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On Life, People and Freedom

CHAPTER 1On Life, People and Freedom

When I lose the reasons to live, I shall die.

Life has a purpose in itself and on its own. It becomes visible once life has lost all its outer sense: youth, beauty, health, freedom. We then see that the beauty of life is not in these desirable yet impermanent values, but rather in life itself!I have no hatred but I do have bitterness.

To despise death, often excessively praised, can be a consequence of the lack of respect for life (or man). Hegel gives a very bad image of the Blacks, the Indians, the Chinese. Thus, for example: "There is nothing in the nature of the Blacks to resemble humanity. . . . Human worthlessness can reach incredible levels; tyranny is not considered to be an injustice, and cannibalism is a widespread permissible activity." Or: "China does not know the sense of honour... . Since there is no honour the prevailing sense is that of servility, which transforms easily into viciousness. Related to this viciousness is the immorality of the Chinese. They are known to cheat wherever they can; a friend cheats on a friend and if found out, it is not held against them.. . . Slyness and wiliness are the main features of the Indian; submissively low and sly is he to the conqueror and the master, and totally ruthless and cruel to the conquered and the submissive" (Hegel, Philosophy of History). My comment: there is clear racism, or at least Eurocentrism, in these statements. If a sense of morality were a privilege of only some races or nations, it would no longer be what it really is. It is an individual who is moral (or immoral), not a people, thus any generalization is unacceptable.

Two truths; a poet's and a scientist's. To a poet, stars are either twinkling and sad, or they look at us from the skies and tell us about eternity; the moon is the light of heaven and the lovers' friend; a brook murmurs and tells a story, an old oak hides secrets; the skies smile or thunder with rage, and mountaintops reflect in the big blue sky and tell of the eternity of nature and the transience of all things human, etc. Science sees things quite differently. For science, nature is detached and the universe is blank and everything in it is just a game of blind and impersonal forces. The moon is a plain, cold planet that has been moving in the dark of space for millions of years, with no known or comprehensible purpose. We would learn so much about ourselves if we were able to say with certainty which held more truth to us and which was closer: the untruth of the poet or the truth of the scientist. This is, perhaps, where the answer is to who we are and where we are from, in fact, the answer about our nature and our origin.

Funny is a sober man among drunks. For in the company of drunks, the drunks are the majority and they set the standard of normality. In such company a sober man seems abnormal.

When we say that the work of any true artist is essentially autobiographical, we certainly do not mean that the adventures he leads his characters through are, in fact, events from the writer's life. We simply mean that descriptions of inner lives, dilemmas, suspicions, sufferings-especially the sufferings-are a description of one's own life. For no one has ever described someone else's suffering, nor is it possible to. The suffering any writer describes is his own, past or future, but his own, not someone else's. In that sense, every novel is autobiographical in its essential part.

Alija Izetbegović - Notes From Prison, 1983-1988 of 26


Only he who asks shall receive an answer.

There is a reason why I am enduring all this. The reason is just one, but sufficient: I must.

Fasting has something truly human to it, taking the better sense of the word. It cannot, of course, be analyzed, nor can it be proved, for it is a purely personal experience. When I was in prison, in moments of the kind of depression that can absorb a man in such a situation, I always felt worse if I ate well. Hunger always helped me more than a wonderful parcel from home. For the worst combination is an empty soul and a full stomach. Why is it so? Thoughts on this could contribute to our understanding of the essence of a human being more than deep and learned philosophical discussion on the topic.

However paradoxical it may sound, the invention of gunpowder enhanced the rule of the spirit over naked physical force. It provided an opportunity for the physically weak, provided they had the spirit and the courage.Advantages of freedom do not have to be proved by something outside freedom itself. It is its own underwriter.

There are signs of upheaval everywhere. It is a turmoil that reaches to the bottom of our world, to its very foundations.

Heidegger and his philosophy of death are totally a part of the Christian world of thought and emotion, as much as Marx and his optimistic philosophy of life belong to the Jewish world of the Old Testament. Nominal alignments do not mean much. Marx and Heidegger are like Moses and Jesus, the New and the Old Testament, Judaism and Christianity. Marx's philosophy is shallow and optimistic; Heidegger's is deep and pessimistic. True philosophy is only the one that takes into account the fact of death. Otherwise, the question that always remains is how can one speak truly of life, while avoiding the fact the truth of which is the only one void of any doubt-the fact of death.

294. Two men are gambling on the sinking Titanic. One of them is cheating. Many people resemble these two in real life.

304. When you are in prison, you have but one desire: freedom. If you fall ill in prison, you do not think about freedom, you think about health. Health is, therefore, more important than freedom.

325. I do not know if one can speak of a stupid peasant. Stupidity is far more frequent with so-called intellectual imbeciles. That is the most repelling and the most obvious form of stupidity. False erudition reveals rather than conceals stupidity. In it, stupidity is at its most obvious. I have never found such stupidity with peasants.

326. Excessive reading does not make us smarter. Some people simply "devour" books. They do it without the necessary intervals of thought, which are necessary in order to "digest," to process what has been read, to absorb and comprehend it. When people of that kind speak, pieces of Hegel, Heidegger and Marx come out raw, unprocessed. Reading requires personal contribution as much as a bee requires "inner" work, as well as time, to transform pollen into honey.

328. Newton, Darwin and Freud introduced determinism into everything they studied: the first into the universe, the second into the living world, and the third



into the psyche. All three types of determinism were to be questioned later, and in the same sequence. It all started with Einstein's denial of Newton's universe.

355. In the world, things are in relations of mutual dependence rather than those of cause and effect. Instead of observing them in a cause-and-effect relationship, we should observe them in their correlation.

360. Their entire long story, with an abundance of words, is usually just a clear sign that they have nothing to say.

366. Life is a game where nobody wins. . . except for those who believe and do good deeds. . . (Qur'an, Surah "Al Asr").

377. Kundera' s Theresa (Unbearable Lightness of Being) felt nakedness as a sign of the compulsory uniformity of a concentration camp, a sign of humiliation.413. Is the world divided into good and evil, and is man thus halved? I think that that is where lies the difference between a "romantic" and a "realist." Romantics see the world as a battle arena between men, of whom some are good and some are evil. Realists see the same battle, but primarily within man himself. I think that the latter is closer to the truth.

417. In King Lear, Shakespeare shows that only when mad does Lear understand life, and only when blind does Gloucester "see" life. The mind and eyes often do not see. It is the soul that understands and sees.

418. There are places more desolate than cemeteries. People go there with memories and emotions, they cry and lay flowers. So, let us not say: desolate as a cemetery. The comparison is false.

423. If I cannot speak freely with a friend-and I obviously cannot, read my judgment-if all privacy is denied, then it is a concentration camp. It is not just ordinary violence; it is the total elimination of privacy, one of the features of a concentration camp.

426. There is no proof of the existence of the soul, unless some of our questions that have no answers reveal something like that. One of those questions is why poetry tells about the human soul more than all the psychology of our time. Why is it poets rather than psychologists uncover the soul, why Shakespeare, and not Freud or Jung? Another question may be: why is it that the better off we are, the more displeased we are? Or: Why is pessimistic philosophy born in regions of affluence? Why is man negatively affected by comfort?

428. Look at a daring building: true, it is held together by adhesives or by steel built into it, but the real truth is that it is held together by the thought inside its basic balance and ratios.457. As the case of Voltaire (and not just his case) shows, upbringing may result in the unintended. Voltaire was brought up by Jesuits, and in him they bred their fiercest enemy.

500. There are paradoxes. If there were no night, we would be deprived of the magnificent image of a starry sky. Thus light deprives us of "vision," and darkness helps us "see."

