Enfin

After the best book, the most beautiful woman, or the finest desert you've ever seen, you tell yourself this is where the rest of your life begins.

     In fact, something else happens: another book, another woman, another desert. And the rest of your life becomes life itself. It was merely the illusion of the end.

     Even the hope of a definitive horizon, a horizon which would stamp what precedes with an irrevocable quality, is apparently not possible. New Deal of Life. New Deal of Desire.

     If everything can seem indifferent when you have encountered the most beautiful of things, why don't we regard the opposite situation as equally fateful: having read the worst book, having seen the dullest landscape, having met the stupidest, ugliest woman? There should be a perfection of - and hence an absolute limit to - the insignificant, the useless, the trivial and the banal, beyond which, as in the contrary case, there would be nothing more worth waiting for.

     In fact, it is not that way. After seeing the worst, you do not say, 'O time, suspend thy flight!' There is no ecstasy of uselessness.

Pour toujours

[...] His new book is about cats, Foucault, Alfa-Romeos, leukaemia, Catholicism, the Berlin Wall, mattresses, Laurent Fabius, John-Paul II, roses, Antarctica, Lech Walesa, mud wrestling, Zinoviev, porn films, snow, feminism, Rio, Jacques Lacan, Stevie Wonder, Palermo, DNA and terrorism. I'm trying to grasp a world in all its silences and its brutality. Can you grasp a world when you're no longer tied to it by some kind of ideological enthusiasm, or by traditional passions? Can things "tell" themselves through stories and fragments? These are some of the questions posed in a book which may seem melancholic. But then I think almost every diary is melancholic. Melancholy is in the very state of things.