have openings onto the beyond.

  Who, in pitch-darkness, looking into a mirror, has not seen projected there the crimes which await him?

  If we had the faculty of exaggerating our evils, it would be impossible for us to endure them. By attributing unwonted proportions to them, we consider ourselves chosen reprobates, elect in reverse, flattered and stimulated by disgrace.

  For our greater good, there exists in each of us a braggart of the Incurable.

  Everything must be revised, even sobs …

  When Aeschylus or Tacitus seems tepid, open a Life of the Insects — a revelation of rage and futility, an inferno which, fortunately for us, will have neither a playwright nor a chronicler. What would remain of our tragedies if a literate bug were to offer us his?

  You do not act, yet you resent the fever of high deeds; without enemies, you wage an exhausting battle … This is the gratuitous tension of neurosis, which would give even a grocer the shudders of a defeated general.

  I cannot contemplate a smile without reading in it: “Look at me! it’s for the last time.”

  Lord, take pity on my blood, on my anemia in flames!

  How much concentration, industry, and tact it takes to destroy our raison (d’êtrel

  When I realize that individuals are merely life stammering, and that life itself isn’t worth much more with regard to matter, I make for the first bistro with the notion of never coming out. And yet were I to drain a thousand bottles in there, they could never give me the taste for Utopia, for that belief that something is still possible.

  Each of us shuts himself up in his fear — his ivory tower.

  The secret of my adaptation to life? — I’ve changed despairs the way I’ve changed shirts.

  In each blackout, we feel a kind of final sensation — in God.

  My greed for agonies has made me die so many times that it strikes me as indecent to keep on abusing a corpse from which I can get nothing more.

  Why Being or some other capitalized word? God sounded better. We ought to have kept that one. After all, shouldn’t reasons of euphony regulate truth-functions?

  In the state of paroxysm without cause, fatigue is a delirium, and the fatigued person the demiurge of a sub-universe.

  Each day is a Rubicon in which I aspire to be drowned.

  No founder of a religion displays a pity comparable to what we find in one of Pierre Janet’s patients. She would have crying jags on the subject, among others, of “that poor Department of Seine-et-Oise which encloses and contains the Department of the Seine without ever being able to get rid of it.”

  In pity, as in everything, the madhouse has the last word.

  In our dreams surfaces the madman within; having ruled our nights, he falls asleep in the depths of ourselves, at the heart of the Species; yet sometimes we hear him snoring in our thoughts…

  Who trembles for his depression, who dreads recovering from it — how relieved he is to observe that his fears are ill founded, that it is incurable!

  “Where do you get those superior airs of yours?”

  “I’ve managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?”

  The moment we believe we’ve understood everything grants us the look of a murderer.

  We emerge into the irrevocable only from the moment we can no longer renew our regrets.

  Those ideas which soar above space itself and which, all of a sudden, bump into the walls of the skull…

  A religious nature is defined less by its convictions than by the need to prolong its sufferings beyond death.

  I observe, in terror, the diminution of my hatred of mankind, the loosening of the last link uniting me with it.

  Insomnia is the only form of heroism compatible with the bed.

  Young and ambitious, you will suffer no greater misfortune than to consort with those who know men. I’ve frequented three or four such: they did me in at twenty.

  The Truth? It is in Shakespeare; — a philosopher cannot appropriate it without exploding along with his system.

  When we have exhausted the pretexts which incite us to gaiety or melancholy, we come to the point of experiencing either one in a pure state: which is how we join the mad …

  After having so often exposed the folie des grandeurs in others, how could I without absurdity still believe myself to be the most ineffective man in the world, first in the ranks of the useless?

  “A single thought addressed to God is worth more than the universe” (Katherina Emmerich). — How right she is, poor saint…

  Madness is achieved only by the garrulous and the taciturn: those who have emptied themselves of all mystery and those who have accumulated too much.

  In dread — that megalomania in reverse— we become the center of a universal whirlwind, while the stars pirouette around us.

  When an idea is sufficiently ripe on the Tree of Knowledge, what ecstasy to insinuate one-self there, to function as a grub, and to hasten its fall!

  In order not to insult others’ labor or their beliefs, so as not to be accused of either apathy or sloth, I have flung myself into Confusion until it became my form of piety.

  The inclination to suicide is characteristic of timorous murderers, those who respect the laws; fearful of killing, they dream of wiping themselves out, sure as they are of impunity.

  “When I shave,” this half-mad man once told me, “who if not God keeps me from cutting my own throat?” — Faith, in other words, would be no more than an artifice of the instinct of self-preservation. Biology everywhere.

  It is out of fear of suffering that we struggle so to abolish reality. Our efforts crowned with success, such abolition reveals itself as a source of sufferings.

  If you don’t see death en rose, you are suffering from color blindness of the heart.

  Not having managed to celebrate abortion or legalize cannibalism, modern societies must resolve their difficulties by prompter methods.

  The last resort of those stricken by fate is the idea of fate.

  How I’d like to be a plant, even if I had to keep vigil over a piece of shit!

  That mob of ancestors lamenting in my blood… Out of respect for their defeats, I demean myself to sighs.

  Everything persecutes our ideas, beginning with our brain.

  We can’t know whether man will long continue to make use of words or gradually recover the use of screaming.

  Paris, remotest point from Paradise, remains nonetheless the only site where it feels good to despair.

  Some souls God Himself could not save were He to kneel and pray for them.

  A sick man once told me: “What use are my pains? I’m no poet able to turn them to use or to the satisfactions of vanity.”

  When, the motives of revolt being liquidated, we no longer know against what to rebel, we experience a vertigo such that we would give our lives in exchange for just one prejudice.

  When we turn pale, our blood withdraws in order no longer to interpose between us and who knows what…

  To each his own … madness: mine was to suppose myself normal, dangerously normal. And since others seemed mad to me, I ended by being afraid, afraid of them and, even more, afraid of myself.

  After certain fits of eternity and of fever, we wonder why we have not deigned to be God.

  The meditative and the carnal: Pascal and Tolstoy. To feel for death or to abhor it, to discover it by the mind or by physiology. — With undermined instincts, Pascal surmounts his dreads, whereas Tolstoy, outraged by dying, reminds us of a haggard elephant, a flattened jungle. One no longer meditates at the equators of the blood.

  The man who, by successive inadvertences, has neglected to kill himself seems to himself no more and no less than a veteran of pain, a pensioner of suicide.

  The more intimate I become with certain twi
lights, the surer I am that the only ones to have understood something of our horde are cabaret singers, quacks, and madmen.

  To attenuate our pangs, to convert them into doubts — a stratagem inspired in us by cowardice, that skepticism for universal use.

  Involuntary access to ourselves, sickness compels us, condemns us to “profundity.” The invalid? A metaphysician in spite of himself.

  After having vainly sought a country of adoption, to fall back on death, in order, in such new exile, to set up as a citizen.

  Any being who manifests himself rejuvenates in his fashion original sin.