509. A word uncovers the truth; it can also be used to conceal it.

521. Imitation is the most obvious form of acceptance.



523. The deepest, most important question the human mind ever asked itself, the most important question ever asked, is: Why does something exist, rather than nothing? Or: why does something exist at all? For me, this is the fundamental question of ontology.

533. Endless lies are possible on one and the same thing. The truth about it is just one.

534. Life is a dangerous thing. Insecurity is the price of living. Only those who died and those who will never be born are absolutely safe.

540. It was Plato who, long ago, found that it was impossible to discuss anything before agreeing on the terminology, that is, on the meaning of notions and names.

562. Existentialism is philosophy in its subject, and art in the means it uses to resolve it.

563. All Heidegger's efforts, supported by incredible perseverance, knowledge and passion, to build a "philosophy of existence," by his own admission, ended in failure.

578. "It is better to deal with an intelligent devil rather than a good-natured fool," says a proverb. This is probably so because an intelligent rascal is guided by interest, thus being, contrary to a good-natured fool, mainly predictable. You know where you stand and what you can expect.

585. In moments of real tragedy, there is no place for acting or complacent grief.

588. History sometimes makes fun of us and of our best intentions.

591. Ivo Andric was once asked what would have been his most important message, if he had been asked to give just a very short one, and he said: "Do not get drunk." He did believe that there were other evils, most of which would have disappeared, though, if people stopped drinking. Still, the writer emphasized: "When people speak about how damaging alcohol is, they give numerous convincing examples. A doctor speaks about how damaging it is for health, a social worker speaks about problems of alcoholics' families, divorces, unhappy children and devastated homes, public officials speak about economic damages, etc., but one reason, perhaps the most important one, is often left out: human dignity. I would like to say to people: do not drink for your own sake, out of self-respect, for your own dignity, do not humiliate yourselves." My comment:That is, presumably, the reason how a ban on alcohol came to be the subject of a religious ban. For religion may be indifferent towards this calculation of damages and benefits, but it cannot remain indifferent towards violations of human dignity.

695. Between sorrow and indifference, I will choose sorrow.

696. Falsity is the only thing uglier than an ugly truth.

782. If I do not kill time, time will kill me.



790. Melancholy is a matter of the soul, not a matter of the psyche, and it was thus always of more interest to philosophers and poets (as well as theologians) rather than psychiatrists.

824. If there is anything that has charisma, it is suffering ("charisma of suffering").

825. A man can flee the unpleasant present in two directions: into the past or into the future. The choice depends on character and convictions. The so-called dignified withdrawal from reality can be mere cowardice, capitulation in the face of reality or a whining self-deception. It is hard to learn exactly which one of these is valid for a particular case.

847. The matter is not only of dignity of life, but also of dignity of death. The two are connected. Lack of respect for death is a consequence of the lack of respect of life.

853. Our skill of life and our knowledge of life are two completely different things. In a similar way, it is one thing to be an artist, to create, and our knowledge of art, or our ignorance of it is something different, the latter being more frequent and more true.

873. It is said that mathematics is a synthesis of rationality.

876. I am convinced that there are illnesses that stupid people cannot succumb to. I think that if I tried, I could even list some of them.

878. What is the biggest question of honor? One thing above all: stay true to yourself and your destiny.

879. How big is disappointment? As big as hope was. Big hopes create big disappointments.

880. "Sad is this time of ours, when it is more difficult to break a bias than a atom"-A. Einstein.

898. Prison allows for realizations that can be said to be "painfully fundamental."

929. A true man speaks most harshly with those he loves or of things he cares for the most.966. Can life have a happy end? How do you imagine it? Doesn't every man suffer losses? (Qur'an, Surah "Al Asr").

998. "For a man to be able to read a lot, he should be either very rich, or very poor," said a famous film director. I would add: or a prisoner (in my case).

1010. During my time in prison, I never noticed a drop in my will to live, but I often realized that I was finding relief in the fact that I was old enough to know that death was not too far away. This thought brought me comfort. I treasured it like a big secret.

1012. Realists object that what we say or think about man is excessive idealism rather than the truth. Yes, it is possible that we do not speak of men, but rather of our desires, not of what man is, but what he should be. That may be true. But, despite all, this beautiful dream of what man is like is what makes us human. If we



ever cast away this idea as an illusion or a folly, in the name of "truth" or "reality," everything that makes our life bearable will disappear and we will become definitively prepared for all the evils and atrocities that humanity is prone to. Unfortunately, many of them, initiated in the name of the "truth" that man does not exist, are already implemented in large parts of our planet.

1049. A happy man does not have a life story. One may say: boring as a biography of a happy man living in peaceful times. At least that is what it looks like. And is it so? Is there a truly happy man? Is an average Swiss or an average Swede truly happy today? Bauer and Ibsen tell us something about that.

1080. There are realizations that we cannot confirm in any other way but to go through them ourselves. It takes hardship (and suffering) to reach that level, to see and be assured. There is no other way.

1094. A man can be as old as an old shoe, or as old as an old town or at least as an old, centennial oak tree. If he wants to, a man can grow old in this second way. It requires spirit. And what is spirit? This question has almost no answer, certainly not a direct one, but Socrates comes to my mind. This tragic Ancient Greek scholar had an ugly face, an ugly face that was loved by all. Despite that, he was a model of dignity and respect for those who knew him best, especially by his students. Perhaps at least some part of the answer to the question: what is human spirit, lies here.

1117. It is the kind of people, too wise and spiritual, who know how to rejoice endlessly and how to suffer endlessly. Extremes are typical of this kind of people.

1122. Even the most profound, the most versatile wisdom a man may "know," feel or "live," once spoken, becomes a thought, is reduced to a thought. And a thought is, by definition, one-sided. Those are the inevitable human limits, or the limits of knowledge, information and human communication.

1123. A true poet, a true artist, is "engaged" even when he does not wish to be. His art-if it is true-is always a testimony against lies. That is where the inevitable engagement of artists lies.

1182. There are situations in a man's life when a mere thought of death can awaken a desire and move the soul out of total numbness.

1187. This is how they praised old age (and I still do not know if they were right): Plato: "Eyes of the spirit become discerning only when the eyes of the body start to decline." Seneca: "The soul is flourishing and it is rejoicing the fact that it has little to do with the body." Zuber: "Those who have long old age are as if purged of the body." Tolstoy: "It is to the old that we owe the moral advancement of the world." Vuando: "As much as the body reclines towards its fall, so much the soul ascends to its peak," etc.

1193. In prison, man has a shortage of space and an excess of time. Unfortunately, space and time cannot compensate here.

1232. Some people are alive merely biologically. Emotionally and psychologically they are dead. To be alive means, first of all, to be alive in spirit.

1233. Despite numerous exaggerations, even nonsense, fashion has a good side to it: it expresses the need of an individual to be individual, to be "different."



1235. In a certain way, a child is more human than an adult: it possesses the most appealing and the most convincing features-spontaneity of will and emotions. So, while growing up, man loses some of his "humanness," some of what he brought with him from Paradise. By living, he moves further from its source and that is why "every man suffers losses" (Qur'an). Is our life, just like the "life" of nature, a continuous increase of entropy?

1257. I always wondered what was the difference between a story and a report of an event. The content of the story is not just the event itself, the reality, but rather the event as I experienced it. The story is not realistic, but it makes sense. A report is just realistic, it makes no sense, it is a mere collection of facts, whereas a story is an organized event. A story with no end is not a story, time in it stops being an endless flow. In a story, time is somehow bordered. A story is not the truth-it can be, but the truth impedes the story more than it helps it in being a story.

1267. Neither is the irrational senseless, nor is the rational always sensible. It is sometimes the other way round.

1275. Suffering cannot be avoided, but it may be complemented by ideas.

Everything that lives, suffers. But only men give ideas to suffering. That is the difference.

