41
" If I were to tell this story the way history is usually written or the way each of us recalls his own past, which means recording only the most glorious moments and inventing a new continuity for them, I should omit these little details and say that our eight stout hearts drummed from morning to night in time with a single all-encompassing desire—or some such lie. But the flame that kindles desire and illuminates thought never burned for more than a few seconds at a stretch. The rest of the time we tried to remember it.
Fortunately the demands of daily work, in which each of us had his vital role, reminded us that we had come aboard of our own free will, that we were indispensable to one another, and that we were on a ship—that is to say, in a temporary habitation, designed to transport us somewhere else. If anyone forgot it, someone else lost no time in reminding him. "
― René Daumal , Mount Analogue
42
" Having no lead to follow, we were swept up by words, memories, manias, grudges, and solidarities. Having no goal to aim for, we wasted what little life there was in our thoughts on joining in with a pun, speaking ill of common acquaintances, avoiding unpleasant facts, riding hobbyhorses, pushing at open doors, making faces, and preening ourselves. "
― René Daumal , A Night of Serious Drinking
43
" I've got a couple of other ideas. For instance, about the viscosity of sound. Sounds spread over surfaces, slide across polished floors, flow in gutters, pile up in corners, snap on ridges, fall like rain on mucous membranes, swarm on plexuses, flame up on body hair, and flutter on skin like warm air over summer fields. There are aerial battles where sound waves bounce back on themselves, start spinning and whirl between heaven and earth, like the indestructible regret of the suicide, who halfway down from the sixth floor all of a sudden no longer wants to die any more. There are words which do not reach their mark and roll up into roving balls, swollen with danger, like lightning does sometimes when it fails to find its target. There are words which freeze... "
― René Daumal , A Night of Serious Drinking
51
" Out of a single man, they get a thousand: homo economicus, homo politicus, homo physico-chimicus, homo endocrinus, homo skeletonicus, homo emotions, homo percipiens, homo libidinosus, homo peregrinans, homo ridens, homo ratiocinans, homo artifex, homo aestbeticus, homo religiosus, homo sapiens, homo historicus, homo ethnographicus, and many, many more. But at the very end of the production line in this laboratory of mine sits a Scienter who is quite unique. Three thousand brains in one. His function is to collect all the data and clarifications written up by the specialist Scienters. When he has collated everything, he is convinced that he has clasped the red rabbit or the essential man entire to his understanding. There you are, you can see him from here,' he ended, with a sign to one of his assistants who brought me a pair of binoculars.
I put them to my eyes and, indeed, at the far end of the gallery, I saw the Omniscienter. There he was, an enormous cranial dome with a tiny, shapeless, crumpled face, which seemed to me to be hanging by the ears from the two ebony knobs on the back of a raised throne. Swinging to and fro beneath this head was a little cloth puppet which dangled its empty trouser legs over the crimson plush seat. His tiny right arm was kept aloft by means of a wire, and the index finger rested on his temple in the gesture of one who knows. Above the throne ran a banner bearing this inscription:
I KNOW EVERYTHING, BUT I DON'T UNDERSTAND ANY OF IT "
― René Daumal , A Night of Serious Drinking
52
" In the evenings in bed, with the light out, I tried to picture death, the “most nothing of all.” In imagination I suppressed all the circumstances of my life and I felt gripped in ever tighter circles of panic. There was no longer any “I.” What is it after all, “I”? ...Then one night, a marvelous idea came to me: Instead of just submitting to this panic, I would try to observe it, to see where it is, what it is. I perceived then that it was
connected to a contraction in my stomach, a little under my ribs, and also in my throat...I forced myself to unclench, to relax my stomach. The panic disappeared ... when I tried again to think about death, instead of being gripped by the claws of panic I was filled by an entirely new feeling, whose name I did not know, something between mystery and hope."
-Mount Analogue, Rene Daumal "
― René Daumal , Mount Analogue
53
" I am dead because I have no desire, I have no desire because I think I possess, I think I possess because I do not try to give; Trying to give, we see that we have nothing, Seeing that we have nothing, we try to give ourselves, Trying to give ourselves, we see that we are nothing, Seeing that we are nothing, we desire to become, Desiring to become, we live. "
― René Daumal , Mount Analogue
54
" Я мертв, потому что у меня нет устремлений
У меня нет устремлений, потому что я думаю, что обладаю
Я думаю, что обладаю, потому что не пытаюсь дать
Пытаясь дать, понимаешь, что у тебя ничего нет
Поняв, что у тебя ничего нет, пытаешься отдать себя
Пытаясь отдать себя, понимаешь, что ты ничто
Поняв, что ты ничто, ты стремишься стать
Стремясь стать, ты начинаешь жить. "
― René Daumal , Mount Analogue
57
" On an experimental animal subject—the University not yet having authorized us to attempt a trial on a bishop in partibus, as we would prefer—we have tied, one by one, Corti fibers, that living harp, to the cones and rods of the retina. We have obtained, right on the macula lutea (which paradoxical as it may seem, is in keeping with our theory of concrete absences), the exact image of the guinea pig’s scream. The victim’s face presented all the signs of celestial bliss. The day we are allowed to avail ourselves of a subject of our choosing, we will be able to offer their Lordships the Ecclesiastics all the photophloxes of vespers, matins, complines, plainchants, antiphons, neumes, etc., they might need for their confounded ministries. "
― René Daumal , Pataphysical Essays