Page 97 - The Thief's Journal

and colors it with my likeness.
The Thief's Journal
I accumulate rash acts: getting into stolen cars, walking in front of stores where I have operated, showing
obviously fake papers. I have the feeling that in a very short time everything is bound to break wide open. My
rash acts are serious matters and I know that airy−winged catastrophe will emerge from a very, very slight
1
mistake.
ways of the world. I want to fulfill myself in one of the rarest of destinies. I have only a dim notion of what it will be. I want it to have not a graceful curve, slightly bent toward evening, but a hitherto unseen beauty, lovely because of the danger which works away at it, overwhelms it, undermines it. Oh let me be only utter beauty! I shall go quickly or slowly, but I shall dare what must be dared. I shall destroy appearances, the casings will burn away and one evening I shall appear there in the palm of your hand, quiet and pure, like a glass statuette. You will see me. Round about me there will be nothing left.
1. But what will prevent my destruction? Speaking of catastrophe, I can not help recalling a dream: a locomotive was pursuing me. I was running along the tracks. I heard the machine puffing at my heels. I left the rails to run into the countryside. The locomotive cruelly pursued me, but gently and politely it stopped in front of a small and fragile wooden gate which I recognized as one of the gates which closed a meadow belonging to my foster−parents and where, as a child, I used to lead the cows to pasture. In telling a friend about this dream, I said, “...the train stopped at the gate of my childhood...”
By the gravity of the means and the splendor of the materials which he has used to draw near to men, I measure the distance that separates the poet from them. The depth of my abjection forced him to this convict's labor. But my abjection was his despair. And despair was strength itself—and at the same time the matter for putting an end to it. But if the work is of utmost beauty, demanding the vigor of the deepest despair, the poet had to love men to undertake such an effort. And he had to succeed. It is right for men to shun a profound work if it is the cry of a man monstrously engulfed within himself.
By the gravity of the means which I require to thrust you from me, measure the tenderness I bring you. Judge to what degree I love you by the barricades I erect in my life and work (since the work of art should be only the proof of my saintliness, not only must this saintliness be real so that it may fecundate the work, but also that I may brace myself, on a work already strong with saintliness, for a greater effort toward an unknown destination) so that your breath—I am corruptible to an extreme—may not rot me. My tenderness is of fragile stuff. And the breath of men would disturb the methods for seeking a new paradise. I shall impose a candid vision of evil, even though this quest require that I leave behind my flesh, my honor and my glory.
Creating is not a somewhat frivolous game. The creator has committed himself to the fearful adventure of taking upon himself, to the very end, the perils risked by his creatures. We can not suppose a creation whose origin is not love. How can a man place before himself something as strong as himself which he will have to scorn or hate? But the creator will then charge himself with the weight of his characters' sins. Jesus became man. He expiated. Later, like God, after creating men, He delivered them from their sins: He was whipped, spat upon, mocked, nailed. That is the meaning of the expression: “He suffers in his flesh. “Let us ignore the theologians. “Taking upon Himself the sins of the world ” means quite exactly: experiencing potentially and in their effects all sins; it means having subscribed to evil. Every creator must thus take upon his back—the expression seems feeble—must make his own, to the point of knowing it to be his substance, circulating in his arteries, the evil given by him, which his heroes choose freely. We wish to regard this as one of the many uses of the generous myths of Creation and Redemption. Though the creator grants free will to his characters, the free disposition of himself, he hopes m the depths of his heart that they will choose Good. Every lover does
But while I hope for misfortune as an act of grace, it is well for me to plunge fully into the usual
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