Incompatibilites 对抗自我 《解体概要》

A mind compels us only by its incompatibilities, by the tension of its movements, by the divorce of its opinions from its inclinations. Marcus Aurelius, engaged on remote expeditions, tends more toward the idea of death than toward that of the Empire; Julian, made emperor, regrets his contemplative life, envies the sages, and wastes his nights polemicizing against the Christians; Luther, with a vandal's vitality, sinks and mopes in the obsession of sin, and without finding an equilibrium between his delicacies and his crudities; Rousseau, who mistakes his instincts, lives only in the idea of his sincerity; Nietzsche, whose entire oeuvre is nothing but a hymn to power, drags out a sickly existence of a poignant monotony ...

For a mind matters only to the degree that it deceives itself as to what it wants, what it loves, or what it hates; being several, it cannot choose itself. A pessimism without raptures, an agitator of hopes without bitterness, deserves only scorn. Only the man who has no regard for his past, for propriety, logic, or consideration is worthy of our attachment: how can we love a conqueror if he fails to plunge into events with a suspicion of failure. or a thinker if he has not conquered his instinct for self-preservation? Man fallen back on his futility is no longer concerned with the desire to have a life ... If he were to have one, or were not - would concern the others .. . Apostle of his fluctuations, he no longer encumbers himself with an ideal identity; his temperament constitutes his sole doctrine, and the whim of the moment his sole knowledge.

----《A Short History of Decay》

不会法文太遗憾了，只能从中文和英文来品