Collected Works of Paul Valery, Volume 14: Analects 9781400872091

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Introduction, by W. H. Auden
Odds and Ends
Rhumbs
Analecta
Suite
Bad Thoughts and Not So Bad
Mixture
Petites Etudes
At Moments
Miscellanea
Notes

Citation preview

PAUL VALERY

ANALECTS Translated by Stuart Gilbert

With an Introduction by W. H. Auden

BOLLINGEN SERIES XLV · I \

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PAUL VALERY

ANALECTS Translated by Stuart Gilbert

With an Introduction by W. H. Auden

BOLLINCEN SERIES XLV · 1 4

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1970 by Princeton University Press, Princeton,

N.J.

All rights reserved

T H I S IS V O L U M E COLLECTED CONSTITUTING SPONSORED

WORKS

NUMBER BY

FOURTEEN OF P A U L

XLV

IN

BOLLINGEN

I T IS T H E T E N T H COLLECTED

SBN

TO

THE

VALERY

BOLLINGEN

OF

THE

APPEAR

691-09837-9

Library of Congress catalogue card no.

56-9337

Type Composed at the University Printing House, Cambridge, Printed 111 the United States of America DESIGNED

SERIES

FOUNDATION.

VOLUME

WORKS

OF

BY

ANDOR

BRAUN

England

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION, by W. H. Auden

Odds and Ends

vii

1

Rhumbs

157

Analecta

263

Suite

327

Bad Thoughts and Not So Bad

367

Mixture

527

Petites Etudes

543

At Moments

559

Miscellanea

589

NOTES

611

v

Introduction

To DISCUSS literature written in any tongue other than one's own is a questionable undertaking, but for an Englishspeaking writer to discuss a French writer borders on folly, for no two languages could be more different. To discover the essential and unique qualities of a lan­ guage, one must go to its poetry for it is the poet, as Valery says, who attempts to remove all the noises from speech leaving only the sounds. The conventions of a poetry, its prosodic rules, the kinds of verbal ornamentation, rhymes, alliterations, etc., which it encourages or condemns can tell us much about the way in which a native ear draws this distinction. I very much doubt whether a Frenchman can ever learn really to hear a line of EngUsh verse—think of Baudelaire and Poe—and I am perfectly certain that no Englishman can learn to hear French poetry correctly. When I hear a native recite German or Spanish or Italian poetry, I believe, however mistakenly, that I hear more or less what he hears, but if the reciter is French, I know I am hearing noth­ ing of the sort. I know, in an academic way, the rules of Classical French verse, but the knowledge does not change my habit of hearing. For example, to my ear, trained on English verse, the prevailing rhythm of the French alexan-

INTRODUCTION

drine sounds like the anapaestic rhythm of The Assyrian catnc down like a wolf on the fold thus \J

KJ

—

KJ

KJ

—

\J

K J -

V-»

—·

Je suis belle, |ο mortels! ) comme un reve | de pierre I know this is all wrong but it is what I hear.* Further, most unfortunately, the nature of the English language forbids the use of anapaests for tragic subjects. I am con­ vinced that, when he goes to hear Phedre at the Comedie Fran^aise, an Englishman, however well he may know French, however much he admire the extraordinary varied and subtle delivery of the cast, cannot help finding Racine comic. I have known Valery's poem Ehauche d'un serpent for over twenty-five years, reread it often with increasing admiration and, as I thought, comprehension, only to discover the other day, on reading a letter by the poet to Alain, that I had missed the whole point, namely, that the tone of the poem is bur­ lesque, that the assonances and alliterations are deliberately exaggerated, and that the serpent is intended to sound like Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger. How could I, to whose ear all French verse sounds a bit exaggerated, hope to get this? In prose, the difficulties of communication, though not so formidable, are still serious enough. It is not just a matter of the obvious translator's headaches, that there is no English equivalent to esprit, for instance, or that amour and love are not synonymous, but of the entirely different rhetorical struc­ ture of French and English prose, so that an English reader * Another difficulty for my ear is the caesura; an English poet works just as hard to vary its position from line to line as a French poet works to keep it in the same few places.