1276. Any reasonable thinking naturally strives towards a system. It is its good as well as its bad side.

1295. A true man carries out his human task, or exhausts himself trying to fulfill it. That is the beginning and the end of what we call human. The task itself is usually understood in an individual way. Religion and ethics are but attempts to objectify this task, to determine it and make it less subjective. It is always something outside mere biology. For, animals live, too. In order to be human, man must possess something above biological life alone. The question is not how, but why one lives.

1324. I have often boasted (to myself and others) that I am turned toward the future rather than the past, and this has been true. I thought that this was a particular virtue of mine. It was certainly useful, but it was not a virtue. Only much later did I understand that it was an escape from the past and from bad memories. It seemed to me at certain moments that there was nothing beautiful in anything that I had gone through; it all seemed like an inferno that I was able to rescue (have I?) my three children from.1325. Kant claims that the laws of natural phenomena must a priori correspond to reason and its forms, and its categories prescribe even the laws of phenomena, thus also of the nature as the "synthesis of all phenomena." Reason is therefore of a legislative nature. As there is obviously a correspondence between nature and notions on subjects of experiences. How is this correspondence possible?

1329. (Politicians and thinkers): Whoever still remembers Baron Cedlic- whom Kant addresses as a "humble and most obedient servant" (in the dedication of Critique of Pure Reason)?

1332. It sometimes seems to me that for a man to endure the pressures of life, he must descend to the ninth circle of the inferno. That means enduring the unendurable and accepting the unacceptable. Accepting everything one fears, absolutely everything. And just when it seems that all the troubles of this world



have already befallen him, that he has drank all the cups of bitterness except for the most bitter one, it means to take that one and drink it all. There are people who are said to have gone gray overnight. Are they the ones who descended to the very bottom? And when they returned, all that was left of them was something that can face the entire world, heaven and earth, and can look any truth in the eye. Everything that could have happened did happen to them and they have nothing left to fear, there is no fear left. They are the ones who are prepared to live their life, no matter what it may be like, to endure with serenity and dignity all the way to the end. And those who can endure life, can endure death. For life is more difficult and more dangerous than death.

1356. Man is born in blood, pain and scream, the first thing heard is crying, the birth is not exactly a natural act, it is painful, almost cruel. Does this not say something about the very life that has just been created?

1388. It may sound awkward, but evil gives sense to our existence. If there is no evil, there is no good. If there are no good and evil, everything is reduced to mechanics, thus to non-existence (non-sense).

1395. I have sometimes doubted my faith. I wondered if it really existed. But one thing was certain: I was already an old man, but I had no great fear of death. In fact, I never thought I would really die. I was more absorbed by the fear of the responsibility that awaited me. It was then that I understood that my faith was stronger than I thought and that such an emotion could only have originated from and been maintained by faith in God.

1407. I sometimes vividly remember my youth, the early youth when all the illusions were there. Life that was to come would blow like the wind, shatter them all and leave behind a wasteland. Still, not everything is gone, I have my children. I am grateful to God.1417. What we call good fortune is sometimes just concurrence of our personal task and our historical one, of our biography and our history, our personal aspirations and historical trends. Some find this "good fortune" in foregoing the personal and accepting the historical imperative as one's own. If I look at things that way, most of my life has been in collision with the historical one and harmony began to appear only recently. It is a paradox that such good fortune is happening at such a late stage of my life, the one I am spending here. I may also say: I was born too early to be happy, I should have been born a little later. However, birth is one of many things we do not choose. It is part of our destiny.

1431. I finished reading Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. It is Saturday, June 28, 1986. (My son is exactly 30 years old today and I have almost nine years of prison before me.) The reading was so "dense" that at times it felt like a jungle where I had to cut my way through with a machete. It is one of the best books I have read, and it is certainly one of the closest to my own thoughts and dilemmas.

1452. True love only chooses to reside in a noble heart. Selfish hearts cannot love.

1458. The ninth, the worst circle of the Inferno. Dante intended it for traitors.

1516. In literature, the greatness of a hero is not in his social significance, but in the greatness of the moral dilemma he represents. A character is great if he represents the good and the evil in a novel, irrespective of his social ranking, his title or position. That is why, in a novel or a drama, a king may be an insignificant character and a servant may be a hero. Why is it not so in life? The reason is that



in writing the writer introduces us to the soul of a hero, and in real life we get to know people only by their outer side. A man may be in our vicinity for years (at work or in the neighborhood) and we may believe that we know him, and what we know, in fact, are exactly the things that bear no moral value: name, profession, financial situation and social standing, etc. What is truly important and what no one but a writer could tell us about that person usually remains unknown.

1525. There are "mighty" personalities, mighty only because the society or the environment where they act is weak.

1526. You cannot give up your ideals, and you see quite clearly that there is no place for them in reality. That is a tragic situation.

1529. There are people who accumulate knowledge without expanding their views. The latter is achieved only through ideas.

1530. Writers may be well received by society or they may be rejected and misunderstood. In the former case, they are faced with the danger of alienating themselves from life and reality, and in the latter, to disappear. Both have happened.

1551. Contempt toward people can be twofold and can originate from totally opposite emotions. It can be a product of selfishness and insensitivity to people; in that case, contempt is an excuse for one's own emptiness. However, it can also be the other side of love for them, thus a result of continuing love for people and constant disappointment with them. The first is a feature of the selfish and the insensitive, and the latter of generous and noble souls.

1552. What is a star (or sky) for an astronomer and what is it for a poet, and which of the two is right? To an astronomer, the sky is an empty, desolate space that embodies a kind of algebra (or geometry). To a poet, stars are shimmering messages that create melancholy emotions, or symbols of eternity and order above a transient, forever changing world. Again we have two truths. What should one teach a child first: a beautiful poem about the moon or astronomic information about it?

1555. A starry sky is equally interesting to a scientist, a mystic, an ethics scholar and a poet. Looking at the stars, each experiences something different and each sees his own picture. An image (a scene) is endless; it can be compared to itself and nothing else.

1579. I have just finished Dickens's David Coppeifield and I wondered: from the point of view of formal morality, are Mr. Murdstone and his sister, who devised the monstrous system of upbringing, bad people? Perhaps not, but the scenes described by Dickens, where Mr. Murdstone's every word and Mrs. Murdstone's every move spread a deadly coldness, uncovering a kind of cruel order and mercilessness. God, save me from righteous people who possess honesty but have no heart. (God, save me from their heartless honesty.)

1583. Principles alone are insufficient. The second "decisive parameter" is man. The most sublime deeds of kindness and mercy have been done in the name of Christian principles, but stakes have burned too. It depended on the people who were applying the principles. Let alone the hypocrites.

1588. A toothache hurts, stupidity does not. A hollow head does not hurt the way a hollow tooth does. It is just damaging, but one does not die of stupidity.



1596. The political and material circumstances and troubles I have gone through in my life made my children, I believe, think and judge life and its problems much earlier than would normally have been the case. The consequences of this in their lives must have been both good and bad. God grant that there were more of the good ones.

1600. There are people who are not materialists in the philosophical sense, but are by their instincts and behaviour. Most people are, in fact, like that.

1607. Faust sells his soul for the treasures of this world-an old story, very old and often repeated. And true.

1613. "Speaking of history, it is art that flicks through the pages of the book of centuries, questions chronicles, fills in what the chroniclers missed out, reawakens facts, customs and characters, bridges analyses, groups what has been separated, introduces harmony into disharmony"-thus writes Victor Hugo. Still, speaking of history and art, I believe that there is a difference in the subject itself. History describes external events. Historical novels describe life itself. History deals with events, and novels deal with experiences. The subject of history is a people, a society, a community or a group; the subject of a novel is a person (an individual). History written on the basis of a novel or an epic poem would be very bad, but at the same time our complete knowledge of an epoch is not possible without a novel or a poem about it. However inaccurate literature may be in its presentation of historical facts, it is true in terms of local colour, social climate, spirit of the time, emotions and a subjective experience of a historical event recorded truly, albeit only externally, by history. We should therefore leave history to historians and life to poets. The latter will tell us truths about a time gone by, truths of a kind that we can never find in history. There is obviously an outer and an inner history of any era.

