"The difficulty of subordinating action to its end stems from the fact that the only admissible action is the most efficacious. Hence, the initial advantage of immoderately giving oneself over to it, of lying and of unrestrained conduct. If all men permitted themselves to act only to the extent that necessity dictates to their total being, falsehood and brutality would be superfluous. It is the overflowing propensity to action and the ensuing rivalries, which increase the efficacy of liars and of the blind. Moreover, given the circumstances, we can do nothing to extricate ourselves--to remedy the evil of excessive action, one has to, or would have, to act! We do nothing more than verbally and vainly condemn those who betray and blind their own kind. Everything, in all this vanity, takes a turn for the worse. No one can condemn action except through silence,--or though poetry, which opens, as it were, its window onto silence. To denounce, to protest, is also to act, and at the same time, it is to shy away from the exigencies of action!"
On the unbearable and the divine:
"One speaks about the 'unbearable' universe that I portray in my books, as though I were displaying my open wounds the way the wretched do. It is true that, on the surface, I like to deny, or at least to neglect and discount, the multiple resources which help us to endure. I scorn them less perhaps than it would appear, but I most certainly hasten to give back my own small portion of life to that which divinely slips away before us, and which slips away from the will to reduce the world to the efficacy of reason. I have nothing against reason and rational order, for in the numerous cases where it is clearly opportune, like everyone else, I am in favor of them both. Nevertheless, I do not know whether anything in this world has ever appeared adorable which did not exceed the functions of utility, did not wreak havoc upon and benumb as it charmed, and, in short, was not at the extreme limit of endurance. I, who know myself to be clearly limited to atheism, am perhaps wrong for never having demanded less from this world than the Christians did from God. Did not the idea of God itself, while having as its logical outcome a reasonable account of the world, also have the means to chill (the blood)? Was it not itself 'unbearable'? All the more unbearable then is that which is, of which we know nothing (except in detached bits), about which nothing can give an explanation, and whose fullest expression is to be found only in man's powerlessness and death."
Henri Michaux, Tête Bleu, 1948
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