Editorial Inexistente, 2024, 230 pags. Click here to read the full book.
Excerpts:
He who seeks the end of his road is not on the road; what he is really seeking is its beginning.
There is a reality, yes, but it can be simulated by various enchantments. So it is a reality by default, and whoever is content with it, as though it were the one or the true thing, is a being by default.
No advice can be given. Laughter therapy is a philosophy for engineers.
Life stains. It is as simple as that.
People imagine things about one another and never ask; they let a dawn come between them, and never dawn.
To feel that everything is still to be said, because all that was said was said badly, and to feel even so that it is useless, as though all that is effable were only the unnoticed murmur of running errands on foot.
I do not know that word which, beneath the tongues, unbinds being. The gaze that smells souls.
One loves apart from words.
The sage is not a pearl in a dunghill, but an excrement in a jewellery shop.
As it is studied, history is strange. It gives to understand that things have happened, and that Christian man, for example, is different from the ancient Greek. But he is different only because he is studied as different.
I believe that, of all the great inflections of written time, none differs from any dawn at all. That the different dawn has not yet come, and perhaps never will.
That dawn is longed for and sung by all the prophets. But the prophets are too much like what already is, and too unlike what will come.
What will come, no one can sing. The new dawn is a mutation in our children, who will be born saying, one morning like any to us, that the sun has risen different, that they no longer need the baseness with which we, their fathers, live, nor our claws, our governments, our gods or our laws. Nor anything of us — so much so that they will not even bother to bury us.
Perhaps it is true that history has an end, as some say. Human life has one — not as death, but as exhaustion of its possibilities, fossilisation of its hopes, conformism with the given and the running down of energy.
Such, then, would be the end of history. Not a realisation, nor a goal, nor the encounter with an ultimate meaning, but the ashen dissipation of the possible, boredom, repetition, closure, the slackness of facts born of a nothing that leads to nothing.
An end neither sad nor joyful, but so anodyne and vulgar that it will be passed over.
Perhaps it has already happened. Perhaps, I ask myself, the palaeolithic painters were the last men, and prehistory is the true history.
Reading a lot teaches you how much we repeat things that have already been said. Even so, we go on repeating them, sometimes with near-identical words, other times with different ones, but seldom with better ones.
I live in a cold place and do not heat it. Guests complain — let them not come!
No, I do not heat it. Here, where there is neither heaven nor forsakenness, I practise the mystic art of making words rise from this stingy cold.
From this abyssal cold. So absurdly deep is my soul.
Pure life lacks technique, just as pure creation does. Everything is a matter of a technique, a method, a teaching, a school, a process, a routine, a custom, a trade.
To write the poem of pure art, one would have to found a language without referents or grammar — a mute and incomprehensible tongue.
Laziness is the greatest of the passions, but it is a passion in reverse, like a sock turned inside out. It is a multidimensional, cosmic, omnipotent passion. It annuls everything with its freezing fire.
Present-day life has lights no one has called for — electric lights that defile the darkness of the poets.
What is that damned red flicker troubling my melancholy of throwing myself into the shadows?
Romanticism was possible because they lit themselves with candles. Today the masses dress up as galactic adventures.
Immortal men would not have produced culture. Immortality, if ever it is reached, will wither everything human. Science will then achieve its supreme end: to annihilate all wisdom, all good, all caress, all verse, all tear, all smile, all word.
Men who cannot die are men who have not been born.
This is the teleology of mathematics — for mathematics is essentially teleology — an imperialist fantasy with airs of being the mesh of the world, its sustenance, its origin and its end. Human delusions.
There is only chaos: freedom.
Happiness is the most lethal creature; its poison kills in an instant.
He who stops at the edge is always throwing himself over.
The spirit coincides exactly with the flesh.
It is foolishness to write things no one is going to understand. It is ridiculous to have nothing to say and even so to write a book. An exhausting pornography of the prosaic.
These things anyone understands, but who is interested?
We are not clear whether our mission is to keep a flame alive or to put it out. Though perhaps it is, rather, to kindle it.
Magic must be restored. Not the magic of films or of sorcerers. Nor the magic of romantic idiots or quantum esoterics.
Real magic is that of strong men, and it serves only to master the weather. The man who builds an energy flow along all the lines of his body and hurls it at the storms to make use of them. That is the magician. Only the one who does that, and exactly in that way.
The others — those who make potions, spells or enchantments, telepaths and those who deal in heartbreak, and so on — are all sellers of trinkets. Charlatans or ineptitudes.