1645. It is difficult to help a man without hurting his pride. Everyone wants to be a giver and not a receiver.

1649. Nietzsche's "super-humans" are weak. For it is easy to live only for oneself, follow one's own instincts, which is Nietzsche's advice to his superhuman; it is hard to live for others and against one's own instinct. It is easy to retaliate, it is hard to forgive. It is easy to want the wife of thy neighbour, it is hard to resist the temptation. The first requires less than a man. Only the second requires a super-human.

1652. There is a strange link between good and evil. Were there no evil, would there be good? Is there good but in the struggle for good? Ibsen had nothing against oppression, for-he used to say-what else would awaken inside us the love for freedom? When he learnt that the Italian army had liberated Rome, he was not particularly delighted. He said: "The beautiful yearning for freedom is lost forever. I myself must admit that the struggle for freedom is the only thing about freedom that I like. I am not interested in the exercise of freedom" (Henrik Ibsen, Brand). My comment: these are the thoughts of a man who lives in freedom. I do not know if Brand would think the same way if he were in my situation.

1665. Has it ever happened to you that you actually like a rogue more than a so-called honest citizen? Have you ever wondered why? I believe that this can only be so because a rogue is more original and more his own. He is what he is. An honest citizen often acts according to a law that is not his own, that which was imposed upon him, and a rogue acts true to himself, according to his own law. It



does not mean that you like misdemeanours, nor that you approve of crime or sin, it is about the other part of the pair-personality. We like a man who is his own legislator. And conversely, we like the acts of a moral man, we do not like the man himself, since he obeys, and obedience is a form of non-freedom. Actions in accordance with a code that does not arise from the soul can easily be odious. In the end of nineteenth-century poetry, we find certain understanding for rogues and sinners, and the understanding originates from the above. "Be whatever you want to be, but be true to yourself all the way," says Ibsen's Brand. In certain extreme situations, a rogue seems a free man, and a moral man seems a slave to rules. Faced with a choice like this one, our spontaneous sympathies are with the free man. A slave can be pitied, but no one wishes to identify with him.

1674. I often wondered, especially in the first days after the verdict, whether I had the courage that could endure all that was ahead of me. There were days when death was my only hope. I kept it as a secret that only I knew, a secret THEY neither knew nor could take away from me.

1678. Love cannot exist as something general, just as something individual. That is why Jesus speaks of love for a neighbour. Only this specific love has meaning and only this love exists. Love for mankind-what is it? How does one love mankind? There is love for a human being or no love at all.

1679. "Be serious with your work, always and everywhere," says Kierkegaard-bearing in mind the Ibsenian (or Nietzschean) law of either-or. You either are the one who is called for and ready to sacrifice unconditionally for an ideal, or you are not, in which case, your seriousness toward work means that you do not accept it at all. There is nothing worse than doing things halfway. It sometimes equals treason and lies.

1680. To have one's own self, to be aware of it, to defend it-irrespective of what else the "I" may mean-is the first condition for being human. That is why we can sometimes feel respect and be interested in the destiny of a negative hero-if he is consistent and ready to draw consequences of his own attitude.

1691. A man and a woman are the basic cell of the world and of life. No revolutions, changes of empires, changes of laws and owners over the goods of the world were ever able to change real life unless they changed the relationship between man and woman. And vice-versa: the smallest shift in this basic element of life leads to an overall upheaval. The first image of Him and Her, this primordial image, is linked to Paradise, to sin, to responsibility and punishment. Everything else that happened later, starting from the epoch-making Descent, is linked to Adam and Eve and their relationship. What happened between them started as metaphysics, and metaphysics it remained. All subsequent history has been determined by this first drama and its main characters, Him and Her.

1717. That was the embrace of the unfortunate, those who could not belong to each other under the laws of this world. And there was but one way out of this embrace reminiscent more of a struggle: death. For "love and death are the same"-I do not know whose words these are, but they are implanted deep in my memory.

1727. It can be said of many people: they wanted to destroy the mechanism, instead they became its victims.

1728. Justice is one of those few things that need no proof. To prove the need for justice and fairness is either superfluous for those who have a heart or useless for



those who do not. The very question why there is a need to be just shows that any conversation and any explanation are pointless.

1729. A metropolis has a strange influence on men. A man poisoned by a metropolis loses the immediate sense of life that he had when he came to this world. He starts to hate nature, the sea, the sky, the clouds and becomes an "addict" just as he would with any extensively administered poison.

1735. American writers-contrary to European writers-do not strive to improve the world nor do they believe in such a mission of literature. To them, ideology is one of the grave dangers of this world. I agree with them.

1746. To seek trouble-this is not courage, this is madness. Courage is the willingness of man to sensibly face the troubles he cannot avoid.

1748. Accustomed to darkness, moles cannot tolerate light. To them, darkness is a normal state and light is unnatural and unbearable. Some people are like them. They are accustomed to darkness, they dislike light.1751. Nietzsche once wrote that he hated "the weak, the moralists and the slaves." For him, these were one and the same kind of people.

1760. In order to build, there must be destruction. Only anger can destroy, love cannot. That is why anger is a necessary and a useful part of life.

1762. We seek freedom, but are we worthy of it?

1763. This one great hardship saved me from hundreds of small ones that would have eaten away at me every day, in bits, yet systematically.

1766. I took revenge on hardship from my earlier life by forgetting it.

1774. I would like to live like a human being but I would like to ail and die quietly, like an animal.

1780. When Prophet Yahweh, God's Emissary, asked Satan about the time when his power over man was the strongest, he replied: "When man has eaten enough and drank enough."

1789a. After seeing a large exhibition of modern painting (in Sarajevo in 1980) it took me some time to re-establish balance and a normal link with the outer world and to start walking through it straight. Upon leaving the exhibition and entering the street, I felt a mild clash between the two worlds, the one from the painting and the real one. It is obvious that laws governing these worlds are not the same.

1790. When you see a painting you do not understand, you may think that the creator is not an artist but rather a charlatan playing with a naive audience. However, you may also think this: How high did the creator have to climb and how low did he have to descend in order to see a scene or a truth he is trying to tell you? If you do this, you will err less. For, think about it, you do not understand an essay on electronics, nor do you understand much of what a scientist may tell you about how he is building a spaceship to go to Saturn and how he plans to direct its flight from Earth. Although what he is telling you is fantastic and hard to understand, the scientist is not a charlatan. So why should a painter whose painting you do not understand be one?



1795. Injustice can be remedied by justice, by punishment. Same for same. Crime and punishment, remedium peccati. But the only way to truly overpower injustice is forgiveness. That is why the Qur'an instructs justice and recommends forgiveness. And yet, how does one know that justice is truly just, and not just a new injustice? And is there the same in human life? Are crime and punishment ever-can they at all be-the same, one at the measure of the other? Is not every justice, for it is pronounced and executed by men, always a new injustice, seeking again justice of its own? Over and over again.

1797. It was in Andric, I think, where I read that surplus imagination and laziness go together. Imaginative people are often lazy. Hard working ones are often dry, rational, calculating. Some people are pushed towards hard work by selfishness, ambition, desire for attention. Yet lazy people are not as disliked as we may expect, since their nonchalance is often accompanied by a total absence of ambition and calculation. In this respect there is a parallel with teetotallers and drunks. While we basically praise teetotalism and condemn drinking, we do not always feel the same towards teetotallers and drunks. The only thing we respect in some teetotallers is their sobriety, wishing them to be as far from us as possible.

