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Мистики открыли: чтобы сопротивляться грубому равнодушию, составляющему видимую суть вещей, лучший способ – отречение. Отвергнуть мир, отвернуться от него, как от болота, у края которого мы бы могли встретиться. Отречься, как Будда, отвергая абсолютную реальность; отречься, как Христос, отвергая реальность условную; отречься… Я просил у жизни лишь того, чтобы она ничего не требовала от меня. У двери в хижину, которой у меня не было, я сидел на солнышке, которое никогда не светило, и наслаждался будущим угасанием моей усталой действительности (с удовольствием сознавая, что ее еще нет). Я еще не умер, хотя этого уже достаточно для бедных жизнью, и есть еще надежда, что…

Я сам, только мечтавший о хижине или пещере, где был бы свободен от всеобщего однообразия, - что есть во мне, даже решись я уехать в эту хижину или пещеру? Наверное, я понимаю, что раз однообразие - во мне, я всегда буду носить его с собою? Я сам, задыхающийся там, где нахожусь, где бы я мог дышать свободнее, если болезнь - в моих легких, а не в воздухе, меня окружающем? Я сам, тоскующий по чистому солнцу и вольным полям, по морям и всему огромному горизонту, уверен ли я, что мне опротивеет моя постель или еда, или то, что мне не придется спускаться на восемь пролетов лестницы до выхода на улицу, входить в табачную лавку или обмениваться приветствиями с праздным парикмахером?

I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don't know where it will take me, because I don't know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I'm compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social center, for it's here that I meet others. But I'm neither impatient nor common. I leave who will to stay shut up in their rooms, sprawled out on beds where they sleeplessly wait, and I leave who will to chat in the parlors, from where their songs and voices conveniently drift out here to me. I'm sitting at the door, feasting my eyes and ears on the colors and sounds of the landscape, and I softly sing - for myself alone - wispy songs I compose while waiting.

Night will fall on us all and the coach will pull up. I enjoy the breeze I'm given and the soul I'm given to enjoy it with, and I no longer question or seek. If what I write in the book of travellers can, when read by others at some future date, also entertain them on their journey, then fine. If they don't read it, or are not entertained, that's fine too.

Everything is interconnected. My readings of classical authors, who never speak of sunsets, have made many sunsets intelligible to me, in all their colours. There is a relationship between syntactical competence, by which we distinguish the values of beings, sounds and shapes, and the capacity to perceive when the blue of the sky is actually green, and how much yellow is in the blue green of the sky. It comes down to the same thing – the capacity to distinguish and to discriminate. There is no enduring emotion without syntax. Immortality depends on the grammarians.

Ah, who will save me from existing? It’s neither death nor life that I want: it’s that other thing shining in the depths of longing, like a possible diamond in a pit one can’t descend. It’s all the weight and sorrow of this real and impossible universe, of this sky like the flag of an unknown army, of these colours that are paling in the fictitious air, where the imaginary crescent of the moon, cut out of distance and insensibility, now emerges in a still, electric whiteness.

It all amounts to the absence of a true God, an absence that is the empty cadaver of the lofty heavens and the closed soul. Infinite prison – since you’re infinite, there’s no escaping you!

To join in or collaborate or act with others is a metaphysically morbid impulse. The soul conferred on the individual shouldn’t be lent out to its relations with others. The divine fact of existing shouldn’t be surrendered to the satanic fact of coexisting.

When I act with others, there’s at least one thing I lose – acting alone.

When I participate, although it seems that I’m expanding, I’m limiting myself. To associate is to die. Only my consciousness of myself is real for me; other people are hazy phenomena in this consciousness, and it would be morbid to attribute very much reality to them.

There are moments when the emptiness of feeling oneself live attains the consistency of a positive thing. In the great men of action, namely the saints, who act with all of their emotion and not just part of it, this sense of life’s nothingness leads to the infinite. They crown themselves with night and the stars, and anoint themselves with silence and solitude. In the great men of inaction, to whose number I humbly belong, the same feeling leads to the infinitesimal; sensations are stretched, like rubber bands, to reveal the pores of their slack, false continuity.

And in these moments both types of men love sleep, as much as the common man who doesn’t act and doesn’t not act, being a mere reflection of the generic existence of the human species. Sleep is fusion with God, Nirvana, however it be called. Sleep is the slow analysis of sensations, whether used as an atomic science of the soul or left to doze like a music of our will, a slow anagram of monotony.

To know oneself is to err, and the oracle that said ‘Know thyself’ proposed a task more difficult than the labours of Hercules and a riddle murkier than the Sphinx’s. To consciously not know ourselves – that’s the way! And to conscientiously not know ourselves is the active task of irony. I know nothing greater, nor more worthy of the truly great man, than the patient and expressive analysis of the ways in which we don’t know ourselves, the conscious recording of the unconsciousness of our conscious states, the metaphysics of autonomous shadows, the poetry of the twilight of disillusion.