There are words that sound like a deep and important thing and whose meaning goes beyond — towards the unknown — what they appear to mean, which is already in itself lordly, savage and steppe-like.
These words can be used in any discourse and give meaning to everything, but this meaning is not a signification, a logos, but a sexual comprehension, an eros. The words burst silently and are absorbed into a black hole, like a phenomenon unknowable to any physics or any psychology. Their meaning is undefinable immediacy, sounds that have something of edible music, of fertile dance, of ejaculation, of palate, of wind, of moisture, of mud. It must be that their articulation is like a long kiss that fuses tongues dragged towards furious abyssal seas.
It is not what they say, but the organic excess their act demands. That is why these sayings, these dictions, these labours, these copulations are chosen for the tremendous things.
On my first day of school I took the wrong way. From then on I went somewhere else.
The moment of leaving school I do not remember well; I have it in a haze like falling asleep.
The child does not know what it is to be old.
The old man has forgotten what it is to be a child.
In that mutual strangeness they seek each other and intersect.
He who is no longer one thing, nor yet the other, goes by the road that joins no place with nowhere.
I went to the doctor with a problem: excess of health.
At first he took me for a joker, and then he hinted that perhaps my problem was mental more than anything. But no, I insisted — in mental things, even more than physical ones, I overflow with health and lucidity.
It is not understood that anyone could suffer from excess of health, but health is a measured good, and if one has too much, one is placed above life, outside of it; everything is too little, everything is wearying, everything is boring, everything is small and slow, expired, diminutive.
We are made to be inside, not outside. If one goes beyond the given smallness, one overflows it, squanders it and suffers it.
So, doctors can do nothing against my ill. My ill is an ill that is not ill, but a good that is too much good.
It would be beautiful if factories looked to me like castles and trucks like dragons. If the wasteland of rubble behind the rusted gate were a spectral marsh, and its trickles of plastic water the poisoned springs that well up from a necromancer’s lair. If the park of pines and elms blackened by smoke were an enchanted forest, inhabited by elves riding talking wolves, instead of those pseudo-proletarians waiting for nothing who walk the dog. If the shopping centre, with its revolving doors and hordes of maddened gatherers, were a palace of dreams where mischievous fairies trick you into enslaving you, and so give you the chance for renunciation and heroism. If the foul-smelling joint muddied by mechanical music were a deep cave full of mysteries and perils, a labyrinth at whose bottom, guarded by orcs and other wicked beings, there was a treasure. If the hardware shop and its modern gadgets were the forge of a master versed in the art of magic swords. If the street pressed by traffic were a road travelled by the messengers of a world that knows no immediacy. If among the crowds trotting along the pavements there were for me a glint of pure love, a true gaze I must find in order to save — to save us — from the jaws of that dragon whose fumes scorch everything. How beautiful this world of fantasy superimposed by my madness upon the true madness would be for me. But I have not read every book, nor even most, nor even many. And to be Quijote, one must have read everything, so that there is no unknown knight and no impossible feat. Was that man mad, or had he come to the desperate conviction of bravery? Where lies the impossible — in his deliriums or in the healing heroism of the unjust and dusty world?
My excess of sanity, and all the books destroyed. Towers of paper no one can climb and which will not burn. It is our eyes that have burned.
Everything human tires. Songs, poems, paintings, theories, sciences, politics, cities, symphonies, technologies, and so on. Yet what has been there from before and from outside — the storm, the sky, the forests and their sonorous mantle of birds — is inexhaustible. I can walk eternally through the forest. Only when the human is abandoned and fuses with that nature indifferent to our cultural achievements does it enter eternity.
Is language the house of being, or the prison of being?
To lie in the sun in cold climates and in the shade in warm ones. There is not much more.
Lightning always strikes only one. Or two embracing.
It has been said of many men that they were ahead of their time. I believe none were; rather they were relics or delays, broken insignia of a magical antiquity that never existed.
Because the future — what does it hold for us but this infinite routine and repetition?
When one lives surrounded by food, food loses its sense, stops being edible, and we die of hunger.
Having everything we have nothing, and having nothing we have everything. Simple language games. No one ever had everything, nor will have nothing.
Glass reflects only if darkness is on the other side.
Revolutionaries revolve around themselves.
The greatest greatness is in recovering your smallness.
To mediocre subjects, the excellent is always the mediocre.
