A few hours earlier, last night, when I was having dinner with [crossed out] X. (X. has been called up [crossed out] and leaves today but he is leaving [crossed out]), I had already soaked up a lot of wine.

I asked W. to read a passage from the book that I was carrying around with me and he read it out loud (no one I know reads with more tough simplicity, with more passionate grandeur than him). I was too drunk and I can no longer recall the exact passage exactly. He himself had drunk as much as me. It would be a mistake to think that such a reading done by men under the influence of drink is merely a provoking paradox.

Everything I can say that is most true about X. is that he [crossed out] at the point in my life [crossed out]. I think that we are joined together in that we are both open without defences – from tempation – to forces of destruction, not out of boldness, but like children who never give up a cowardly naivety.

His face with its pronounced features, marked by a punctilious reserve, at the same time clenched and feverish, wounded by the constant agony of impossible inner turmoil, his shaven head (almost uniform in colour, as if made of wood or stone) perhaps make up something more contradictory than anything I have ever encountered: an obvious cowardice (more obvious than mine) but so marked by gravity, so beyond rescue that nothing could be more heartbreaking to witness; at one and the same time a little boy at fault and a venerable old man, a naive sailor on a spree and a stupid divinity losing his boulder-thick head in the darkness of the clouds …

People like [X.] and me can never aspire to sanctity. Do I know what we can aspire to? If we are closer to the saints than to other men, it is to the extent that we are 'little flayed gods'. Why shall I not become a little god if it is true that one may no longer laugh, get drunk, enjoy naked girls and then know ecstasy without being a god?

from the first version of Georges Bataille's Guilty, cited here. X is Leiris.