1799. It is impossible to go forward, and backward there is nothing to go back to.

1801. Is there anything more beautiful than a rainbow? But the man who is inside it, cannot see it.

1802. It is one thing to do evil unto man, but it is another, though not a very different thing, to not do unto them the good you were able and obliged to do. If you summarize your life from time to time, do not forget the latter.1804. Philosophy came to be and continues to exist out of man's natural endeavour to conceive or at least to comprehend the world. Of as long as this endeavour lives, so shall philosophy.

1826. All my reasons remained helpless, as if before a wall or a kind of madness. Madness knows no reasons. No comparison with other people and events was of help. For this comparison was based on the typical and the normal, and here everything was atypical and abnormal.

1833. Life is full of paradoxes. Thus, for example, a true man who loves and honours others in principle goes by his conscience and cares very little about criticisms or praise of others. Conversely, a vain man usually despises others but secretly cherishes their opinion, hence cares about the opinion of those he despises. We usually find this in dictators and tyrannical natures. Stalin is said to have despised his surroundings bitterly. He was particularly disparaging towards poets and intellectuals (Osip Mandelstam, a poet, lost his head because of a poem about Stalin written too liberally). The logical question is: Why are they affected by the opinions of those whom they consider beneath them and whom they despise?

1851. Hatred is said to be blind, but so is love, in its own way. I cannot remember truly hating anyone, but I am certain that I have known much better the people I disliked or even could not stand the sight of. The distance I felt towards them helped me to see all their weaknesses, lack of talent and intelligence, basically all their faults that would have remained unknown to me had I liked them. It is a different question whether this "knowledge" of mine (or lack thereof) is a good thing, and should we know all the bad truths about people close to us.



1852. A temptation that lurks at us: We sometimes feel disgust (or even hatred) for a person against whom we have nothing to say and who is no worse than us or those we love and respect. This unfounded antipathy towards people is a frequent and an ugly occurrence. It is one of our temptations.

1855. Reading is, more or less-depending on the reader-a creative act, for the reader provides his own interpretation to what he read. Ten readers-ten different characters of Fyodor Karamazov, and with it numerous unexpected judgments and associations, totally subjective, varying from one reader to the next. That is, to an extent, the difference between reading a story and watching a film. While reading we reconstruct a character (or a landscape), in film it is given and the viewer receives it passively. While reading a novel the image is in the mind of the reader, and while watching a film the image is on the screen. We should therefore read, for film cannot replace that.

1861. I have always found modern painting a little difficult to understand, but it always attracted me, like a secret. I read with curiosity everything on paintings of this style that I could lay my hands on. And here in prison, there have been days when I was "attacked" by a desire to understand a secret, an essence eluding me yet feeling so near. If I had been a painter, I am certain that, feeling the inadequacy of words, I would have painted those incomprehensible images that I used to gaze at with bewilderment and awe. I think that at such times I did understand modern painting, inasmuch as anyone but the creator can understand it at all.

1863. As for the difficult, the ultimate questions, the ones on life and death, especially the latter, some keep asking themselves and some keep avoiding them. But neither is finding any answers. The first because there is no answer, the latter because they are not looking. At first sight, the result is the same. Still, the difference between those two categories of people is immense, just like the difference between wisdom and recklessness.

1864. Is life without desires imaginable? Are not life and desires one and the same thing? Even if you want to (are endeavouring to) overcome a desire, it is nonetheless a desire. Thought and desires cannot be stopped.

1866. I have read writings by Tolstoy, Hugo, Dostoyevsky, Rousseau, and came to a conclusion: none, not even people whom we hold to be geniuses, were free from vices and weaknesses. The only difference is how much people are willing to admit this to themselves and others. To courageously face all the sins and failures of one's life, in a confrontation that poisons and purges the soul at the same time, this is something that only a truly brave, great man is capable of. There are no imperfect human beings, just insincere ones.

1869. Describing his childhood, Tolstoy tells us that the memory of that time fills him with a sensation of something poetic and mysterious and how then, growing up, he lost this true feeling of the depth of life. We all feel something similar. Does not the same happen to mankind and has not mankind, when leaving its childhood, lost that feeling (or that memory) for the mysterious or the supra-sensory? Is not the drama (or the entire development) that mankind has gone through repeated in human life? And this time, the development does not just consist of advancement, but also of retrogression or loss?

1870. I do not know much about computers, but I can say with certainty that the intelligence of computers is stupid and that it is at best a simulation of intelligence. This simulation can be endlessly improved but it will never cross that



magic line and become spontaneous and authentic. And it is exactly that fact that represents the endlessly great (or, if you prefer, the endlessly small) difference between the animate and the inanimate. No human product can cross this threshold. Only God was capable of that. "God is not reluctant to give you an example of a fly" (Qur'an). However great our knowledge is, do we not overestimate it at times? If all the knowledge of all the libraries of the world were to be concentrated into a single imaginary computer, and if all the greatest scientists of the world were to be gathered into an imaginary institute or laboratory, and if they were to be given all the time and all the resources they may ask for, they would not be able to produce a single swamp mosquito (a fly). That is the message of the Qur'an's ayyah on a fly.

1872. When we try to imagine a good writer, we usually think of the qualities he should possess: imagination, experience, talent, perceptiveness, intellect. But I read somewhere that Turgenev made a list of flaws a man should possess in order to be a writer. Thinking about this unexpected or the "inverted" way of looking at things, I think that one flaw should be very high on this list: vanity. For why does a writer believe in the first place that he should teach us or educate us or that we should know what he thinks? Is this not a form of vanity?

1875. As for the relationship of these two histories (the inner and the outer- see note 1613) the inner may contain the real truth about events, if it were not an excellent field for the writer's arbitrariness, subjectivity, bias and imagination. For what is there that guarantees to us that people were exactly the way the writer describes them in his novels? For example, Ivo Andric is persistently reproached for being biased against Islam and Moslems and that this bias drew all his characters with Moslem names. In his stories, Moslems are always primitive, dishonest, weak and idle, prone to deceit and laziness. The outer history, despite everything, lends itself a lot less to mystification and arbitrariness of this kind. In any case, it is more verifiable. For not all writers are as conscientious when writing so-called inner histories as Leo Tolstoy. For example, while writing his 30-page story titled "Why?," he is known to have read a number of books on the history of the 1830-1831 Polish rebellion, in order to be as truthful as possible. He wrote in his diary: "I need to read a lot in order to write five lines scattered throughout the story." The opposite example may be the said Andric, who is said to have totally misrepresented the land expropriation prior to the construction of the bridge on the Dma. According to Andric, it was a ruthless grab with no compensation and no right to complain, accompanied by violence. However, Osman Sokolovic, a historian, found and published court archive documents that showed that one by one the owners went to the Turks' office and how the purchase price was determined for each lot that was taken. Sokolovic quoted literal translations of records that were no different than the modern ones put together on similar occasions. If Andric did not follow historical facts or if he did not confirm them, if he drew everything he wrote on people, their character, beliefs, feelings and relationships from his imagination (and he was undoubtedly very imaginative) then there is in his Bridge on the Drina, The Travnik Chronicle, The Damned Yard and Djerzelez nothing one may learn and understand about time and people that really existed. What can be learnt from Andric' s novels is perhaps something about people in general, about what they may have been like and not what they were really like. But in that case his works have a philosophical value and have no significance for what we call an inner history of an epoch.

1903. Time and use wear out most things, but there are those-like folk songs-that go from mouth to mouth and are shaped and enriched with time, thus becoming shorter and more meaningful.



1915. There is one thing that we want and hate at the same time: old age.

1951. There is no wisdom without experience, one's own, of course. However, if it is true that a clever man uses someone else's rather than his own experience, what arises is that recklessness in youth is the condition of wisdom in old age. What follows is that young smart men never achieve true wisdom and that such wisdom is achieved only by those who were neither very wise nor very thoughtful in their youth.

