Цитаты из книги «Книга непокоя», страница 17

The outer world exists like an actor on stage: it’s there but is something else.

Tedium, yes, is boredom with the world, the nagging discomfort of living, the weariness of having lived; tedium is indeed the carnal sensation of the endless emptiness of things. But tedium, even more than all that, is a boredom with other worlds, whether real or imaginary; the discomfort of having to keep living, albeit as someone else, in some other way, in some other world; a weariness not only of yesterday and today but also of tomorrow and of eternity, if such exists, or of nothingness, if that’s what eternity is. It’s not only the emptiness of things and living beings that troubles the soul afflicted by tedium, it’s also the emptiness of something besides things and beings – the emptiness of the very soul that feels this vacuum, that feels itself to be this vacuum, and that within this vacuum is nauseated and repelled by its own self.Tedium is the physical sensation of chaos, a chaos that is everything. The bored, the uncomfortable and the weary feel like prisoners in a narrow cell. Those who abhor the narrowness of life itself feel shackled inside a large cell. But those who suffer tedium feel imprisoned in the worthless freedom of an infinite cell. The walls of the narrow cell may collapse and bury those who are bored, uncomfortable or tired. The shackles may fall and allow the man who abhors life’s puniness to escape, or they may cause him pain as he struggles in vain to remove them and, through the feeling of that pain, revive him without his old abhorrence. But the walls of the infinite cell cannot crumble and bury us, because they don’t exist; nor can we be revived by the pain of shackles no one has put on us.

The Gods are the incarnation of what we can never be.

My domain of old was in deep valleys. The water that trickled in my dreams was never tainted by blood. The trees’ foliage that forgets life was always green in my forgetting. The moon was fluid like water between stones. Love never reached that valley, which is why life was happy there. Neither love, nor dreams, nor gods in temples – and we walked in the breeze and the indivisible hour without any nostalgia for drunken, useless beliefs.

No one understands anyone else. We are, as the poet* [Matthew Arnold in "To Marguerite: Continued"] said, islands in the sea of life; between us flows the sea that defines and separates us. However much one soul strives to know another, he can know only what is told him by a word – a shapeless shadow on the ground of his understanding.

I’m astonished by my capacity for anxiety. Though not generally inclined to metaphysical speculation, for some days now I’ve been filled with intense, even physical anxiety as I grope for answers to the metaphysical and religious problems… I quickly realized that for me the solution to the religious problem meant solving an emotional problem in rational terms.

Have you ever considered, beloved Other, how invisible we all are to each other? Have you ever thought about how little we know each other? We look at each other without seeing. We listen to each other and hear only a voice inside ourself.The words of others are mistakes of our hearing, shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe in our meanings of other people’s words. We hear death in words they speak to express sensual bliss. We read sensuality and life in words they drop from their lips without the slightest intention of being profound.The voice of brooks that you interpret, pure explicator… The voice of trees whose rustling means what we say it means… Ah, my unknown love, this is all just us and our fantasies, all ash, trickling down the bars of our cell!

If I could really convince myself that renunciation is beautiful, how dolefully happy I would always be!

Я – сумрачный стратег, что, проиграв все битвы, накануне каждого нового сражения набрасывает подробный план своего отступления, получая от этого удовольствие.

Жить не стоит. Стоит только смотреть. Умение смотреть, не живя, привело бы к счастью, но оно невозможно, как обычно бывает со всем, о чем мы мечтаем. Экстаз, который не включал бы в себя жизнь!..