A Commonplace Book

While still quite young, he said, I had already experienced almost every pleasure and disappointment, every happiness and every suffering which can befall a man as a social animal. It would be useless to give you the details: the repertory of possible happenings in a human life is fairly limited, and it always comes down to about the same story.

If only scientists today, instead of constantly inventing new means to make life easier, would devote their resourcefulness to producing instruments for rousing man out of his torpor! There are machine-guns of course, but that's going a bit too far...

A good stew is worth more than a false philosophy.

Then, one particular night, a marvellous idea came to me: instead of just enduring this agony, try to observe it, to see where it comes from and what it is. I perceived that it all seemed to come from a tightening of something in my stomach, as well as under my ribs and in my throat. I remembered that I was subject to angina and forced myself to relax, especially my abdomen. The anguish disappeared. When I tried again in this new condition to think about death, instead of being clawed by anxiety , I was filled with an entirely new feeling. I knew no name for it -- a feeling between mystery and hope.

And then you grew up, went to school, and began to "philosophize", didn't you? We all go through the same thing. It seems that during adolescence a person's inner life is suddenly weakened, stripped of its natural courage. In his thinking he no longer dares stand face to face with reality or mystery; he begins to see them through the opinions of "grown-ups", through books and courses and professors. Still, a voice remains which is not completely muffled and which cries out every so often -- every time its gag is loosened by an unexpected jolt in the routine.

Well, there it is! he said, almost violently. I've told you the essential thing. Everything else is mere detail.

... one of the laws which governs [our] behavior.... This law might be termed: "inner resonance to influences nearest at hand." The Guides on Mount Analogue, who explained it to me later, called it simply the chameleon law.

The Hollow-Men live in solid rock and move about in it in the form of mobile caves or recesses. In ice they appear as bubbles in the shape of men.... [Some] say that, as a sword has its scabbard or a foot its imprint, every living man has in the mountain his Hollow-Man, which he will seek out in death.