INTRODUCTION

may entirely ignore some important effect and be overimpressed by another. In writing about Valery, therefore, I can only console myself with the thought that, if the Valery I admire is in large measure a creation of my own, the man who wrote—"the proper object of thought is that which does not exist"— would be the first to appreciate the joke. From the age of twenty, Valery made it his daily habit to rise before dawn and spend two or three hours studying the interior maneuvers of his freshly-awoken mind. This habit became a physiological need so that, if circumstance made him miss these hours of introspection, he felt out of sorts for the rest of the day. The observations he made during this period he wrote down in notebooks, without a thought, he says, of their ever being read by another. From time to time, however, he was persuaded to publish selections. The reluc­ tance he expresses seems more primadonna-ish than real. I never dreamt that one day I would have these fragments printed as they stood. Dr. Ludo van Bogaert and M. Alexandre Stols had the idea for me. They tempted me to do so by pointing out the "intimate" quality of this little venture, and by the typographical perfection of the sample pages they showed me. There are times when one has to give way to the preposterous desires of lovers of the spontaneous and ideas in the rough. This does not ring quite true, especially when one finds him writing privately to a friend (Paul Souday) that he considers his notebooks his real ceuvre. In any case, we may be very glad that he overcame his reluctance, for, taken together, these notes form one of the most interesting and original documents of "the inner life" in existence.

INTRODUCTION

Most of such documents are concerned with the so-called personal, that is, with the confession of sins and vices, memories of childhood, the feelings of the subject about God, the weather, his mistress, gossip, self-reproach, and the ordinary motive for producing them is a desire to demon­ strate that their author is more interesting, more unique, more human than other folks. For the personal in this sense, Valery had nothing but contempt. It is in what they show, he believed, that men differ; what they hide is always the same. Confession, there­ fore, is like undressing in public; everyone knows what he is going to see. Further, a man's secrets are often much more apparent to others than to himself. One of Gide's most obvious traits, for example, was his tightfistedness; after reading his journals, one is curious to know if he was aware of this. A cultivation of memory for its own sake, as in Proust, was incomprehensible to Valery, who preferred to forget everything in his past that was just a picture, retaining only what he could assimilate and convert into an element of his present mental life. As for confiding one's sufferings to paper, he thought it responsible for all the worst books. The task which Valery set himself was to observe the human mind in the action of thinking; the only mind that he can observe is, of course, his own, but this is irrelevant. He is not a philosopher, except in the etymological meaning of that word, nor a psychologist in so far as psychology is concerned with hidden depths—for Valery, humanity is confined to the skin and consciousness; below that is physio­ logical machinery—but an amazingly keen and ruse observer of conscious processes of thinking. For this neither a special talent, Lke a talent for mathematics, nor esoteric learning is χ

INTRODUCTION

required, but only what might be called intellectual virtue, which it is possible for every man to develop, if he chooses. For the cultivation of such an Ethique sportive, as Valery once called it, one must develop a vigilance that immediately distinguishes between fictions and real psychic events, be­ tween the seen, the thought, the reasoned and thefelt, and a pre­ cision of description that resists all temptation to fine literary effects. Hence Valery's repeated attacks on the popular notion of "profundity." A thought, he says, can properly be called profound only if it profoundly changes a question or a given situation, and such a thought is never found at the bottom of the mind which contains only a few stock proverbs. Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear; what-is-not is the profundity of what-is. This kind of pro­ fundity is a literary effect, which can be calculated like any other literary effect, and usually deplorable. For Valery, Pascal's famous remark about the silence of the eternal spaces is a classic instance of Uterary vanity passing itself off as observation. If Pascal was genuinely interested in stating a truth, then why, Valery maliciously asks, did he not also write: "The intermittent hubbub in the small corners where we live reassures us." After reading his notebooks, we know no more about Valery as a person than before—we are not told, for example, that he suffered from depressions—he has only shown us that he was a good observer and that he expressed his observa­ tions in precise language. To judge if his observations are true or false, we have only to repeat the experiment on our­ selves. For instance, he says that it is impossible consciously to put a distance between oneself and an object without turning

INTRODUCTION

round to see if one is succeeding. I try, and I find that Valery is right. Valery's attitude to life is more consistent than he admits, and begins with a conviction of the essential inconsistency of the mind and the need to react against it. The following three notes might be taken as mottoes for all his work. Cognition reigns but does not rule. Sometimes I think; and sometimes I am. I invoke no inspiration except that element of chance, which is common to every mind; then comes an unremitting toil, which wars against this element of chance.

