The Trouble with Being Born

At first you follow, then you start going in circles, then you are caught up in a kind of mild unmenacing whirlpool, and you tell yourself you’re sinking, and then you do sink. But you don’t really drown—that would be too easy! You come back up to the surface, you follow all over again, amazed to see he seems to be saying something and to understand what it is, and then you start going round and round again, and you sink once more…. All of which is meant to be profound, and seems so. But once you come to your senses you realize it’s only abstruse, obscure, and that the distance between real profundity and the willed kind is as great as between a revelation and a whim.

In the days when I set off on month-long bicycle trips across France, my greatest pleasure was to stop in country cemeteries, to stretch out between two graves, and to smoke for hours on end. I think of those days as the most active period of my life.

An ancient cleaning woman, in answer to my “How’s everything going?” answers without looking up: “Taking its course.” This ultra-banal answer nearly brings me to tears.

No one has lived so close to his skeleton as I have lived to mine: from which results an endless dialogue and certain truths which I manage neither to accept nor to reject.

If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.

To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression.

I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.

Not to have been born, merely musing on that—what happiness, what freedom, what space!

Two kinds of mind: daylight and nocturnal. They have neither the same method nor the same morality. In broad daylight, you watch yourself; in the dark, you speak out. The salutary or awkward consequences of what he thinks matter little to the man who questions himself at hours when others are the prey of sleep. Hence he meditates upon the bad luck of being born without concern for the harm he can cause others or himself. After midnight begins the intoxication of pernicious truths.

Regarding death, I ceaselessly waver between “mystery” and “inconsequentiality”—between the Pyramids and the Morgue.

I think of so many friends who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death.