Jean Cocteau

“My worst fault,” he acknowledges, “like almost everything in me, springs from childhood. For I am still the victim of those unhealthy rites which make children obsessive, so that they arrange their plates in a certain way at meals and only step over certain grooves in the pavement.”

In the end, everything is resolved, except the difficulty of being, which is never resolved.

Suffering is a habit. I am inured to it. During the film they talked about my courage. I would call it rather a laziness in looking after myself. I let myself sink as heavily as possible, with a passive strength, into work.

Marcel Proust would read to us, each night, Du côté de chez Swann.
These sessions added to the noxious disorder of the room a chaos of perspectives, for Proust would start anywhere, would mistake the page, confuse the passage, repeat himself, begin again, break off to explain that the lifting of a hat in the first chapter would reveal its significance in the last volume, and he would titter behind his gloved hand, with a laugh that he smeared all over his beard and cheeks.

I am told that of the Hotel Welcome nothing remains but the walls. That is the final triumph of the emptiness. Doubtless it will be rebuilt. But let travellers beware. It is haunted. Ghosts are not killed by bombs.

ON DEATH

I HAVE PASSED THROUGH TIMES SO INTOLERABLE that death has seemed to me a delicious thing. So I have formed the habit of not fearing her* and of looking her straight in the face.

WE CANNOT RUN FROM PLACE TO PLACE WITHOUT losing something, suddenly move all our goods from one place to another and change our work all in a moment just as we please. Nothing takes so long over its journeys as the soul, and it is slowly, if it detaches itself, that it rejoins the body. Hence those who think themselves speedy are thrown into confusion, badly reassembled, since the soul, joining them little by little and having rejoined them when they departed, is found by them to perform the same exercise in reverse. In the end they come to believe that they are, and are no longer.

In regard to one’s works, it is important to wait after each one, and let the body free itself of the vapours which remain in it and which may take a long time to disperse.
Hence the danger of a work for the cinematograph like the one I have just finished, for the hypnosis it subjects us to is such that it is difficult to tell where it ends. Even when the film detaches itself from us and, having consumed us, circulates with an unconcerned life of its own, more remote than that of the stars, our machine remains subject to it and will not shake it off.

The same thing applies to the discomfort of passing from one work to another, since the finished work goes on living in us and only leaves a very confused place for the new work. It is important, in regard to a journey, to wait for the body to reassemble itself and not to rely on an appearance in which only those who do not know us well can have any faith.

Nothing that is done can be destroyed. Even if one burns it and nothing of it remains but ashes.