Human mechanics. Whoever suffers tries to communicate his suffering—either by ill-treating others or by arousing their pity—in order to reduce it, and he does really reduce it in this way. The one who is at the very bottom, whom no one pities, who has no power to ill-treat anyone (if he has no child or being who loves him), his suffering remains within him and poisons him.
This is as imperative as gravity. How does one free oneself from it? How does one free oneself from what is like gravity?
Tendency to spread evil outside oneself: I still have it! Beings and things are not sacred enough for me. May I never sully anything, even if I were entirely transformed into mud. May I sully nothing, even in my thought. Even in the worst moments, I would not destroy a Greek statue or a fresco by Giotto. Why then anything else? Why, for example, a moment in the life of a human being that could be a happy moment?
It is impossible to forgive whoever has done us harm if that harm has lowered us. We must think that it has not lowered us, but has revealed our true level.
Desire to see others suffer exactly what we suffer. This is why, except in periods of social instability, the resentments of the wretched are directed against their fellows.
This is a factor of social stability. Tendency to spread suffering outside oneself. If, through excessive weakness, one can neither arouse pity nor harm others, one harms one's own inner representation of the universe. Every beautiful and good thing then feels like an insult. To do harm to others is to receive something from them. What? What has one gained (and what one will have to repay) when one has done harm? One has grown. One has expanded. One has filled a void in oneself by creating one in another. To be able to harm another with impunity—for example, to vent one's anger on an inferior who is forced to keep silent—is to spare oneself an expenditure of energy, an expenditure that the other must bear. The same is true of the illegitimate satisfaction of any desire. The energy thus saved is immediately degraded. To forgive. One cannot. When someone has done us harm, reactions are created in us. The desire for revenge is a desire for essential balance. Seek balance on another plane. One must go by oneself to that limit. There one touches the void. (God helps those who help themselves...) Headaches. At a certain moment: less pain by projecting it into the universe, but the universe is altered; more acute pain, once brought back to its place, but something in me does not suffer and remains in contact with an unaltered universe. Do the same with the passions. Bring them down, reduce them to a point, and detach from them. Treat all pains in this way. Prevent them from approaching things.
The search for balance is bad because it is imaginary. Revenge. Even if one actually kills or tortures one's enemy, it is, in a sense, imaginary. The man who lived for his city, his family, his friends, to grow rich, to improve his social position, and so on—a war comes, and he is taken away as a slave, and from then on, forever, he must exhaust himself to the extreme limit of his strength simply to exist. This is atrocious, impossible, and that is why no end so miserable presents itself to him that he would not cling to it, even if it were only to have the slave working beside him punished. He no longer has the choice of ends. Any one of them is like a branch for a drowning man. Those whose city had been destroyed and who were carried off as slaves no longer had a past or a future: with what object could they fill their thoughts? With lies and the most paltry, most pitiful cravings, perhaps readier to risk crucifixion for stealing a chicken than they previously were to risk death in battle to defend their city. Certainly so, or else those dreadful punishments would not have been necessary. Otherwise, one would have had to be able to bear the void in thought. To have the strength to contemplate misfortune when one is miserable, one needs supernatural bread. The mechanism by which a situation that is too harsh degrades is that the energy provided by lofty feelings is—generally—limited; if the situation demands that one go further than this limit, one must have recourse to base feelings (fear, covetousness, the taste for records, for outward honors), which are richer in energy. This limitation is the key to many reversals. The tragedy of those who, having set out for love of the good on a path where there is suffering, arrive after a given time at their limit and debase themselves. A stone on the path. To throw oneself at the stone as if, beyond a certain intensity of desire, it should no longer exist. Or to go away as if oneself did not exist. Desire contains something absolute, and if it fails (once the energy is exhausted), the absolute is transferred to the obstacle. State of mind of the vanquished, the oppressed. To grasp (in everything) that there is a limit and that one will not go beyond it without supernatural help (or only very slightly), and that one pays for it afterward by a terrible degradation. The energy released by the disappearance of objects that constituted motives always tends to go lower. Base feelings (envy, resentment) are degraded energy. Every form of reward constitutes a degradation of energy. Self-satisfaction after a good action (or a work of art) is a degradation of higher energy. That is why the right hand must not know... A purely imaginary reward (a smile from Louis XIV) is the exact equivalent of what one has spent, because it has exactly the value of what one has spent—unlike real rewards which, as such, are above or below. Thus imaginary advantages alone provide the energy for unlimited efforts. But Louis XIV must really smile; if he does not smile, the deprivation is unspeakable. A king can only pay rewards that are mostly imaginary, or he would be insolvent. Equivalent in religion at a certain level. For want of receiving Louis XIV's smile, one fabricates a God who smiles upon us. Or else one praises oneself. One needs an equivalent reward. Inevitable, like gravity. A beloved being who disappoints. I wrote to him. It is impossible that he should not answer me what I have said to myself in his name. Others owe us what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt. To accept that they are other than the creatures of our imagination is to imitate the renunciation of God. I too am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.