2018. Water reduced to turbines of a plant is useful. Water that remains free and falls free is not useful, but it is beautiful.

2019. Can something be said of "nothing"?

2076. One of the arguments of the feminist movement is that a woman has been expressing herself as a mother and that it is now time for her to express herself as a personality. In their argumentation, mother and personality are opposed terms. I would like someone to explain this to me. I have always thought that there is nothing more personal or richer in personality than a mother, that a mother is a superb personality. Feminist dialectics is confusing.

2078. Why else do we treasure objects and memories of times long gone, if not because they represent symbols of human continuation and tradition.

2079. If it is sincere, remorse is a moral category of the ultimate kind. In my eyes, a man who sinned and repented is better than those who never sinned (and there are such). I have always had an aversion to so-called sinless men and, despite my great desire to do so, I have never been able to free myself from this mistrust. Perhaps this is because I am neither sinless nor perfect.

2080. It is no wonder that painters paint. The world is full of shapes, colours, light and shadow-therefore made to be painted, and a human being with eyes and soul is made to paint. Thus a painter and his world are at each other's measure.

2109. Real men are not rough. They have emotions and they are not ashamed of them. Homer's famous heroes, whose heroic deeds he described so vividly, do not hide tears. When Patroclus saw his Achaeans killed before Troy, "tears streamed down his cheeks like water down a rocky mountain." Achilles said to him: "Why do you cry, Patroclus, like a little girl running behind her mother and crying until the mother takes her in her arms?" And when Patroclus was killed, Achilles "fell on the ground.. . and cried, with such pain that even his mother Tehida heard him in the depths of the sea." Antioch cried, "shedding bitter tears." Homer and his heroes are no less manly because of their tears.

2135. A "better life" (as a slogan, a motto, a goal) is something a man can work toward but not die for. One may suffer for something above the "standard of living," despite the fact that what is "above" is in some cases an illusion, even a delusion. It is, in fact, something that belongs to the same order of things as death itself: love, honor, freedom, dignity, glory, idea, homeland, etc. To sacrifice life is an irrational act, and something like that can be done only based on emotions, and not based on reason.

2143. Decency is not just a question of good morality, but also a question of good taste. Immoral things are usually also in poor taste.



2144. If Islam is understood correctly, it will become clear that it holds that a true man is above a saint, that a saint is a man who has perhaps tried but failed to become a complete man. Whoever reads Tolstoy's biography, a moving story of "a struggle which continued for 80 years and which was participated by all virtues and all vices, all vices but one-lie" (R. Roland), will understand how any biography of a "sinless" saint (if such exists) would be pale, boring, even fake, compared to the life of this true man. One can appreciate that the great writer's dramatic life was exactly what God wanted and that that was the reason why He ordered sinless angels to bow before a sinful man.

2153. It is interesting that some people constantly request the right to an opinion, and once they win the right, they do not use it.

2167. Fire can keep us warm, but we can also burn in it.

2178. How can I judge people? Edgar Allan Poe, one of the greatest writers in the past 150 years, who wrote unforgettable prose, poems and essays, died at the age of 40, eaten by alcohol and who knows what else, practically homeless. Only Allah can judge people.2198. A person is not defined by his or her opinions, but by his or her feelings. A man can change his opinion completely and remain the same person.

We can talk of a change of a person only once his feelings have changed. It can be said that we adopt opinions with a belief that they will contribute to easier achievement of what we are emotionally committed to or linked with.

2200. One man's death is as valuable as his life has been.

2204. "In Memoriam-Borivoj Niksic"Borivoj Bora Niksic, Justice of the Federal Court, participant of the National Liberation War from its beginning, member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia since 1939, was buried on Saturday, 18 October, at the New Cemetery in Belgrade. Persecuted for spreading communist ideas, he remained firm and unwavering. A warrior, a partisan, a brave son of his Srem, he fought honourably until the final victory. Awarded several war and peacetime medals, he remained the humble bearer of his communist ideals. Well known to the Yugoslav legal community as a long serving judge of Circuit, Supreme and Federal Courts, he gave full contribution to the development of criminal legislation and legal theory and practice. Gravely ill and aware of his approaching end, he left a message for his family and colleagues that he was to be buried with no speeches, no flowers, no obituaries, in the presence of just his immediate family and closest associates. A quiet departure of this long serving judge of the Federal Court, a warrior and -above all a good man, left a huge void among his colleagues, close associates and friends" (Politika, Belgrade, October 28, 1986).

My note: Borivoj Niksic was the vice-chair of the Federal Court Chamber that passed the final ruling in my case. Legal qualification was changed (from counterrevolutionary association aimed at destroying constitutional order to so-called verbal offence-Article 133 of the Criminal Code) and the sentence was reduced from twelve to nine years of imprisonment. According to the Criminal Code in effect, the maximum penalty was ten years.

2215. My mind keeps vacillating and wondering, but my heart has always been and is firmly on the side of faith. My moments of true happiness were those when my mind and my heart were in agreement.



It is January 1st today. We have just entered 1987. What is ahead of us?

2268. Perhaps sorrow is a natural state of the soul, here, ici-bas, in this world.

2268a. What else is a characteristic of the human soul? It loves fairy tales. Why?

2275. "A man is not what he thinks, but what he does," says Mesa Selimovic (Death and the Dervish). My comment: I am not what I think, even less what I do. Both are clearly conditioned. I am what I want and feel. Thought is "outside of me," my actions are even more "alien," even more "outside." Emotions are closest to the soul, if they are not the soul itself.

2324. When you have lived and survived everything, when you have stumbled a hundred times and then risen again, when you have given up all false hopes and comforts and you have clenched your teeth to look the truth in the eye, only then do you realize that the sole purpose of life is the fight against evil. Little can be done in this fight, but that is the only thing we have left. Outside it, there is disaster and death forever.

2330. People have not sung about wisdom, they have sung about courage. People have dedicated their most beautiful poems to a virtue held in esteem higher than anything else, probably because it is the rarest of all: the virtue of courage, the contempt toward danger and death. This goes equally for folk poems of all times, from Japan, to India and Persia, to England and America.

2341. In prison, a man has to pass a very difficult test. After years of loneliness and deprivation, only a man of strong spirit can leave with no signs of numbness and frailty. This is a sign that, despite all the hardship, his inner life has not been boring, that he amused himself even in solitude with his thoughts and his plays of fantasy. While his body has been behind bars, his spirit was able to be with his loved ones, in his thoughts he could "see" a show at the theatre or even be in a distant country.

2343. Have you noticed that when watching comedy, some people do not find it funny at all? While the politicians usually get upset, some intelligent people find comedies sad.

2354. The soul aches as much as the body. There are days when all the scars, all the old and long forgotten hurts "light up," just- like old injuries awaken before bad weather or bones hurt from blows you have collected in a long life and only forgotten for a short while. In those days you are bad tempered and absorbed in yourself, in your soul whose wounds reopened only to remind you that nothing is lost, nothing vanishes, least of all pains and bad memories. They just whither away for a while, withdraw into an unknown depth, just like they will this time and you will put them behind you. Until the next time.

2355. There is only one way to avoid defeat when you are facing the world. Even that one is not quite safe, but it is the only possible one: It is that you move the ratio of strength between you in your favour. Instead of moving and changing thousands of things, each of which is stronger and heavier than you, you strengthen yourself to be "above" the world. The latter you can do, it is in your power at least to some extent, and the world is huge and unconquerable. You cannot cover all the roads you take with leather, you can make shoes for yourself, you can cover your feet with leather and the result will be the same. That is the only way to rule the world and the circumstances we find ourselves in. Have you ever thought why old people feel cold even when they are dressed warmly? They



lack their own warmth. The best way to resist the outer cold is for your blood to work, so that you are warm within. That is the only real solution.

