“Trip to the End of the Night” by Ferdinand Celine. Part 2
Posted by: adonis49 on: August 26, 2012
“Trip to the End of the Night” by Ferdinand Celine (Part 2)
This French book, published in the early 1930’s, is basically a collection of autobiographical stories of a freshly graduating physician in his mid thirties who established his “clinic” in a poor working neighborhood in the suburb of Paris.
Celine (pen name) used to be called to pay visit to patients after sundown, and his medical tour will last till dawn, from a poor patient to another dying girl aborting in the room of her parents, because the parents refused to send her to the hospital for face-saving…
Celine volunteered in WWI, was caught in the machinery and couldn’t get out, and was able to flee to the USA and worked at the noisy and boring Ford factories in Detroit. He returned to France and studied medicine.
The followings are excerpts, not of the stories, but of the kind of statements that the living among miseries bring up in our mind and emotions.
The biggest tiredness of the living is this tremendous effort invested in looking “reasonable”, along the decades of our growth: Everything is justified as long as we never exhibit ourselves, as we are: vile, foul, atrocious, absurd…This long nightmare of presenting this little universal ideal, superman during the day, this sub-man that we inherited, handicapped from birth in so many ways…
It is a good feeling when we land in an unknown city: We can lure ourselves that the people are much nicer. It is good to dream that we can spare a few hours in the public park, ogling the young girls…
I noticed that people have a vast reserve for love, plenty of it in reserve, genuinely pitying the handicapped, the blind…
The trouble is that love in reserve is never invested, not early enough, not ever: It is blocked inside, serving nothing and nobody…This kind of love in reserve dies slowly, and is reduced to nothing: Inflation of hatred, contempt, self deprecation exhaust all the initial wealth in love, bottled up inside…
It’s astonishing how hard it is to figure out what may render a person, more or less, agreeable to others. We really want to be of service, to be favorable, but we keep mumbling and blubbering…The first uttered words, and we are swimming in the vast sea, unable to swim. Al the unconscious distract you as you approach the topic of being friendly…
Detritus do not increase or last: They are decomposed one way or another. It is mankind who keeps defecting, urinating through his half-decomposed body, and exacerbate this mess with conversations that are half-cooked and ill expressed
Our torture is imprisoned in a body, characterized by a specific foul nauseating odor, a particular trademark of every individual, his signature…And our molecules keep their unrelenting navigation, to getting out of our body and rejoin this universe of infinity…
What’s life after all, but a bit of light that ends in the dark? Most of our adventures and undertakings that counts to our heart are done mainly in the dark of the night: Shameful endeavors that we think the others don’t know or have the secret, and the details of our dark maneuvers…
Fear never does reply by a Yes or a No. All that fear does is to gather what we are thinking, all that we say, everything we do…Fear just control our emotions and our actions, unknown to our conscious mind…
Relocating your business has a single advantage: The time it takes for your clients to discover the best way to harm you, you are already enjoying a tranquil relative break from people’s harm. It is this short period that is the most agreeable in relocating your living. The best tactic is turning over from one side to the other in your bed…
Adonis Diaries 
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