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So a change has taken place in the course of these last few weeks. But where? It’s an abstract change which settles on nothing. Is it I who has changed? If it isn’t I, then it’s this room, this town, this nature; I must choose.
Autodidact
Person who teaches himself.
Now, I don’t think about anybody any more; I don’t even bother to look for words. It flows through me, more or less quickly, and I don’t fix anything, I just let it go.
Most of the time, because of their failure to fasten on to words, my thoughts remain misty and nebulous.
Sounds like my thoughts
I admire the way we can lie, putting reason on our side.
Objects ought not to touch, since they are not alive. You use them, you put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it’s unbearable. I am afraid of entering in contact with them, just as if they were living animals.
Three o’clock. Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to
‘If you look at yourself too long in the mirror, you’ll see a monkey there.’
This is time, naked time, it comes slowly into existence, it keeps you waiting, and when it comes you are disgusted because you realize that it’s been there already for a long time.
I can no longer feel the gliding movement, the slight touch of time.
the same, for a hundred dead stories there remain one or two living ones. These I evoke cautiously, occasionally, not too often, for fear of wearing them out.
I build my memories with my present. I am rejected, abandoned in the present. I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape from myself.
I haven’t had any adventures. Things have happened to me, events, incidents, anything you like. But not adventures.
Something begins in order to end: an adventure doesn’t let itself be extended; it achieves significance only through its death.
Louse.
The true nature of the present revealed itself: it was that which exists, and all that was not present did not exist.
Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them … there is nothing.
exist. It is I. The body lives all by itself, once it has started. But when it comes to thought, it is I who continue it, I who unwind it. I exist. I think I exist. Oh, how long and serpentine this feeling of existing is – and I unwind it, slowly … If only I could prevent myself from thinking!
My thought is me: that is why I can’t stop. I exist by what I think … and I can’t prevent myself from thinking.
It is I, it is I who pull myself from the nothingness to which I aspire: hatred and disgust for existence are just so many ways of making me exist,
flotsam.
Only we were young: now I am at the age to be touched by the youth of others. I am not touched.
sympathetically:
‘that here we are, all of us, eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence, and that there’s nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing.
for a moment I had the painful impression of being a block of ice enveloped in fire, an omelette-surprise.
His veneer of gentleness and shyness has peeled off; I don’t recognize him any more.
manicheism,
Misanthropy
But he is a scientific misanthrope who has succeeded in determining the extent of his hatred, who hates men at first only to love them better later.
but he has the ironic look in his eyes of somebody who is tremendously amused.
‘At heart, you love them, Monsieur, you love them as I do: we are separated by words.
It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can’t say a couple of words without speaking of it, but finally you can’t touch it.
those weary women who abandon themselves to laughter and say: ‘It does you good to laugh’, in tearful voices; they were parading themselves in front of one another, they were abjectly admitting to one another the fact of their existence.
No: it didn’t go as far as that, nothing that exists can be comic; it was like a vague, almost imperceptible analogy with certain vaudeville situations.
In fact, all that I was able to grasp afterwards comes down to this fundamental absurdity.
Existence is not something which allows itself to be thought of from a distance; it has to invade you suddenly, pounce upon you, weigh heavily on your heart like a huge motionless animal – or else there is nothing left at all.
I could never find the words she expected, the right words to go with her dress, with the weather, with the last words we had spoken the night before. What does she want? I can’t guess.
Me with Shristi. 100%
Anny knows how to be a good listener, but only when she wants to be.
tenterhooks.
don’t dare to tell her that I don’t: just as before, I am sitting on the edge of my chair, trying hard to avoid ambushes, to ward off inexplicable rages.
There are no adventures – there are no perfect moments … we have lost the same illusions, we have followed the same paths. I can guess the rest – can even speak for her and say myself what she still has to tell:
‘Poor fellow! He never has any luck. The first time he plays his part well, he gets no thanks for it. Go on now, be off with you.’
Anny sounds like a bitch.
I am free: I haven’t a single reason for living left, all the ones I have tried have given way and I can’t imagine any more. I am still quite young, I still have enough strength to start again.
But this freedom is rather like death. Today my life
At the same time, I learnt that you always lose.
But I know that it will come back: it is my normal condition. Only
Sick people too have happy weaknesses which relieve them for a few hours of the consciousness of their suffering.
Above my head; and this moment now, from which I cannot emerge, which shuts me in and hems me in on every side, this moment of which I am made will be nothing more than a confused dream.
Even if she loved him with all her heart, it would still be the love of a dead woman. I had her last living love.
Lucid, motionless, empty, the consciousness is situated between the walls; it perpetuates itself. Nobody inhabits it any more.