Valery's observations cover a wide range of subjects. As one might expect, the least interesting, the ones in which he sounds least like Valery and most like just one more French writer of mordant aphorisms, are those concerned with love, self-love, good, and evil. He has extremely interesting things to say about our consciousness of our bodies, about those curious psycho­ physical expressions, laughing, crying, and blushing, about the physical behavior of people when they are concentrating on a mental problem. He is excellent on dreams—he ob­ serves, for instance, that in dreams there is "practically no present tense." But for poets, naturally, and for many others too, I believe, his most valuable contributions are his remarks on the art of poetry. A critic who does not himself write poetry may be an admirable judge of what is good and bad, but he cannot have a first-hand knowledge of how poetry is written, so that not infrequently he criticizes, favorably or unfavorably, some poem for achieving or failing to achieve something that the poet was not interested in doing. Many

INTRODUCTION

poets have written defenses of poetry against charges that it is untrue or immoral, but surprisingly few have told us how they wrote. There are two reasons for this: the poets are more interested in writing more poems and, less laudably, they, like lawyers and doctors, have a snobbish reluctance to show the laity the secrets of their mystery. Behind this snobbery, of course, lies the fear that, if the general public knew what goes on, that a poem is not sheer logomancy, for instance, or that an intensely expressive love poem does not necessarily presuppose a poet intensely in love, that public would lose even the little respect for poets that it has. It is unfortunate that one of Valery's few predecessors, Poe, should have used as his case history of composition a poem, "The Raven", which does strike the reader as "con­ trived" in a bad way, which means that it is not contrived enough. The form Poe employed for the poem, which demands many feminine rhymes, has in English a frivolous effect out of key with the subject. A reader, who wishes to cling to a more magical view of the poetic process, can find reasons to confirm his illusion. Valery's achievements as a poet make his critical doctrines harder to wish away. His statements are obviously intended to be polemical. He dis­ likes two kinds of writers, those who try to impress with sonorous or violent vagueness, and naturalistic writers who would simply record what the camera sees or their stream of accidental thoughts. For Valery, all loud and violent writing is comic, Uke a man alone in a room, playing a trombone. When one reads Carlyle, for instance, one gets the im­ pression that he had persuaded himself that it takes more effort, more work, to write fortissimo than piano, or universe than garden. Of the Zola school of naturalism Valery disposes very

INTRODUCTION

neatly, by asking what kinds of scents perfumers would bottle if they adopted this aesthetic. For Valery, a poem ought to be a festival of the intellect, that is, a game, but a solemn, ordered, and significant game, and a poet is someone to whom arbitrary difficulties suggest ideas. It is the glory of poetry that the lack of a single word can ruin everything, that the poet cannot continue until he discovers a word, say, in two syllables, containing P or F, synonymous with breaking-up, yet not too uncommon. The formal restrictions of poetry teach us that the thoughts which arise from our needs, feelings, and experiences are only a small part of the thoughts of which we are capable. In any poem some lines were "given" the poet, which he then tried to perfect, and others which he had to calculate and at the same time make them sound as "natural" as possible. It is more becoming in a poet to talk of versification than of mysterious voices, and his genius should be so well hidden in his talent that the reader attributes to his art what comes from his nature. Needless to say, Valery found very little in the French poetry of his age which seemed to him anything more than a worship of chance and novelty, and concluded that poetry was a freak survival, that no one today would be capable of arriving at the notion of verse if it were not already there. In his general principles I am convinced that Valery is right past all possibility of discussion, but I cannot help wondering if I should also agree in daily practice as much as I do, if I were a Frenchman trying to write French poetry. For polemical reasons, probably, Valery overstresses, I think, the arbitrariness of poetic formal restrictions, and overdramatizes the opposition between them and the "Natural." If they really were purely arbitrary, then the prosodies of

