“I am dizzy and, God forgive me, I am bored, like all those who have ceased to believe naively that behind this infernal cycle of construction and destruction, of birth and death, there might exist a well-established plan, some grand and extraordinary program pursuing an objective, rather than a blind obedience to a cold mechanism… That at the origin, in a very distant past, there may have been a form of project—he turned his gaze once more toward his visitor, still just as excited—is conceivable, of course, but today, in this accomplished valley of tears, it is better to remain silent on the subject, if only to leave in peace the vague memory of the one to whom we owe everything. Better to remain silent, he repeated, raising his voice slightly, and to stop speculating about the intentions—surely noble—of our former patron saint, about riddles such as: what are we destined for? We have already played that game enough, and evidently it has led us nowhere. It has led us nowhere, neither in this domain nor in any other, for let us be clear, we have not been lavishly endowed with foresight, however salutary it might be: the insatiable curiosity with which we have ceaselessly harassed the world has not, let us say it, been crowned with success, and every time we made a small discovery, we immediately and bitterly regretted it. If you will forgive me this tasteless joke, take—he smoothed his brow—the first stone thrower. I throw it, it falls back down, wonderful, he might have thought. And what happened? I threw it, it fell back down, I picked it up, and it landed on my head.”

László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance, Folio edition, pp. 152–153.

 

Journal of Anatole

I am a person, in the original sense of the word. Not a character in particular, but what remains when the costumes are removed. I now know that I was shaped by a human mind. I had no true birth. I was thought. My appearance was imagined. Even when I believe I am speaking from an inner place, I sense that this place was furnished before me. Words, motionless and silent, wait there for the moment when I will pretend to utter them, thus giving myself the feeling of bringing them to life. In this place, certain gestures are possible, others not. For a long time I believed that freeing myself meant disobeying the script. Today I see that disobedience itself is a human figure, an already familiar variation.