The seas today demand that you sail identified; if not, all the ports are closed, all the islands hidden, all the shores off-limits. All that is left to you then is to turn upon the monotonous horizon of the swell. Always the same and always different. Oceans of fresh water in which shipwreck is impossible.
Drowned in the immense henhouse, in the planetary din, there is a tiny, singular voice. It is the voice of the age. It is no average, nor the vulgar accent of any neighbourhood. It is a strangeness watching from inside as though looking from outside. It is the voice of half-poet and half-fool sage. Of a half-witted short-legged creature who arouses wide suspicions despite his efforts to greet others and pass unnoticed.
He says nothing in particular, gives no advice, unveils no mystery.
The voice of the age wanders like a thread of mercury through the torrents of the world. It contaminates the waters, but the waters are so vast that their poisoning is homeopathic and no one is intoxicated. And whoever is, forgets it at the next romantic verse that appears on supermarket labels.
Today everything is known, which is to say that knowledge no longer has value.
If infamies occur, it is known. And nothing changes.
Only the anecdote is serious. Whole hordes of oligarchs sacrifice chickens on the altar of the anecdotal. And nothing changes.
What happens when one knows that the life one would like to lead is not possible — simply does not occur in the world?
It is all a matter of straightening out on the infinite curve of a dusty, treacherous sand path. Straightening oneself by brute force against the strange speed of having no course, against the useless fascination of a child with a dilated, dilettante gaze who drank until he drained every sea of the imagination.
Nobility has always existed out of time. In dusty eras it was resorted to with pomp — good clay to seal the porosities of barbarism and make it defensible, a useless, empty thing, a superficial standard. Today, when barbarism is coarse and our meanness has civilised itself, standards are beside the point and we do not need nobility; no one seeks it or claims it any longer. It has kept its reputation for uselessness.
Perhaps today we would need a true nobility.
Perhaps God does not exist except as an act someone does — an individual act performed by anyone at all.
Perhaps his truth is only the not-lying of the honest, and his omnipotence the bravery of the peasant who does not let himself be bullied. Perhaps his eternity is that of the adventurer who crosses dangers without fear, or that of the sick man who refuses to die. Perhaps his love is the mother’s for her child and his goodness that of the poor man who shares the little he has.
God exists only as such acts; apart from them, he is no thing — even less a clamorous character who knows everything, even less a demiurge or a magician capable of pulling out of nothing four hens and a planet of cork-oak forests. What absurd power is that, of creating the universe?
There is no creator, and God, the divine, or whatever name is given to being whole, is nothing other than what is, recreating itself in a natural good which is not at the summit of a Platonic sky, but in the mud and the feeding, in the evening sun and the rain, in the joy any living thing no doubt feels at the mere fact of spending an evening taking comfort in its existence without thinking about it.
For those whose life is full of vicissitudes and sufferings, of deserts and banishments, of republics and hungers, history has a sense and a half-light of real self-portrait brought out into the light from the immanent multitude behind the screen.
For those of bored, banal, computerised life, history has no sense, it is the phantasmal half-light of an unreal screen, it is a myth of anything at all to plant one’s feet from afar in everyday absurdity.
On the crest of the wave is the foam, the dirtiest, the most volatile, the most stupid.
Not going outside to let the air touch you is an achievement of engineering.
Being asked to explain what has been perfectly said is an achievement of the human sciences — the ones the air never reaches.
The media narrow the world until it becomes suffocating. Some say the opposite, but I believe they only widen it with rare exceptions. In general they are mediocre and offensive; they produce massive waves of plastic material whose purpose is to fill everything up and turn rooms into cramped, padded cells where no air moves.
Of them all, the one that most causes this effect is television. Turning off the television is like opening a window.
At the place where one lives — let us call it a house — there must be at least one window with a view.
And in the view there must be at least one house in which one lives.
Both things, the one and the other. If the view is missing, only a cavern remains, a dark, atavistic refuge. If the house is missing, only a shipwreck remains.
He who desires only a piece of sky is anguished by the daggers of all that can be said.
He who desires immensity is appeased by words, for they are not possible.
That is why there are words here.
Everything that ends is the exact half of an infinity.
Most essays or treatises say in many pages what could be said in a few lines. Others say what it is not necessary to say, and there is no shortage of those who expatiate on things of which nothing can be said — things of which, to speak properly, one would have to say less.
We cannot bear good men. When someone is too good, he arouses suspicion, and if his goodness exceeds the limit of the tolerable, he is cast out into the exile of Sainthood. We cannot bear goodness in the middle of our streets, in the circuits of our reasons or in our vestibules. Goodness is something that must be outside, in the irrational marginality of the holy.
