You've always been wrong

by René Daumal

You've Always Been Wrong is a collection of prose and poetic works by the French writer Rene Daumal (1908-1944). A fitful interloper among the Surrealists, Daumal rejected all forms of dogmatic thought, whether religious, philosophical, aesthetic, or political. Much like the Surrealists (and French theorists of more recent decades), Daumal saw in the strict forms and certainties of traditional metaphysics a type of thought that enslaves people even as it pretends to liberate them. These "cadavers of thought," Daumal wrote with youthful bravado, "must be met with storms of doubt, blasphemes, and kerosene for the temples." Daumal tied Surrealism with mystical traditions. A devoted student of Eastern religions, philosophy, and literature, he combined his skepticism about Western metaphysics with a mystic's effort to maintain intense wakefulness to the present moment and to the irreducible particularity of all objects and experience. Such wakefulness, according to Daumal, leads inevitably