death — to Zelter, “The Cross is the most hideous image on this earth.”
The essential often appears at the end of a long conversation. The great truths are spoken on the doorstep.
What is dated in Proust: those trifles swollen by a dizzying prolixity, the eddies of the Symbolist manner, the accumulation of effects, the poetic saturation. As if Saint-Simon had undergone the influence of the Précieuses . No one would read him today.
A letter worthy of the name is written in the wake of admiration or outrage — of exaggeration, in short. We realize why a sensible letter is a stillborn one.
I have known obtuse writers, even stupid ones. On the other hand, the translators I have managed to approach were more intelligent and more interesting than the authors they translated. After all, it takes more reflection to translate than to “create.”
Someone regarded as “extraordinary” by his intimates must not furnish proofs against himself. Let him take care not to leave traces, above all not to write, if he ever hopes to seem what he has been for the happy few.
For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.
“I feel you have come to hate what other people think quite as much as what you think yourself,” she told me straightaway, after a long separation. And just as she was leaving, she produced a Chinese fable to prove that nothing can equal the capacity to forget oneself. She, the most present being, the creature most charged with interior energy, with energy tout court , so closely clamped to her ego, so inconceivably full of herself — by what misunderstanding was she boosting effacement to the point of imagining that she offered a perfect example of it?
Ill-mannered beyond permissible limits, miserly, dirty, insolent, cunning, sensitive to the slightest nuance, shrieking with delight over any excess, any joke, scheming and slanderous — everything in him was charm and repulsion. A swine one regrets.
The mission of Everyman is to fulfill the lie he incarnates, to succeed in being no more than an exhausted illusion.
Lucidity: a permanent martyrdom, an unimaginable tour de force.
Those who want to tell us scandalous confidences count quite cynically on our curiosity to satisfy their need, which is to make a show of secrets. They know perfectly well, at the same time, that we will be too jealous of them to betray them.
Only music can create an indestructible complicity between two persons. A passion is perishable, it decays, like everything that partakes of life, whereas music is of an essence superior to life and, of course, to death.
If I have no taste for Mystery, it is because everything seems inexplicable — because I live on the inexplicable, gorged with it.
X reproached me for being a spectator, for not getting involved, for loathing the new. “But I don’t want to change anything,” I answered. He did not grasp the meaning of my reply. He took it for modesty.
It has been justly observed that a philosophical jargon ages just as rapidly as argot. Why? The first is too artificial; the second, too vital. Two ruinous excesses.
He has been living his last days for months, for years, and speaks of his end in the past tense. A posthumous existence. I am amazed that, eating virtually nothing, he manages to survive: “My body and my soul have taken so much time and so much effort to get together that they can’t succeed in separating.” If he doesn’t have the voice of a dying man, it is because it has been so long now that he is no longer “in life.” “I am a snuffed candle” is the most accurate thing he said about his latest metamorphosis. When I suggested the possibility of a miracle, “It would take more than one” was his reply.
After fifteen years of absolute solitude, Saint Seraphinus of Sarow would exclaim, in the presence of any visitor at all, “O my joy!” Who, continually rubbing up against his kind, would be so extravagant as
The essential often appears at the end of a long conversation. The great truths are spoken on the doorstep.
What is dated in Proust: those trifles swollen by a dizzying prolixity, the eddies of the Symbolist manner, the accumulation of effects, the poetic saturation. As if Saint-Simon had undergone the influence of the Précieuses . No one would read him today.
A letter worthy of the name is written in the wake of admiration or outrage — of exaggeration, in short. We realize why a sensible letter is a stillborn one.
I have known obtuse writers, even stupid ones. On the other hand, the translators I have managed to approach were more intelligent and more interesting than the authors they translated. After all, it takes more reflection to translate than to “create.”
Someone regarded as “extraordinary” by his intimates must not furnish proofs against himself. Let him take care not to leave traces, above all not to write, if he ever hopes to seem what he has been for the happy few.
For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.
“I feel you have come to hate what other people think quite as much as what you think yourself,” she told me straightaway, after a long separation. And just as she was leaving, she produced a Chinese fable to prove that nothing can equal the capacity to forget oneself. She, the most present being, the creature most charged with interior energy, with energy tout court , so closely clamped to her ego, so inconceivably full of herself — by what misunderstanding was she boosting effacement to the point of imagining that she offered a perfect example of it?
Ill-mannered beyond permissible limits, miserly, dirty, insolent, cunning, sensitive to the slightest nuance, shrieking with delight over any excess, any joke, scheming and slanderous — everything in him was charm and repulsion. A swine one regrets.
The mission of Everyman is to fulfill the lie he incarnates, to succeed in being no more than an exhausted illusion.
Lucidity: a permanent martyrdom, an unimaginable tour de force.
Those who want to tell us scandalous confidences count quite cynically on our curiosity to satisfy their need, which is to make a show of secrets. They know perfectly well, at the same time, that we will be too jealous of them to betray them.
Only music can create an indestructible complicity between two persons. A passion is perishable, it decays, like everything that partakes of life, whereas music is of an essence superior to life and, of course, to death.
If I have no taste for Mystery, it is because everything seems inexplicable — because I live on the inexplicable, gorged with it.
X reproached me for being a spectator, for not getting involved, for loathing the new. “But I don’t want to change anything,” I answered. He did not grasp the meaning of my reply. He took it for modesty.
It has been justly observed that a philosophical jargon ages just as rapidly as argot. Why? The first is too artificial; the second, too vital. Two ruinous excesses.
He has been living his last days for months, for years, and speaks of his end in the past tense. A posthumous existence. I am amazed that, eating virtually nothing, he manages to survive: “My body and my soul have taken so much time and so much effort to get together that they can’t succeed in separating.” If he doesn’t have the voice of a dying man, it is because it has been so long now that he is no longer “in life.” “I am a snuffed candle” is the most accurate thing he said about his latest metamorphosis. When I suggested the possibility of a miracle, “It would take more than one” was his reply.
After fifteen years of absolute solitude, Saint Seraphinus of Sarow would exclaim, in the presence of any visitor at all, “O my joy!” Who, continually rubbing up against his kind, would be so extravagant as
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