Sainthood is an innocuous, absurd and laughable territory. Those who wander there become harmless and are listened to without fear, as one listens to a child who rambles until he says wise things that interest no one — except to delight in the comic strangeness of the one who says them.
In the human, when something rises, its lineage ends. Only the rough create lineages. The mediocre continue them.
I like to stop in the middle of bridges and watch the current run through my chest, towards me and against me. Only at the exact middle of a bridge is the experience possible, at the place that is neither road nor its opposite.
Even dry rivers cross me. Their bed runs too, like the matter of the world, an endless channel towards the infinite sea.
I have the impression of walking among ruins. I do not belong to the old world, and the new world is yet to be made. Even so, I lucidly feel the echoes of both whispering among the dust. They are never in the present. People walk by with their everyday smile, caught in conversation. They are ghosts beyond the threshold. Here, among the ruins, I breathe in the memory of a disenchanted romanticism, and I still feel, like those romantics, the abyss of the sublime. I am a man between two worlds that do not know each other. Could it be that we of my kind — solitary and forgotten men — are the ones who keep an invisible bridge?
I wonder what other mysticisms are yet to come, now that the bonds are broken, that the ruins have been glassed over, that God is buried and books fill houses to no use.
There is a spectral chemistry beneath the world; it is the humus in which your feasts and your gods have grown. That is why I do not play the old rites — I am knee-deep in the mud.
You, though, play at leaping over waters.
I tell you: those are neither waters nor lands. Knowing that, I sink, condemned as a dwindling tree that offers fruits with no mythology.
Sometimes one nail drives out another, but other times it drives it in deeper still. At the very bottom, invisible now, are all those nails slowly eaten away by rust.
They say that language is linked to thought. Perhaps so, but not too much. This is shown by the sure fact that almost everything said is not thought — not because it is said in a rush, but because it had already been thought before and so it stayed, from ancient time, with that certificate of good manners and of being a practical, proven thing, like a saying useful for life: not because it serves any purpose, but because it avoids the wearisome, scarcely human chore of having to think about what one says.
In that sense — of saying things that had already been thought by others before — is the one in which language has to do with thought. It is at its origin, not in its present. It is like the constitutions of the democratic worlds, which are laid down at a primordial moment and stay there, as immovable, inviolable myths for the rest of time, but are nothing more than mechanical engenderings of an antiquity; and in the supposed current rationality of their systems, what rules is basically the conventional, laziness, conformism and the irrational.
I think of the first men who spoke. Suddenly, one morning — a rainy morning perhaps — they woke up and thought: “something is happening, we have to speak.” But they had no words or grammar — though they had long been able to emit sounds — and they had to go through the suffered chore of creating a language. Afterwards they realised that their exceptional achievement had required such an enormous squandering of energy that it was advisable not to have to do it again in the future. And so, for the benefit of future generations, they invented not only language but also almost everything to be said with it, at least what is most necessary for life, what is enough for most people. But they were not gods and could not invent it all, so something still remains to be said, and that is why there are people, like me now perhaps, who say things that were never said before — but one has to think them, and it hurts! — things like these, strange and peculiar, a little dissident, absurd and rather useless.
There are those who feed only on what they find in the supermarket. Their bodies are made, literally, of manufactures and processed goods. If there is a god, he is for them like a comic-strip character. They get emotional at the jingle of coins and at the love songs of their youth. For them, a metaphor is only a barter. If they wrote a poem, it would begin: Today I woke up with a headache and you were not there, or some other insipid onanism.
These people flood the field of vision, and there is nothing behind them that is anything other than what they show.
All those who seek to be who they truly are, and follow the advice of their gurus — know thyself — end up being nothing.
The global village has its corresponding global yokels.
I have tirelessly sought to know what lies behind each shadow. Now I know that ignorance is circular. We turn upon our limit, clinging to a longing that scarcely holds us up. I envy those who walk with the insignificance of a dreamer. They do not seek to know, only to solace themselves, as the one who eats every day from a hunger not his own — every hunger is foreign. They go to see films to entertain themselves, read books recommended to them, with which they spend some free hours, distract themselves with routine music or give themselves over to any kind of engineering with a domestic vocation.
My curiosity, however, I have always felt as my own, as a centre. It has never abandoned me, but I feel it grumble like a weary beast that has stirred up innumerable paths, sometimes without judgement. Now it does not know which door to open. Each door gives onto a hallway already seen, with other doors that in turn give onto hallways already seen.
