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the man who either hopes for heaven or fears hell cannot be free. Shame on us if we continue to become intoxicated in the taverns of hope or the cellars of fear.
When a person is orderly and quiet in a society which is unruly, immoral, and boisterous, when he welcomes neither men nor women into his room, he infringes the rules. He is not, and cannot be, tolerated. I have observed this all through my life. Since my life was always extremely simple, people considered it dangerously complicated. No matter what I said or did, they attached a different meaning to it, always trying to divine what was hidden and undivulged.
Always, whenever I reach some certainty, my repose and assurance are short-lived. New doubts and anxieties quickly spring from this certainty, and I am obliged to inaugurate a hew struggle to deliver myself from the former certitude and find a new one—until finally that new one matures in its turn and is transformed into uncertainty. . . . How, then, can we define uncertainty? Uncertainty is the mother of a new certainty.
But the true man is not a sheep. Neither is he a sheepdog, a wolf, or a shepherd. He is a king who carries his kingdom with him and advances. Knowing where he is going, he reaches the brim of the abyss, removes the cardboard crown from his head, and discards it. Then he strips himself of his kingdom, and, completely naked like a diver, joins his hands together, also his feet, throws himself headfirst into chaos, and vanishes.
“Whoever says salvation exists is a slave, because he keeps weighing each of his words and deeds at every moment. ‘Will I be saved or damned?’ he tremblingly asks. ‘Will I go to heaven or to hell?’ . . . How can a soul that hopes be free? Whoever hopes is afraid both of this life and the life to come; he hangs indecisively in the air and waits for luck or God’s mercy.”
“To search in order to find the world’s beginning and end is a disease,” he said to me. “The normal person lives, struggles, experiences joy and sorrow, gets married, has children, and does not waste his time in asking whence, whither, and why.
Yes, Lenin was another new savior, I reflected, another new savior created by the enslaved, hungry, and oppressed to enable them to bear slavery, hunger, and oppression—another new mask for mankind’s despair and hope.
I listened to her. At first I offered objections, but I soon realized that faith rules from an elevated level above man’s head, and that reason is unable to touch it. I let her go on speaking, therefore, let her demolish and rebuild the world.
realized that night that the world is not a specter; that the body of woman is warm, hard, and filled with the waters of immortality; that death does not exist.
Christianity soiled the union of man and woman by stigmatizing it as a sin. Whereas formerly it was a holy act, a joyous submission to God’s will, in the Christian’s terror-shaken soul it degenerated into a transgression. Before Christ, sex was a red apple; along came Christ, and a worm entered that apple and began to eat it.
Direct contact with human beings I had always found irksome. I was eager to help them as much as I could, but from a distance. I did so with great pleasure, I loved them all and sympathized with them all, but from a distance. Whenever I came near, I found it impossible to tolerate them for long, they felt the same about me, and we parted. I have a passionate love for solitude and silence; I can gaze for hours at a fire or the sea without feeling any need for additional companionship.
Albert Schweitzer.
Difficulty, however, has always been life’s stimulant, awakening and goading all our impulses, both good and bad, in order to make us overleap the obstacle which has suddenly risen before us. Thus we sometimes reach a point much further than we had hoped: by mobilizing all our forces, which otherwise would have remained asleep or acted reluctantly and without concentration.
exercise our minds in order to keep certainty from turning us into idiots, that we fight to open every closed door we find in front of us. “I cannot live without certainty,” says the person who is in a hurry to settle down, to find firm ground on which to stand, to eat without seeing the innumerable hungry, gaping mouths behind the food he devours. “I do not wish to live without uncertainty, nor can I,” cry others who do not eat with an easy conscience, do not sleep without nightmares, do not say, This world has no defects, may it remain the same forevermore! These others, God bless them, are
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How long will you keep on burning, how long will you roam the world?” “As long as I’m still alive—when I can’t change any more, and I stand dead and beatified, with an unlighted pipe in my mouth, making fun of the living.”
Just then—as if fate was in a mood to play games—I made the acquaintance of an elderly mineworker named Alexis Zorba.
As I wrote in the peace of my family home, wrote away in a transport, this terrible responsibility never left my mind. Verily, in the beginning was the Word. Before action. The Son, only Son, of God; the spermatic Word which creates both the visible and invisible world.
Greetings, man, you little two-legged plucked cock! It’s really true (don’t listen to what others say): if you don’t crow in the morning, the sun does not come up!
The only thing that exists is the sea, and a barque as tiny as a man’s body, with Mind as captain. This captain stands in his osseous cabin. Both male and female, he sows and gives birth; gives birth to the world’s sorrows and joys, its beauties, virtues, adventures, all its bloody, beloved phantasmagoria. He stands motionless with his eyes fixed in the direction of death’s cataract, which drags his little barque toward it and insatiably pays out its five famished tentacles over land and sea. “Whatever we’ve still time for,” he cries, “whether a glass of cool water, a breeze on our temples, a
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Each morning the world rediscovers its virginity; it seems to have issued fresh from God’s hands at that very instant. It has no memory, after all; that is why its face never develops wrinkles. It neither recalls what it did the day before nor frets about what it will do the day after. It experiences the present moment as an eternity. No other moment exists; before and behind this moment is Nothing.
THE ENTIRE TIME a person creates, he has the morning sickness of the woman nourishing a son with her vitals. I found it impossible to see anyone. The slightest noise made my entire body quake; it was as though Apollo had flayed me and my exposed nerves were being wounded by mere contact with the air.
I know perfectly well that death is invincible. Man’s worth, however, lies not in victory but in the struggle for victory. I also know this, which is more difficult: it does not even lie in the struggle for victory. Man’s worth lies in one thing only, in this: that he live and die bravely, without condescending to accept any recompense. And I also know this third requirement, which is more difficult yet: the certainty that no recompense exists must not make our blood run cold, but must fill us with joy, pride, and manly courage.
God makes us grubs, and we, by our own efforts, must become butterflies.
confession is over; now you must judge. I did not recount the details of daily life. Rinds they were. You tossed them into the garbage of the abyss and I did the same. With its large and small sorrows, large and small joys, life sometimes wounded me, sometimes caressed me. These habitual everyday affairs left us, and we left them. It was not worth the trouble to turn back and haul them out of the abyss. The world will lose nothing if the people I knew remain in oblivion.
Alas for the man who does not feel himself governed inside by an absolute monarch. His ungoverned, incoherent life is scattered to the four winds.
“No matter how little I have, it is enough; no matter how much, it is not enough.