INTRODUCTION

different languages would be interchangeable, and the experience which every poet has had, of being unable to get on with a poem because he was trying to use the "wrong" form for this particular poem until, having found the right form, the natural form, composition proceeded freely, would be unknown. While it is true that nothing which is without effort and attention is Ukely to be of much value, the reverse proposition is not true: it would take an immense effort, for example, to write half a dozen rhopalic hexameters in English, but it is virtually certain that the result would have no poetic merit. To an English poet, French poetry seems to suffer from a lack of formal variety, as did English poetry between 1680 and 1780. Any form, be it the French alexandrine or the English heroic couplet, however admirable a vehicle origi­ nally, tends to exhaust its possibilities in the hands of two or three masters, and their successors must either find quite different forms or be doomed to remain epigoni. If it is rare to find a modem French poem that is not written in free verse (and one must not forget that Valery himself wrote quite a lot of what he called poesie brute), while formal poems are still common in modern English poetry, the lack of resilience in the official forms of French verse may be partly responsible.* By comparison with French, English seems an anarchic amateur language, but this very anarchy, if it stimulates the proper revolt against it, can give rise to new and Uving structures. Would Valery, I sometimes patrioti­ cally wonder, have finished

his poetic career so soon if he

•About some things it would seem that French taste is more indulgent than English. Thus Valery, while admitting that De Vigny's line J 'aime la majesty des souffrances humaines is nonsense, allows it, nevertheless, because of its beautiful sound. An English poet could never get away with a similar line.

INTRODUCTION

had had the vast resources of our tongue, with all the prosodic possibilities which its common syllables permit, to play with? But then, of course, we might not have got the note­ books. It is fitting that the man whose critical banner might well have carried the device Vade retro, Musa, should have written Tes pas, enfants de moil silence, one of the most beautiful invocations to the Muse in any language. His worshiped Muse, whom he sometimes called Laura, was not, perhaps, the Muse of poetry or, if so, only accidentally, but the Muse of insight and self-renewal whom he daily expected in the dawn hours. My mind thinks of my mind, My past is foreign to me. My name surprises me, My body is a pure idea. What I was is with all other selves And I am not even what I am going to he.

Aside from the money, literary success can give but small satisfaction to an author, even to his vanity. For what does literary success mean? To be condemned by persons who have not read his works and to be imitated by persons devoid of talent. There are only two kinds of literary glory that are worth winning but the writer who wins either will never know. One is to have been the writer, perhaps a quite minor one, in whose work some great master generations later finds an essential clue for solving some problem; the other is to become for someone else an example of the dedicated life, being secretly invoked, pictured, and placed by a stranger in an inner sanctum of his thoughts, so as to serve him as a witness, a judge, a father, and a hallowed mentor.

INTRODUCTION

It was this role, rather than that of a literary influence, which Mallarme played in Valery's life, and I can vouch for at least one life in which Valery does likewise. Whenever I am more than usually tormented by one of those horrid mental imps, Contradiction, Obstinationy Imitation, Lapsus, Brouillamini, Fange-d'Ame, whenever I feel myself in danger of becoming un homme serieux, it is on Valery, un homme d'esprit if ever

there was one, more often than on any other poet, I believe, that I call for aid. W. H. AUDEN

Odds and Ends

FOREWORD UNDER a tide of whose sincerity the reader is free to form his own opinion, we have grouped four small miscellanies originally published separately: Notebook B 1910, Moralities, Literature, and Asides. Each contains, in the form of aphorisms, observations, comments, reflections, or flashes of fancy, a series of remarks or impressions that came to mind off and on over a lifetime and were recorded marginally in the course of other work, or were prompted by some incident under whose impact would flash forth some "truth" (more or less true). True is often used to describe the immediate effect produced by the form or tone of a remark. In such cases there is no question of the real value of that term, which can be established only by its "verification." Whether true or not, the ideas or ghosts of ideas assembled here fall into three or four rather different classes. The Author would have preferred an orderly arrangement according to their kinds instead of the haphazard present­ ment they are given here. Probably, however, those who hold that life and disorder are the same thing will find them, thus presented, " livelier." None the less we make no secret of the fact that we would rather have sacrificed this effect of life to the impression of unity conveyed by a layout where kindred remarks are juxtaposed and like assorts with like. But for various reasons it proved impossible to marshal all the little elements of this book in their ideal order; they are set down "just as they came," and the reader will find moral 3

1-2

ANALECTS

precepts in Literature, literary apothegms in Moralities, and something of everything in each part. He will also find contradictions. But since no form of mental activity dis­ penses with them (and we are not here concerned with geometry), the presence of a certain number of contradic­ tions was almost obligatory.

