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You have to be methodical when you have no character.
Holland is a reverie, sir, a dream of gold and smoke, more smoky by day and golden at night, while night and day this reverie is filled with Lohengrins like these, dreamily going past on their black bicycles with high handlebars, funerary swans endlessly drifting past, throughout the country, around the sea, along the canals. They are dreaming, their heads in their copper clouds, they ride around, they pray, like sleepwalkers in the gilded incense of the mist, and they are no longer here.
Have you noticed that the concentric canals of Amsterdam are like the circles of hell? A bourgeois hell, inhabited of course by bad dreams.
I have always mocked the greed which, in our society, takes the place of ambition.
Have you observed that only death awakens our feelings? How we love the friends who have just departed – don’t you find? How we admire those of our masters who have been silenced, their mouths full of dirt! Then our tributes come naturally, tributes that they may have waited all their lives to hear. But do you know why we are always fairer and more generous towards the dead? The reason is simple! We have no obligation where they’re concerned! They leave us free, we can take our time, fit the tribute into the interval between cocktails and a nice mistress, in other words, lost moments. If they
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So much so that we rarely confide in those who are better than we are; rather, we avoid their company. Most of the time, on the contrary, we confess to those who are like us and who share our weaknesses. This means that we do not want to correct ourselves or to be improved: for that, first of all, we should have to be judged and found wanting. All we need is to be pitied and encouraged in our course.
No more acting, no more theatre: undoubtedly, I was in the realm of truth; but truth, dear friend, is utterly tedious.
