JOURNAL, 1940
127
musician (the reflections I set down on this topic more than
twenty years ago still seem to me the most apt), delights in the
vagueness of immoderation. And this need of restless expansion,
of evasion into the unformulated, the formless, swiftly glides
toward the desire of conquest, as we have seen to our cost. What
remains to be seen is whether this brusque breaking out of bounds,
this immoderate expansion, is compatible with the balance of
an organism.
Read some Saint-Evremond, with delight; then took up again,
as I do almost every year, Chateaubriand's
Memoirs d'Outre–
Tombe,
always rediscovering the same grounds for admiring the
impressive writer and being exasperated by the actor who keeps
setting himself off to advantage and never stumbles or makes a
false move. As he is c<;mtinually preoccupied with the effect he
claims to be producing, the meaning of his words and gestures is
restricted to this effect alone. My zest for life would vanish if
life were no more than this vainglorious parade with a constant
foretaste of death. It goes without saying that religion finds no
trouble in settling on this dreadful vacancy, this
taedium vitae;
the cross finds it no trouble to raise itself aloft when it is
Spes
Unica.
Finally, this passion for tombs, this endless memorializing,
these recollections of an extinct past, a poetics that yawns and
stretches over everything, make me applaud even more warmly
the praises of forgetting history so finely sung by Nietzsche in
the second of his
Untimely Observations.
November.
As soon as I had finished
Lotte in Weimar,
an
acellent book which held all my interest for two weeks, I reread
Ferther,
~ot
without annoyance. I did not remember that he
look
so long to die. It goes on and on, until one feels like giving
an
a
push. Four or five times, what one hoped would be his
lal
sigh is succeeded by another even more ultimate. . . . De–
prtures with frills exasperate me.
Then, to soothe and reward my mind (for I read German
with effort and trouble), I leave German for English. Every
I dip into English literature again, it is with delight. What
! What abundance! This is the literature whose disap-
llllraD<~e
would most impoverish humanity.