Asides ι Painting

THB OBJECT of painting is indeterminate. If it were quite clear—as for example, to produce the illusion of things seen or to amuse the eye and mind by a "musical" arrangement of forms and colors—the problem would be much simpler and there would surely be more works of art having the quality of beauty (meeting, that is to say, certain precise requirements), but no works inexplicably beautiful. There would be none of those whose appeal is inexhaust­ ible. *

I stop in front of a famous picture, the Reclining Venus, and begin by contemplating it from a fair distance. And this first glance reminds me of something I often heard Degas say: "It's smooth, like all fine painting." A hard remark to comment on. Yet its meaning is marvelously clear when one looks at a fine portrait by Raphael. "Divine platitude"; no illusionism, no slabs of thick impasto, no ridges, no splashed-on highlights, no savage contrasts. And I tell myself that perfection is achieved only by disdaining all the devices used by artists to heighten their "effects."

ANALECTS

My eyes begin to see again, and settle once more on the Reclining Venus. The picture displays a white, amply molded figure. It is also a happy distribution of light and shade. Also a wealth of charming passages, delightful areas, a cleanly modeled belly, a highly skillful, seductive rendering of the join of arm and shoulder, a fairly deep expanse of country, all in blue and gold. It is also a system of values, colors, curves, and fields of reference: the presence of a goddess, a complex of contacts, an act of art. Were it not all these things at once, it would not be the poem that it is. This plurality is essential. Quite opposed to it is the wholly abstract train of thought that follows its own path (and is solely what it follows). It must not lose its way, or it would never find itself again. But the artist has brought together, accumulated and assimilated by means of the physical materials of his art, a host of desires, intentions, and conditions coming from all the regions of his mind and being. Sometimes he was think­ ing of his model, sometimes of the mixing of his pigments, his tone, his oils; sometimes of the flesh itself and sometimes of the absorbent canvas. But, though so independent, these objects of his attention coalesced, inevitably, in the act of painting, when all the discrete, scattered moments, followed up, caught on the wing, suspended or elusive, were in process of becoming the picture on his easel. #

Art is, then, this externalized conjunction of a living, mobile diversity whose activities are crystallized and interlocked in a substance that undergoes their collective impact, resists, stimulates, and transforms them; which often baffles and

ODDS AND ENDS

irritates the artist, but sometimes gives him satisfactions of the highest order. While each of his movements has a simple, specific purpose, and though each is definable and corresponds to an abstraction, their joint effect is, paradoxically enough, to reinstate the concrete and give back to the artist what he saw in the first instance: the plenitude and multiple power of every real object, the diversity, even the simultaneous infinity of some precise thing—and this by the operation of the sen­ sory and symbolic virtues of our perception of colors. *

Works of art give us the idea of men who are more accurate, more masters of themselves, of their eyes and hands, more strongly differentiated and better organized than the spec­ tator who, looking at the finished work, fails to see all that went to its making: all the first attempts, the repaintings, the artist's moments of despair and sacrifice, his borrowings and subterfuges, the years of study, and—last but not least—his strokes of luck. Thus they know nothing of what is unapparent in the finished work, all that now is hidden, resolved, or dissolved into it, is left unsaid or gainsaid: all, in short, that is consonant with human nature and adverse to that craving for the marvelous which is, none the less, one of human nature's basic instincts. *

Painting is undoubtedly the form of art in which the artist is most apt to leave us with a sense of impotence. "Look at that foot," I say to him. " Could anybody walk with a foot like that?"