2357. An ornament cannot replace content, just like a spice cannot replace food. When content dissolves into form in a culture, we certainly become witnesses of decadence and disappearance of that culture.

2374. A clever man knows how to speak. A wise man knows how to be silent too.

2376. One can speak of sense or senselessness of suffering, of its role in a man's life and in history, but one is certain, we all feel it: The composition of suffering is noble, it is made of noble matter.

2393. It is February 26, 1987, today, a day of some excitement. I was called to the prison administration this morning. In the visitors' room, I found Lejla and Sabina with happy faces. I guess they wanted to let me know immediately that it was nothing bad. They then told me that Nikola Stojanovic, the president of the Pardons Commission of the RB&H Presidency, had suggested that I should file an application for a pardon and I would be released. The mediator was Zdravko Djuricic, then secretary of the Commission, Lejla's old school classmate. He had put together the text of the application. I read it. I did not sign. The prison continues.

2401. Excessive erudition can sometimes suffocate creative thinking. A man can possess knowledge in many fields, but with no organization, no vision. Many learned men have lived and died without real knowledge, which can be brought to life only by an idea. It is generally accepted that research with a wrong hypothesis is more promising than research with no hypothesis. A pile of good material with no plan remains just a pile. A starting hypothesis may even be a prejudice that we shall be free from once we complete the research, just as we free ourselves of the scaffolding once a building has been built.

2405. Do not kill a mosquito, dry the swamp.

2429. Only freedom cannot be worn out by frequent use.

2518. The "humanity" of a man is not primarily in the fact that he is good and kind, but rather in the possibility that he may or may not be such. Therefore, not because he is not a criminal, but because he is not necessarily, inevitably such. A man has a way out and that is his greatness.

2529. Fasting in prison-for me, that was a confirmation of my human dignity on days and occasions when everything around me violated it.

2547. The fact of death changes all our standards. For no rational order of thoughts and values can cope when faced with this fact. Only strong passions- love, faith, hatred, pride, vengeance-and they are rejected by reason-are capable of that. That perhaps justifies them in the eyes of many.

2557. The question why something is, why is there Something and not Nothing, for me the most far-reaching question a man can ever ask himself. I wonder:How could a man, being in reality as a part of it, ever come across a question like that, how could he think of it? The first time I heard it, I was astounded.



2572. Art is not worthy of that name if it merely describes, follows, copies, or even reveals, unless it all grows in its eyes to the limits of the invisible and the miraculous.

2581. A pure mind embodies the unity of essence and existence: It is at the same time a real existence, and this characteristic of real existence is inherent in the very essence of the mind, that is, it is one, unquestionable and absolute being. The world cannot be compared with the light that expands into infinity and sheds itself onto everything it comes across (Husserl' s views, presented in Ideen).

2703. Man is in conflict with the forces of history. These forces are blind to the life of an individual. An individual, his life, his feelings, are victims of these forces. "Senselessness of history and its unfulfilled promises overcasts the individual human being" (Emile Sioran, History and Utopia). Sioran speaks about evil, violence and barbarism as the main driving forces of history. According to him, morality, goodness and humanist ideals have always been on the verge of defeat in their conflict with the forces of tyranny and evil.

2735. Among poor peoples, slenderness and paleness are not held in high regard-they remind them of hunger and poverty.

2862. Optimism sometimes sounds cynical.

2127. Unlike animals, God made us walk upright. Most people do not use this privilege; most of their lives they bend, even crawl. Should one do that? Is it not blasphemous to reject this great gift from God: walking upright?

2152. A man is not a "social animal." The more he is a man, the more he is a person, the more he strives toward solitude. An ordinary (average) man is sociable not because of his love for other men, but because he is self-insufficient. It is an escape from emptiness, from monotony, from one's own life. A superficial person does not like to be alone and vice versa: a truly spiritual man, a monk, a recluse can be alone all his life.

2156. In Italy, instead of hitting a donkey thus making it move forward, which sometimes has no effect due to the donkey's stubbornness, peasants have thought of a trick: They fasten a stick with a bunch of hay to the donkey's head, so the donkey stares at it and hopes to reach it. Are not many people like these donkeys, and are there not some people who turn others into donkeys like the ones in Italy?

2161. Envy is a misfortune that affects unhappy people. They are envious because they feel unhappy. Envy does not soothe their misfortune, it just worsens it.

2173. Some people consider their arrogance to be a form of self-awareness, but the two are totally different.

2178. Real knowledge is possessed by the people who are belonging to the majority-thus the lower, rougher nature. A better kind of people seem naive and ignorant. I often had a dilemma: Should I respect them for their kindness, or resent them for their naiveté. For ignorance is no virtue. And vice versa:should I resent the experienced kind for their resemblance with the majority (for "the majority is not good"-Qur'an) or should I appreciate them for their knowledge and realism? Of course, I had no real dilemma: Honesty is superior to knowledge, but I must admit that I was never able to truly forgive the naiveté and clumsiness



of good and honest people. I have always dreamed of an ideal: a good and honest man, yet experienced and realistic. Can that be united in one person or is it just a lucky coincidence?

2182. Just as we carry the burdens of our own children, in the same way we do not feel our own faults and vices, but rather only those of other people.

2184. We express noisily and passionately the opinions that come from our will, and those that come from our knowledge and conviction, we express calmly and coldly. That is why we always rely more on judgments expressed coldly; we feel that they come from understanding rather than passion.2185. Interests in general truths and personal truths are in inverted proportion. If we come across a person of great curiosity towards personal matters and lives of their near and not so near dear ones (which is quite frequent, not only in women), in them we will find less interest in the general truths of the world, which are subjects of science and philosophy. With his well-known sting, Schopenhauer observes that ordinary people, who normally do not show particular sharpness, are "excellent algebraists in someone else's personal matters, where they solve the most complicated equations with only one given value."

2193. Nietzsche was a very sensitive man, not at all like his own Ubermensch. At the age of 44 he lost his mind and-according to biographers-the immediate cause was a scene at a Turin square, when the philosopher, upon leaving his flat, saw a carriage driver giving his horse a merciless whipping. He went to the animal, embraced it gently and cried, and then just collapsed. He lived for another 12 years, but he never returned to his senses. We are what we are, not what we think or wish we are.

2228. We cannot achieve perfection. But there is one thing we can do: we can constantly try to be more men, try for every man to be more like a man.

3054. The presence of death gives the picture of life the necessary dark shades, without which it would have been pale and insignificant. A novel and a drama that contain no dying seem incomplete.

3066. To a man who gives me his opinions I would love to say: I am not interested in your ideas, your alleged convictions, nor in your views of the world, nor in whatever you call it. The only thing that matters to me and the only thing that matters at all is: what are you like? Are you a good or a bad person? In fact, all your stories, even your actions, are interesting only as much as they help me find the answer to this question about you: who are you?

3069. Even darkness may be light. Stars are invisible during the day. Their glow is the strongest in the greatest darkness. If there were no dark nights, we would not have known the magic of a starry sky. Even if we knew of it, we would not be able to see this incredible sight.

3078. What is characteristic of a real writer? First of all, perceptiveness. There are people who lived their lives as if they passed through the world with their eyes closed. A real writer is the total opposite: sensitive as a photo-plate.

3085. The world cannot be won by rejection. This can be done only by acceptance. In fact, acceptance of the world is the precondition for changing it or winning it.