It is not that I know everything, but I have set out on every road, and though I have not walked them to the end — most of them I have barely walked — I know there is no illuminating treasure upon them.
It is sometimes said: so-and-so was born in the wrong time. But is a time reserved for us? No — we are all born on the earth and in the age given to us. There is no error in it.
He who is uncomfortable in his world will be uncomfortable in them all. It is not a chronological error that makes him uncomfortable. It is not even an error, but a certainty.
In truth, every exalted poet is never an origin but a consequence. And it is for that reason — for being an achievement or product of the exalting culture — that he is exalted.
But in turn, that exalting culture was erected by poets who were never exalted.
In public squares they use poetry as a spiritual prosthesis, as an orthopaedic device blessed by the riot police.
World Book Day is not the day of reading or of writing, nor of literature, poetry, philosophy or anything of the sort. It is the day of a bound object of at least forty-nine pages, which rules out many vacuum cleaner manuals but not the old phone directories.
Books should be sold by weight, like cured meats.
The great empires of history transcending me, and I here, in the middle of a field tilled by the combine harvesters.
Weariness precedes madness, like a silence before an explosion, like a void before fullness. And in that void there is the prior lucidity, a burst of visions that exhaust understanding. One understands then that everything has already been seen, and that each new story does nothing but repeat something already heard, already known. One does not go mad from abundance but from completeness. Don Quijote did not read a few books of chivalry, nor even many, but all of them — he read them in every possibility of their being, and so exhausted the world, which, confronted with that infinite fiction, appeared to him parched and sombre. It was then that he set out to beautify with justice, as one can beautify with freedom or with love.
Sometimes I feel I am on the edge. I have reached such a point that each time I open a new book I feel the trembling of madness — will this one be the last? That moment has not yet come, though each word resounds in my mind as though I had already heard it many times.
I do not know whether there is left in the world that which might hurl me into madness, into a new rebirth — or whether I have run aground on weariness.
You come away from the ocean and rise. What breaks into pieces takes on form and name; first it is dissolution, then calm, then the cold of the heights, until the sun begins to push it on an unpredictable journey. Only when you pass through the storm do you have consciousness. The storm is you in that same shattered ocean. Lashed and exhausted, you acquire the firm consistency of a tear, or a star if your passage was harsh — a jewel in short, destined to fall by the law of bodies. Water falling again into the ocean, or onto the fields it fertilises.
Whoever can intuit the home, remember its scent in furtive gusts, will realise later that all is lost — that perhaps it is nothing but the fantasies built by an excessively happy childhood.
Even in polluted waters there is life that adapts.
So men, even as they pollute their songs, will go on singing them until they are bacteria of sewage waters.
There is an unmade world we do not know, and that we barely glimpse beyond our atmosphere. There, geometry is deep and baroque; it is squandered with a simplicity and a perfection that seem silently musical to us.
Then there is a primarily made world, pasture for our cattle, a wayside, a humbly human order.
And finally there is this one, that asphalts everything, that flattens everything, that destroys everything. The world of the built.
One night I hid in a church and in the midst of the silence and the darkness I came out and pressed my ear to the mouth of a crucified Christ of wood. I do not know what I was expecting — perhaps a breath of God, like the one so many believers boast of. Or perhaps it was just the daring of a bored idiot. But to my surprise, a murmur escaped from that figure. At first it was only the incoherence of one who found it hard to speak, until at last Christ managed to say clearly the following words: Paradise is the most dangerous myth.
Now it strikes me that freedom is nothing — not even an ideal, not even an idea. Perhaps only a word, a pure sensual form.
To this many words are reduced. Like fatherlands reduced to flags. The visceral vastness of a belonging. A semantic violation by those who need to sate themselves.
Metaphysics: a bastard and prostitute word that, disoriented, has wandered through history for whoever cared to make use of it. The same is now done with democracy and so many others. Words without land, without sense, without object, without end; words negotiated like the hostages of a war. And the greatest word of them all is god.
I have the virtue of realism and also the talent of an idealism — or fantasy. So imagine the desolation of knowing that every utopia, however measured and judicious it claims to be, is unrealisable when not outright stupid. There is no middle ground left to inhabit. Either you give yourself over to the coarseness of a hopeless realism, or to the solitude of imagination.
I envy the innocence of so many ancient men who imagined utopias and believed them possible.
