The things he was telling me kept squirting against the stumps of his teeth under the impulsion of a tongue, no movement of which escaped me. In a number of spots the edges of his tongue were bruised and bleeding.

This kind of meticulous observation was a habit, you might say a hobby, of mine. When you stop to examine the way in which words are formed and uttered, our sentences are hard put to it to survive the disaster of their slobbery origins. The mechanical effort of conversation is nastier and more complicated than defecation. That corolla of bloated flesh, the mouth, which screws itself up to whistle, which sucks in breath, contorts itself, discharges all manner of viscous sounds across a fetid barrier of decaying teeth — how revolting! Yet that is what we are adjured to sublimate into an ideal. It’s not easy. Since we are nothing but packages of tepid, half-rotted viscera, we shall always have trouble with sentiment. Being in love is nothing, it’s sticking together that’s difficult. Feces on the other hand make no attempt to endure or to grow. On this score we are for more unfortunate than shit; our frenzy to persist in our present state — that’s the unconscionable torture.

Unquestionably we worship nothing more divine than our smell. All our misery comes from wanting at all costs to go on being Tom, Dick, or Harry, year in year out. This body of ours, this disguise put on by common jumping molecules, is in constant revolt against the abominable farce of having to endure. Our molecules, the dears, want to get lost in the universe as fast as they can! It makes them miserable to be nothing but “us,” the jerks of infinity. We’d burst if we had the courage, day after day we come very close to it. The atomic torture we love so is locked up inside us with our pride.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

(in the sanitarium, in Rilke’s final illness)

Brother body is poor . . . that means we must be rich for him.
He was often the rich one; so may he be forgiven
for the meanness of his wretched moments.
Then, when he acts as though he barely knows us,
may he be gently reminded of all that has been shared.

Of course, we are not one but two solitaries:
our consciousness and he.
But how much we have to thank each other for,
as friends do! And illness reminds us:
friendship demands a lot.

— Rilke, Uncollected Poems

If only for once it were still.
If the not quite right and the why this
could be muted, and the neighbor’s laughter,
and the static my senses make —
if all of it didn’t keep me from coming awake —

Then in one vast thousandfold thought
I could think you up to where thinking ends.

I could possess you,
even for the brevity of a smile,
to offer you
to all that lives,
in gladness.

— Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 7

. . . Our loving is not, like the flowers’, the offering
of a single year. When we love, there rises in us
a sap from time immemorial. Oh my dear girl,
it is this: that we loved, in each other, not an individual
or one coming toward us, but brimming multitudes;
not a single child but the fathers
fallen to the depths of us like fallen mountains,
and the dry riverbeds of ancestral mothers;
the whole soundless landscape
under the clear or clouded sky of fate:
all this, my dear, came before you.

— Rilke, From the Third Duino Elegy

When you’re tipsy with fatigue your heart pounds in your temples. Bim! Bim! It beats against the velvet around your head and inside your ears. One of these days you’ll burst. So be it! One of these days, when the movement inside catches up with the movement outside, when your thoughts scatter far and wide and rise up at last to play with the stars.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

We must not portray you in king’s robes,
you drifting mist that brought forth the morning.

— Rilke, From The Book of Hours

The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always flounder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

For our ancestors, a house, a fountain, even clothing, a coat, was much more intimate. Each thing, almost, was a vessel in which what was human found and defined itself.

Now, from America, empty, indifferent things sweep in — pretend things, life-traps. . . . A house, in the American sense, an American apple, a grapevine, bears no relation to the hope and contemplation with which our ancestors informed and beheld them.

— Rilke, Letter to Witold Hulewicz
November 13, 1925

She was so gentle and persuasive that I grew accustomed to her kindness and took it almost personally. But I felt that I was beginning to cheat on my so-called destiny, my raison d’être as I called it, and stopped telling her everything that passed through my mind. I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

People live from one play to the next. In between, before the curtain goes up, they don’t quite know what the plot will be or what part will be right for them, they stand there at a loss, waiting to see what will happen, their instincts folded up like an umbrella, squirming, incoherent, reduced to themselves, that is, to nothing. Cows without a train.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

The mind is satisfied with phrases, but not the body, the body is more fastidious, it wants muscles. A body always tells the truth, that’s why it’s usually depressing and disgusting to look at.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

I have visited the works of art at length in Florence. For hours at a time I have sat before a particular painting and shaped my opinion of it, and then later compared it to Burckhardt’s fine judgments. And look: my opinion was like that of so many others.

Once, studying Botticelli’s Magnificat, I forgot any judgment of my own or of others. That is when it happened: I recognized a battle and was awarded a victory. And my joy was like no other.

— Rilke, Early Journals

She was determined to put me out into the night as soon as possible. The usual thing. Always getting shoved out into the night like this, I said to myself, I’m bound to end up somewhere. That’s some consolation. “Chin up, Ferdinand,” I kept saying to myself, to keep up my courage. “What with being chucked out of everywhere, you’re sure to find whatever it is that scares all those bastards so. It must be at the end of the night, and that’s why they’re so dead set against going to the end of the night.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

In the traffic of our days
may we attend to each thing
so that patterns are revealed
amidst the offerings of chance.

All things want to be heard,
so let us listen to what they say.
In the end we will hear what we are:
the orchard or the road leading past.

— Rilke, Collected French Poems

Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn’t get you anywhere.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night