3103. The Japanese ideogram for the verb "to think" means "to be sad." A coincidence or hidden logic?

3134. The problem of solitude. Some think that that is the only way for man to confirm or to experience his humanity. Others think the opposite: Man can become and remain man only when surrounded by other men. Patrick Suskind, a new-generation German writer, wrote his story titled "Pigeon" only to show that in solitude, man loses his humanity and that human existence is human only with other humans.3137. There are rules of the game in everything one does in life. Follow the rules, and in order to follow them, either learn them or establish them yourself.

3140. Why do we always appreciate morality and almost always despise moralizing? Because morale is an action, moralization is a word. Morale is a request from yourself, moralization is a request directed at someone else. That is why morale is always moral, and moralization is often hypocritical, thus immoral.

3179. It seems that conflict is the way life exists. A conflict-free life cannot be imagined. Conflict can be constructive, destructive or futile (redundant). The latter resolves nothing, nor does it serve any purpose. And many cherish only this type of conflict.

3180. At a certain stage of their lives, salmon go upstream, back to their birthplace, crossing huge distances, conquering rapids and waterfalls, even dying in the effort. Why? They know they must. That is all.

3260. One night during a scientific expedition in the Pacific, three crewmembers of the Kon-Tiki are said to have caught a snake-like fish of magic colours, unlike anything else they had ever seen. They took it immediately to the fourth crewmember, a marine zoologist. They woke him up and showed him the fish. He looked at it and said, "There is no such fish," and went back to sleep. Many people behave like this expert.

3333. People who took part in or witnessed one and the same event often see and describe it differently. Everyone is absolutely convinced of his or her own version (the film Rashomon is a story about that). How does one explain that? I think that the only explanation is that our observations are never mechanical and objective. They, as well as our views of an event, are always intermingled with our thoughts, our emotions, desires and passions. This creates numerous views and numerous misunderstandings.

3334. To live or to die, which is the greater problem? Perhaps Thomas Bailey Aldrich, an American writer, had this question in mind when he stated that "we cry when we are born, not when we die."

3340. What is the true meaning of the rational and the irrational-it is hard to say because, among other things, the notion of ratio is not identical in different cultures and different languages. Latin Ratio, English Reason and German Vernunfi do not have the same meaning.

3341. What was or has been done cannot but be, it cannot be erased for that would be contrary to the law of time.

It is March 23, 1988 today, five years of prison are over, four remain.



3375a. What should we think of Picasso's paintings, most of us standing before them confused? It is interesting to hear what the painter himself thinks about his art. In a letter to Giovanni Papini from 1952, Picasso wrote: "People of sophisticated taste, rich men, idle men, thinkers, all seek in art something new, extravagant, scandalous. I myself, starting from cubism and onwards, have entertained those connoisseurs and those critics with all the impulsive bizarreness that crossed my mind, and they, the less they understood it, the more they admired it. . . . But when I face myself, I do not have the courage to consider myself an artist in the classical sense of the word. Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt and Goya were artists. I am just a public entertainer who understood his time and used as well as he could the stupidity, vanity and recklessness of his contemporaries." My comment: I do not know how sincere this confession was. How do I put it together with the fact that Picasso prepared over 700 studies and sketches just for his painting Ladies from Avignon, which was, as it is held, a real revolution in Western painting? Perhaps Picasso just played a joke on us with this statement.

3377. A writer may fight against the evil in men, if that is his goal. By describing Macbeth, Shakespeare spoke about good and evil more than a hundred aestheticists.

3391. Most people do evil out of interest (power, wealth, glory, love, etc.). But there is also evil for the sake of evil, evil that is its own purpose. That is real hell. I have unfortunately had the opportunity to get to know such evil and the people who do it.

3439. Suffering and pain play a huge moral role in human life. It is hard to explain but we all feel it. Of course, this is not the quality of the world, but rather of man. With no pain and no suffering, what is lacking is the important thing we call credibility.

3464. I was right at the wrong time.

3501. I, to them: you could hide the past. The present you cannot.

3514. A man I knew died. Reading the obituary, I thought: there are people whom we feared for their strength or strictness, whom we respected for their wisdom or superiority of a different kind, whom we admired for their virtues and finally, those whom we loved for their kindness. When they die, it is only the latter that we remember with true sorrow and with a feeling of irreparable loss. For me, this has always been the proof that only love and kindness are the values that defy time and oblivion more than any other, and which can be questioned by nothing, even death itself. In a sense, love and kindness testify human immortality.

3519. I am aware of my faults, but I live with them. However, if I see them in someone else, then I dislike the person and the fault. This is the measure of my "fairness" and my objectivity.

3527. A tragedian and a poet transform the rough experiences of their lives into an exciting story, like a silk worm that transforms mulberry leaves into silk. Both are equally miraculous.

3528. The closer you are to the stars, the closer you are to their destiny:loneliness, distance and cold.



3540. An average aborigine (savage) from Central Africa knows the stars in the sky better than an average inhabitant of a European or an American city. While a primitive man tells time by the sun and follows the stars when travelling at night, the knowledge of this kind of our average man from the street is zero. We left our knowledge of the sky to astronomers and physicists. But the main problem is not this knowledge or ignorance. The damage is more of a moral nature. The man who never or hardly ever looks up at the sky loses his sense of orientation. Without this picture, he is deprived of the sight that all the wisdom of the world comes from. It is only in this heavenly perspective that man could assess his own greatness and his own insignificance, never forgetting either of the two.

3548. Some complain of human ungratefulness. They are afraid that their love will not be requited, that their kindness will remain unrewarded and unrecognised. This is an obvious misunderstanding. No truly good deed can ever remain unrewarded for the reward is simultaneous. Those who have ever done a truly unselfish, that is, a truly good deed, know this very well. A good deed and its reward cannot be separated, like an object and its shadow. The reward you have in mind would only belittle it. Look at a child looking after a wounded bird or feeding a puppy that followed him in the street. Does the child seek any particular reward or does he feel rewarded already? Look at the joy in his eyes.

3559. Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Omer and Merima, Layla and Marjoun, all love each other. And we love them. We love them because they love each other. We love them although we do not know them. What follows is: We do not love them, in fact, we love love.

3574. Man is fallible. A robot is not. In this case, the fallibility of man is an advantage, and the infallibility of a robot is a fault or "a virtue we are averted from."

3575a. Science should be neither praised not cursed, it should be used. In any case, science is not pure truth, as some see it and claim it to be, but it is one of the roads to truth.

3599. All men, even those who are unaware of it, deep inside their souls admire courage, unselfishness and generosity. Why else would we untiringly continue to invent characters who courageously defy destiny and death? All men are poets, mystics and romantics, at least a little. For where does this weakness for flags, symbols, hymns, romantic heroes who die for their homeland or the loved woman with no regret, come from? Who are these creatures who fill cinemas where they can see heroes who are themselves as much as they are not like us? And if it is true that such people do not exist in real life (that they exist only in literature), the question remains, why has the imagination of all the peoples continued to create them from time immemorial? We do not give our admiration to what we are but to what we are not, and what we would like to or should be.

3661. Language is said to be a writer's homeland. Strange things happen with immigrant writers. Even when they have mastered the language of their new homeland, they still write verse in their mother tongue. Thus, for example, after moving to the West, Joseph Brodsky continued to write prose in English and poetry only in Russian. Deep inside we all understand this, but it is hard to explain.

3676. This time of ours: hard, but endlessly interesting. We may complain that we have had it rough, but not that we have been bored. I can only regret that I will not live long enough to see the outcome. I am talking about death. But perhaps



there is no outcome and no death. Perhaps the eyes that have been watching it will just close and life will just continue. New births, new eyes open up like flowers, new stories and so on with no end. God, You are great and so is the world You created!3677. There have been pain and suffering before, horrific and monstrous, but the sword of repression has never before been so conscientiously pointed against the man inside man, and the intention to humiliate and destroy men has never been conducted with so much satanic skill and perseverance. It was-as Bloch said-"the collapse of the upright walk of mankind."


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