[TRANSCRIPT]
THOUGHTS FOR FEBRUARY
The world around us is a smooth surface, meaningless, soulless, valueless, on which we carry no impact.
A.R.G. NATURE, HUMANISM, TRAGEDY /N.R.F. 1958./
The core of a man's reality is made up of his existence. It catches itself in the abandonment, i.e. the loneliness of a being thrown into the world, into care – as man never appears as some stable creature, finished, already in some sort of continual abandoment in the void in the NOTHINGNESS: He is "beings-towards-end".
M.H.: Introduction into Metaphysics, 1938
We go to that ancient garden where all those who love to think, who are full or worry, or talk to themselves, go down towards evening as water goes to the river. They are scholars, lovers, old men, the disillusioned, and the priests; all dreamers, of every possible kind. They seem to be seeking their distances from each other. They must like to see but not know one another, and their separate sorts of bitterness are accustomed to encountering each other. One drags his illness, another is driven by his anguish. But there is no other place to escape the others but this, where the same idea of solitude invincibly draws each of all those absorbed souls. It is a botanical ruin. We shall be there a little before sunset. Imagine us walking slowly, exposed to the sun, the cypresses, the cries of birds. The wind is cool in the sun, the unseen cathedral tolls. Monsieur Teste absently gazes, and walks slowly among the rectangular flower beds and shouts at times: Antirrinum Sicilum Sinnata Asper and Vulgare
P. V. A Letter from Madame Emilie Teste p. 22.