ANAtECTS

"That's not what I'm after," he retorts. '"What you're after'? Well, you haven't found it." *

Taste is made of a host of distastes. *

In making any "useless" thing, one needs to be godlike. Or else refrain from tackling it. •

After a short time music gets on my nerves—a time that's all the shorter the more the music has affected me. Because it now tends to obstruct all that, to start with, it had called to life: thoughts, insights, archetypes, and premises. Rare indeed is music that does not cease being what it was, that does not spoil and counteract what it has created, but nourishes what it has brought to birth within me. From which I conclude that the true connoisseur of music is bound to be a man to whom it suggests nothing. *

So far ballet is almost the only art that gives us a sequence of colors. To the ballet, therefore, we should look for the rendering of a dawn or sunset. *

Critics at large. Scene: an exhibition of painting. A picture with two men in front of it.

ODDS AND ENDS

One of them, leaning on the rail, is talking, explaining, raising his .yoice. The other says nothing. His air of bland politeness suggests that his thoughts are elsewhere. He lends his ear, but not his mind. He is in the Park, at the Stock Exchange, or visiting some lady friend; one couldn't be further away with so much tact and physical proximity. Two paces behind them, a man who looks like an artist is watching me; his eyes convey all his scorn for these boom­ ing explanations, audible some distance off. As for me, posted in the foreground of this little scene, observing simultaneously the picture, the two friends, and the painter behind them, able to hear all the talker says and read the look in the eyes of the man who's sizing him up— I feel I contain them all and so possess a consciousness of a higher order, a supreme jurisdiction; I can bless or sentence everybody, misereor super turbam. . . . But soon another thought dislodges me from this god­ like eminence whence I have been surveying the strata of opinions. I feel only too well that chance has placed me here; so in the end I don't know what to think . . . and nothing gives more food for thought.

II

Works of art of the rarest beauty, subtleties of drawing, the enjoyment of the fine shades and harmonies of a perfect piece of writing, the delicacy of certain mathematical ambi­ guities, the precision sometimes attained in studies of the psyche—all these are private delights reserved to a few persons. Eliminate them—and who will have any inkling of the greatness of the loss? *

ANALECTS

Fine works are daughters of their form; it was born before them. *

The value of men's works is not in the works themselves but in their later development by others, in other circumstances. We never know in advance whether a work will live. It is a seed endowed with more or less vitality and it needs special conditions; even the frailest may be favored by circumstances. *

Some works are created by their public; others create their public. The former cater to the needs of the average natural sensibility. The latter create artificial needs and at the same time satisfy them. *

Nothing is more "original," nothing more "oneself" than to feed on others. But one has to digest them. A lion is made of assimilated sheep. *

The hallmark of the greatest art is that imitations of it are legitimate, worthwhile, tolerable; that it is not demolished or devoured by them, or they by it. *

The fear of being laughed at, and the dread of being dull; of having people point at you, and of passing unnoticed— parallel abysses. *

IO

ODDS AND ENDS

Novelty. The at It oj novelty.

The new is one of those poisonous stimulants which end up by becoming more necessary than any food; drugs which, once they get a hold on us, need to be taken in progressively larger doses until theyare fatal, though we'd die without them. It's a curious habit, growing thus attached to that perish­ able part of things in which, precisely, their novelty consists. But it is surely obvious that these upstart ideas need to be given a certain air of nobility; that they should seem not the fruit of haste but gradually matured; not unusual, but ideas that have existed for ages; not made and found this morning, but merely forgotten and retrieved. •

An exclusive penchant for what is new and merely new points to a degeneration of the critical faculty, for nothing is easier than to gauge the "novelty" of a work. •

Those works, perhaps, are "classical" which can grow cold without dying or decomposing. It would be interesting to trace the will to lastingness implicit in the notions of per­ fection and flawless form, and to bring to light the part it played in the rules, laws, or canons of the arts in the ages we style "classical." *

Our disciples and successors would have a thousand times more to teach us on this score than our masters—if we could live long enough to see their works. IX

