Human life is impossible. But only affliction makes one feel it. The impossible good: "Good brings about evil, evil brings about good, and when will it end?" The good is impossible. — But man always has imagination at his disposal to hide from himself this impossibility of the good in each particular case (it is enough, for each event that does not crush us ourselves, to veil a part of the evil and add fictitious good — and some can do this even if they are crushed themselves) and, at the same time, to hide from himself "how much the essence of the necessary differs from that of the good" and to forbid himself from truly encountering God, who is none other than the good itself, which is found nowhere in this world. Desire is impossible; it destroys its object. Lovers cannot be one, nor can Narcissus be two. Don Juan, Narcissus. Because to desire something is impossible, one must desire nothing. Our life is impossibility, absurdity. Each thing we want is contradictory with the conditions or consequences attached to it, each affirmation we make implies the contrary affirmation, all our feelings are mixed with their opposites. This is because we are contradiction, being creatures, being God and infinitely other than God.
Contradiction alone proves that we are not everything. Contradiction is our misery, and the feeling of our misery is the feeling of reality. For our misery, we do not fabricate it. It is true. That is why we must cherish it. All the rest is imaginary.
Impossibility is the door to the supernatural. One can only knock at it. It is another who opens.
One must touch impossibility to escape from the dream. There is no impossibility in dreams. Only powerlessness.
"Our Father, who art in heaven." There is a kind of humor in this. He is your Father, but just try going up to look for him! We are exactly as incapable of detaching ourselves from the ground as an earthworm. And how would he come to us without descending? There is no way of conceiving a relation between God and man that is not as unintelligible as the Incarnation. The Incarnation makes this unintelligibility burst forth. It is the most concrete way of thinking this impossible descent. From that point, why should it not be the truth?
The bonds we cannot tie are the testimony of the transcendent.
We are beings who know, will, and love, and as soon as we bring our attention to bear on the objects of knowledge, will, and love, we recognize with evidence that there are none that are not impossible. Only falsehood can veil this evidence. The consciousness of this impossibility forces us to desire continually to grasp the ungraspable through all that we desire, know, and will.
When something seems impossible to obtain, whatever effort one makes, this indicates an impassable limit at this level and the necessity of a change of level, a breaking through the ceiling. To exhaust oneself in efforts at this level is degrading. It is better to accept the limit, contemplate it, and savor all its bitterness. Error as motive, source of energy. I believe I see a friend. I run to him. A little closer, I realize that the one I am running toward is someone else, a stranger. Likewise, we confuse the relative with the absolute, created things with God. All particular motives are errors. The energy that is supplied by no motive alone is good: obedience to God, that is, insofar as God overflows all that we can imagine or conceive, obedience to nothing. This is at once impossible and necessary — in other words, supernatural. A good deed. It is a good action if, in accomplishing it, one is conscious with one's whole soul that a good deed is something absolutely impossible. To do good. Whatever I do, I know with perfect clarity that it is not the good. For he who is not good does not do good. And "God alone is good"... In every situation, whatever one does, one does evil, and an intolerable evil. One must ask that all the evil one does fall only and directly upon oneself. That is the cross. Good is the action one can accomplish while keeping attention and intention totally oriented toward the pure and impossible good, without veiling by any falsehood either the attraction or the impossibility of the pure good. In this, virtue is entirely analogous to artistic inspiration. Beautiful is the poem one composes while keeping attention oriented toward the inexpressible inspiration, insofar as it is inexpressible.