/lit/ - Literature

>Having a horror of any action, he keeps telling himself: “Movement, what folly!” It is not so much events which vex him as the notion of participating in them; and he bestirs himself only in order to turn away from them. His sneers have devastated life before he has exhausted its juice. He is a crossroads Ecclesiast who finds in the universal meaninglessness an excuse for his defeats. Eager to find everything unimportant, he succeeds easily, the evidence preponderant on his side. In the battle of arguments, he is always the wiener, as he is always the loser in action: he is “right,” he rejects everything—and everything rejects him. He has prematurely compromised what must not be compromised in order to live—and since his talent was over-enlightened as to his own functions, he has squandered it lest it dribble away into the inanity of a work. Bearing the image of what he might have been as a stigma and a halo, he blushes and flatters himself on the excellence of his sterility, forever alien to naive seductions, the one free man among the helots of Time. He extracts his liberty from the enormity of his lack of accomplishments; he is an infinite and pitiable god whom no creation limits, no creature worships, and whom no one spares. The scorn he has poured out on others is returned by them. He expiates only the actions he has not performed, though their number exceeds the calculations of his wounded pride. But at the end, as a kind of consolation, and at the close of a life without honors, he wears his uselessness like a crown.