ANALECTS

III Literature When all is said and done a book is merely a selection from its author's monologue. The man is talking to himself, or the soul communing with itself, and in the flow of words the author makes a choice. This choice is always self-regarding; in one thought he likes himself, in another hates himself. Pride or self-interest selects or rejects what passes through his mind; the man he would like to be chooses out of the man he is. This is an inescapable law. Supposing all the monologue were given us, we would be capable of arriving at a fairly accurate answer to the most crucial question that enlightened criticism can set itself regarding any work. So far as it does not confine itself to an expression of opinion fathered by the critic's mood and tastes—when, that is to say, he is really talking about himself, while fancying he is talking about another man's work—criticism, in so far as it is an appraisal, should take the form of a comparison between what the author set out to do and what he actually did. Whereas the value of a work depends on a variable and personal relation between some reader and the work in question, the proper and intrinsic merit of the author is a relationship between himself and his original intention. This merit is proportioned to the "distance" between them and to the difficulties the author encountered in carrying out his plan. But these very difficulties are in a way a preliminary operation on the author's part; they are the work of his "ideal." This mental operation precedes, impedes, holds up and challenges the work he eventually turns out. And it is

ODDS AND ENDS

here that character and intellect sometimes treat Nature and her powers as the rider treats the horse. An ideal critique would be based solely on this merit, for all we have the right to ask of any writer is that he should "bring off" what he set out to do. A mind can be judged only by its own laws and almost without any personal inter­ vention on the critic's part—as though by an operation independent of the man who is carrying it out, since all he has to do is to collate a work and an intention. You set out to make a certain book? "Well," I ask, "have you made it? What were you aiming at? "Were you aspiring to scale the heights or to gain material rewards: pecuniary success or a feather in your cap? Or perhaps you had a less obvious purpose; perhaps you wished to appeal only to a few of your acquaintances, or even to a single one whom you hoped to 'get at' by the detour of a published work ? "Whom did you want to entertain? Whom did you want to beguile, to rival, to madden with envy; whose mind to preoccupy, and whose nights to haunt? Tell me, gentle Author, was it Mammon, Demos, Caesar, or maybe God, whom you were serving? Venus, perhaps—and perhaps a little of all five together. "So now let's see how you went about it. . . ." *

According to our pundits the idea of writing "purely" in French (or some other language) is an illusion. I don't altogether agree with them. Rather, the illusion would con­ sist in thinking that a language can have an intrinsic, definite

ANALECTS

"purity," i.e., a "purity" definable by perceptible, indis­ putable characteristics. But a language is one long, contin­ uous creation. Everyone adds a bit of himself to it, mangles or enriches it, receives it and dispenses it as (within certain limits) the fancy takes him. The need for our understanding each other is the only law that controls and retards its changes, these changes being feasible owing to the arbitrariness of the correspondences between the signs and meanings that are basic to language. At every moment it can be likened to a system of conventions, unformulated for the most part, though sometimes we can see how they arose, as is always the case when we learn a new word. So far, then, we have no "purity," but somewhat hap­ hazard phenomena governed only (or restrained in their vagaries) by the need for communication, by the auto­ matic reflexes of individuals, and their propensities for imitation. Yet there may exist—there does exist—a conventional purity which, conventional though it be, has its merits. This purity enjoins, to start with, correctness, that is to say, con­ formity with certain written conventions, the knowledge and usage of which are a criterion of all "cultured" persons. More subtle are the other conditions of this pure, premeditated language, for whose appreciation a special sensitivity is needed. (I need not list them here.) Broadly speaking, they are taboos whose reasons are hard to elucidate; certain "effects" with which one dispenses; the quest of an exquisitecoherence in ex­ pression and a constant care neatly to dovetail the members of a phrase, and the phrases of a paragraph, each with each. But there are men whose hearing, healthy though it is, fails to distinguish sounds from noises.

ODDS AND ENDS

Writing really "pure" French is a hobby and an amuse­ ment which relieve to some extent the tedium of writing. *

Syntax is a faculty of the soul. •

Knowledge of a language has too often been regarded as merely a matter of memory. The idea of treating orthog­ raphy as a sign of culture is a sign of the times—and of stupidity. But what matters is the handling of the language, the continuity in the activity of writing, and the independence thus given to the activities of the mind. And, once these have free play, the freedom of combination in the text. Syntax is a set of habits to be formed, habits which it is sometimes well to renovate and brush up, in full awareness of what one is doing. In this field of literary action, as in all others, we must abide by the rules of the game, but accept them for what they are worth and without attaching too much authority to them. Nor should we pride ourselves on remembering a number of exceptions. It must be borne in mind that in the days of our greatest writers the liberties permitted were, also, far greater. True, their language was more complex, better built, more "organized" than ours; but I must admit that they were of several minds as to the concordance of tenses, unsure about grammatical agree­ ments, inconsistent and sometimes surprising in their hand­ ling of participles.

