Page 98 - The Thief's Journal

The Thief's Journal
likewise, hoping to be loved for his own sake.
I wish for a moment to give sharp attention to the reality of supreme happiness in despair: when one is suddenly alone, confronting one's sudden ruin, when one witnesses the irremediable destruction of one's work and self. I would give all the wealth of this world—indeed it must be given—−to know the desperate—and secret—state which no one knows I know. Hitler, alone, in the cellar of his palace, during the last minutes of the defeat of Germany, surely experienced that moment of pure light—fragile and solid lucidity—the awareness of his fall.
My pride has been colored with the purple of my shame.
Though saintliness is my goal, I can not tell what it is. My point of departure is the word itself, which indicates the state closest to moral perfection. Of which I known nothing, save that without it my life would be vain. Unable to arrive at a definition of saintliness—no more than of beauty—I want at every moment to create it, that is, to act so that everything I do may lead me to what is unknown to me, so that at every moment I may be guided by a will to saintliness until the time when I am so luminous that people will say, “He is a saint,” or, more likely,.” He was a saint.” I am being led to it by a constant groping. No method exists. It is only obscurely and with no other proofs than the certainty of achieving saintliness that I make the gestures leading me to it. Possibly it may be won by a mathematical discipline, but I fear that it would be a facile, well−mannered saintliness, with familiar features, in short, academic. But this is to achieve a mere semblance. Starting from the elementary principles of morality and religion, the saint arrives at his goal if he sheds them. Like beauty—and poetry—with which I merge it, saintliness is singular. Its expression is original. Yet it seems to me that its sole basis is renunciation. I therefore also associate it with freedom. But I wish to be a saint because, above all, the word indicates the loftiest human attitude, and I shall do all to succeed. I shall use my pride and sacrifice it therein.
Tragedy is a joyous moment. Feelings of joy will be borne up by smiles, by a lightness of the whole body, and of the face. The hero does not know the seriousness of a tragic theme. Though he may catch a glimpse of it, he must not see it. Indifference is native to him. In popular dance−halls there are sober young men, indifferent to the music which they seem to be leading rather than following. Others joyously strew among prostitutes the syphilis which they have reaped from one of them. With the decaying of their splendid bodies, foretold by wax figures in fair−booths, they go off calmly, with a smile on their lips. If it be to death that he goes—a necessary end—unless it be to happiness — he does so as if to the most perfect, therefore the most happy, self−fulfillment. He goes off with joyous heart. The hero cannot sulk at a heroic death. He is a hero only because of this death. It is the condition so bitterly sought by creatures without glory; itself is glory; it is (this death and the accumulation of apparent misfortunes leading to it) the crowning of a predisposed life, but, above all, the beholding of our own image in an ideal mirror which shows us as eternally resplendent (until the dying away of the light which will bear our name).
His temple bled. Two soldiers had just fought for some long forgotten reason, and it was the younger who fell, his temple smashed by the iron fist of the other, who watched the blood flow and become a tuft of primroses. The flowering spread rapidly. It reached his face, which was soon covered with thousands of those compact flowers, sweet and violet as the wine vomited by soldiers. Finally, the entire body of the young man lying in
The Thief's Journal 96