Without Lifting A Finger

     One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well. *      "My children, salt comes from water, and if it comes in contact with water, it dissolves and vanishes. In the same way, the monk is born of woman, and if he approaches a woman, he dissolves and ceases to be a monk." This Jean Moschus, in the seventh century, seems to have understood better than either Strindberg or Weininger the danger already pointed out in Genesis. *      Every life is the story of a collapse. If biographies are so fascinating, it is because the heroes, and the cowards quite as much, strive to innovate in the art of debacle. *      Each of us clings as best he can to his unlucky star.     

     In the deserted church, the organist was practicing. No one else there, except a cat that wreathed itself around me. . . . Its eagerness was a shock: the inveterate tormenting questions assailed me. The organ's answer did not seem satisfying to me, but in my condition, it was an answer nonetheless. *      Under an incomparably desolate sky, two birds, indifferent to that lugubrious background, pursue one another. . . . Their obvious delight is more apt to rehabilitate an old instinct than the entire body of erotic literature. *      Music is an illusion that makes up for all the others. (If illusion is a term doomed to disappear I wonder what will become of me.) 

     Perhaps we should publish only our first drafts, before we ourselves know what we are trying to say. *      Only unfinished -- because unfinishable -- works prompt us to speculate about the essence of art. *      What cannot be translated into mystical language does not deserve to be experienced. *      L. wants to know if I have a suicide line, but I hide my hands, and rather than show them to him, I shall always wear gloves in his presence. *      A book should open old wounds, even inflict new ones. A book should be a danger .