Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don’t suffer, time flows, so that they don’t live in time, in fact they never have.

Almost all our discoveries are due to our violence, to the exacerbation of our instability. Even God, insofar as He interests us – it is not in our innermost selves that we discern God, but at the extreme limits of our fever, at the very point where, our rage confronting His, a shock results, an encounter as ruinous for Him as for us.

The tired intellectual sums up the deformities and the vices of a world adrift. He does not act, he suffers; if he favours the notion of tolerance, he does not find in it the stimulant he needs. Tyranny furnished that, as do the doctrines of which it is the outcome. If he is the first of its victims, he will not complain: only the strength that grinds him into the dust seduces him. To want to be free is to want to be oneself; but he is tired of being himself, of blazing a trail into uncertainty, of stumbling through truths. ‘Bind me with the chains of Illusion’, he sighs, even as he says farewell to the peregrinations of knowledge. Thus he will fling himself, eyes closed, into any mythology which will assure him the protection and the peace of the yoke. Declining the honour of assuming his own anxieties, he will engage in enterprises from which he anticipates sensations he could not derive from himself, so that the excesses of his lassitude will confirm the tyrannies. Churches, ideologies, police – seek out their origin in the horror he feels for his own lucidity, rather than in the stupidity of the masses.