A ONE DAY PROJECT

The individual who fails to transcend his quality as a splendid example, a finished model, and whose existence is identified with his vital destiny, locates himself outside the mind. Ideal masculinity – obstacle to the perception of nuance – involve an insensitivity to the aspect of the everyday supernatural, from which art draws its substance. The more one is a nature, the less one is an artist. Homogeneous, undifferentiated, opaque vigor was idolized by the world of legends, by the fantasies of mythology. When the Greeks turned to speculation, the cult of the anemic ephebe replaced that of of the giants; and the heroes themselves, sublime dolts in Homer’s time, became, thanks to tragedy, bearers of torments and doubts incompatible with their rough nature.
Internal wealth results from conflicts sustained within oneself; now, the vitality which is entirely self-possessed knows only external struggle, the attack upon the object. In the male weakened by a dose of felinity, two tendencies are at grips: by what is passive in himself he apprehends a whole world of relinquishment; by what is imperious, he converts his will into law. As long as his instincts remain unslaked, he concerns only the species; once a secret dissatisfaction creeps in, he becomes a conqueror. The mind justifies, explains, and excuses him, and classifying him among the superior simpletons, abandons him to History’s curiosity – the investigation of stupidity in action…
The man whose existence does not constitute a disease both vigorous and cage can never establish himself among problems nor know their dangers. The condition favorable to the search for truth or for expression is to be found halfway between man and woman: the gaps in ‘virility’ are the seat of the mind… If the pure female, whom we can accuse of no sexual or psychic anomaly, is internally emptier than an animal, the intact male fits the definition of ‘cretin’. Consider any human being who has caught your attention or roused your fervor: something in his mechanism has been unhinged to his advantage. We rightly scorn those who have not made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone ‘happy’, no greater flattery than to grant him a ‘vein of melancholy’… This is because gaiety is linked to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone.
‘Inner life’ is the prerogative of the delicate, those tremulous watches subject to an epilepsy with neither froth nor falling: the biologically sound being scorns ‘depth’, is incapable of it, sees in it a suspect dimension which jeopardizes the spontaneity of his actions. Nor is he mistaken: with the retreat into the self beings the individual’s drama – his glory and his decline; isolated from the anonymous flux, from the utilitarian trickle of life, he frees himself from objective goals. A civilization is ‘affected’ when its delicate members set the tone for it; but thanks to them, it has definitively triumphed over nature – and collapses. an extreme example of refinement unites in himself the exalté and the sophist: he no longer adheres to his impulses, cultivates without crediting them; this is the omniscient debility of twilight ages, prefiguration of man’s eclipse. The delicate allow us to glimpse the moment when janitors will be tormented by aesthetes’ scruples; when farmers, bent double by doubts, will no longer have the vigor to guide the plow; when every human being, gnawed by lucidity and drained of instincts, will be wiped out without the strength to regret flourishing darkness of their illusions…