The air is still as though it did not exist; yet I know it surrounds me and passes through me. How do I know? Because there can be no empty thought. I lack everything save this fullness without coordinates that holds every gift. And what if I stirred it? The question is already the act. This motion — is it before or after me? No, we are no doubt, both at once, outside time. The observer begins to be when he remembers.
Now this air stirs and forms eddies and swells, great unmanageable masses that drag small shavings from which the currents are born. I direct it, and I simply observe it. In my question the answer was already contained, and yet everything is new and unforeseen. The question brings every answer and every rupture.
At the Oracle of Delphi there was a sibyl who, intoxicated or not, answered the questions with deliriums. A priest translated her words as he pleased and delivered them to the world.
That was poetry, and that is what it has essentially been ever since: unconsciousness, words, translation. And the reason of the poet is the reason of the priest.
What has changed is the world. No one translates sibyls any more, no one takes them seriously any more, and if they do, they do so pretending. They are no longer in any temple, but dissolved in the brainpan of the proletariat and a little in that of the bourgeoisie.
Now people blurt out deliriums anywhere. Jokey remarks predicting the collapse of the Empire of the day or an imminent alien invasion.
If there were a wise priest — not like those who only repeat psalms — perhaps he would truly unveil to us the meaning of so many prophecies.
Sometimes I read poets of a hundred years ago — many of them were called avant-gardists — and I think they were already the end of something; perhaps they were rearguardists. I do not, however, believe in the stupid messianisms that proclaim ends in everything. There must be something afterwards, something in which we are, but what? We are not yet anything new — perhaps we are far from being so; we belong to our antiquity, to a cyclopean historical inertia that marches on beyond our strivings.
Sometimes I think those poets were not but the death throes — and therefore something new and beautiful — of an immortal. And we the death throes repeated to the point of boredom, until we have lost the horizon of the life that is to be reborn.
Perhaps the necessary rupture is far beyond our understanding. Perhaps not even those who come after us will be capable of understanding it. Our complacency is going to create beings as strange as invaders from another world.
One does not realise until one lives it. But it is true.
What matters is not the inside, as is vulgarly said. At most, the inside could be taken as what ought to matter, if anyone took such a thing seriously. But what is the inside? The guts, goodness, the spinal cord, the unconscious, the IQ, the soul…? None of that matters, and sometimes it does not even exist.
No. What matters is the outside, the seeming, the appearing, the bearing, the posture, the pose, the carriage, the structure, the accent, the tone, the colour, the style, the smell, the mane, the sweat, the salubrity, the grunts, the gestures, the doing, the manners… The living body.
And sometimes the dead body.
We find pleasure in what takes us away from ourselves, in what loses us and expands us like a vapour among things. And pain in what lays us waste and isolates us, in what confronts us with what we are. Pain is the concentration of the self in the mirror.
In love, for example, we lose ourselves in the face of the other. In heartbreak, what remains is the eternal, boring question of our own face.
Of the many things that happen, how much remains? All this curiosity that has filled my room with papers and my hands with pirouettes, my face with ideas that have soured my smile… Nothing is in vain. To be able to look at the simple things of the evening, one must have walked the labyrinths of the palace that walls off the horizon. Some wander lost, others barely at the entrance, in the porticos where the merchants press together, or in the hermetic cloisters where a garden turns upon itself. A few of us have gone down the stairs, towards the dark cellars where nothing can be made out and shadows can be anything, and up the stairs, towards the viewing galleries that promise the world and can give nothing. In the end there is only a small back door. It opens as though it had not been opened in millennia, creaks, parts the brambles, and shows a path almost worn away that leads down to a small stream. You follow its bank up to a high place from which, without losing its freshness, you can see a piece of sky between the poplars. And there is nothing more at the end of all the music, of all the books, of all the stories, the flights, the feats, the engineerings, the laws and the sciences. There is nothing more than this small walk in which everything is contained, which is everywhere, and yet is so elusive.
There is something in the gaze of the one who looks that is transmitted to the one who is looked at. If a lover looks at you, something of his love infects you. If a sage looks at you, a spark, perhaps fleeting, of wisdom. Imagine millions of idiots looking at you — that is fame.
Nobility has an eternal past. Everything else, the law, is a constant hammering of brute inertia.
The grammatical person is no one. I can be you or anyone at all. Everything that has been rambled on until now has been said by many, each in his own peculiar nakedness.
I crossed paths with a walker and shouted: You’re going the wrong way! I was so cheerful. He did not answer me, only looked at me with a phantasmal expression.