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IV

Any production of the mind is important when its existence resolves, summons up, or cancels other works, whether previous to it or not. It sensitizes the mind to quite different works. Either it opens up or it exhausts some lode. . . . *

What is most "human." Some think that the duration of works depends on their "humanness," their endeavor to be true to life. Yet what could be more enduring than certain works of fantasy? The untrue and the wonderful are more human than the "real" man. *

Triangulation. There are works, famous or otherwise, which for the pur­ pose of triangulating the mental world are preferable to others; they provide us with guidemarks. For a long time I have owned a fifty-page pamphlet, dealing with a technical subject, in which what are called exactness, profundity, originality of approach, are con­ stantly and admirably present. With this little work I compare a book I've just been reading; or, to be more precise, I try to compare the intel­ lectual power and, above all, discipline implied in that pamphlet with what the book I have just been reading implies about the mind of its author. #

16

ODDS AND ENDS

Books.

Nearly all the books I prize, and absolutely all that have been of any use to me, are books that don't make easy reading. One's mind may stray from them, it cannot skim them. Some have helped me, despite their difficulty; others, because they were difficult. *

Two sorts of books: those which act as stimulants and merely stir up what I already have within me; and those which pro­ vide nourishment whose substance will be transmuted into mine. From these latter I shall derive forms of speaking or thinking, or else precise resources and ready-made answers— for we are bound to borrow the results of other men's researches and enrich ourselves with what they have seen and we have not. *

An author looks at his work.

Sometimes a swan that has hatched out a duck; sometimes vice versa. •

In the long run every poet's value will equal his value as a critic (of himself). *

The greatness of poets: that of strongly grasping with their words things of which they had but fleeting glimpses in their minds. * 2

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There are people who sparkle, talkers to the manner born, who dazzle you with a steady flow of unexpected remarks, verbal fireworks, striking conjunctions of ideas, some of which seem almost too apt, too finely phrased—and the quantity of which is no less amazing than their brilliance and felicity. Yet all this wordplay, all these inventions, richly varied and copious as they are, leave one with a curious impression that they are automatic. You can't help being reminded of a clockwork bird in a gilded cage warbling its prefabricated ditties. Certainly there is invention—but you know the wheels are turning. In short, the flow of bright remarks might be the output of a competent machine. #

Verdict on a modern writer: His lucky finds are superb, but his substance comes to little. *

Inspiration is an hypothesis that reduces the author to the role of an observer. *

"The spirit bloweth where it listeth." We may leave it to spiritualists and votaries of "inspiration" to explain-why that spirit does not blow in animals and blows so ineffectively in fools. *

If a bird could say exactly what he sings, why he sings it, and what, within himself, is singing, he would not sing. 18

ODDS AND ENDS

He creates in space a point peculiar to himself and. unwittingly, tells all the world that he is there, playing his part. He has got to sing at such and such an hour. Nobody knows just what he feels, himself, about his song—except that he brings a high seriousness to it. The seriousness of animals, of children at their meals, of dogs in love, the shrewd, implacable physiognomy of cats. It would seem that this precisely ordered life allows no place to laughter, to any flippant interludes. •

Another world. Fatigue opens our eyes, at long last, on a new world. The somnolence that comes in theaters crushes out forms, makes the lights seem garish and everything grow tremulous; voices sound preternatural or false. We have an impression of having left the world which we can still see and whose absolute movement now becomes perceptible—as though we were no longer in the same ship. Ceasing to keep track of the voyage, we watch everything slide past en bloc: the whole body of things on which we, just now, were standing. We have lost our bearings. Literature takes the same course in a young mind exhausted from having read too much, or "foreseen" too much, in two laborious years. Such a mind generates foreshortenings, jagged brushstrokes, and can no longer tolerate anything but a restive incoherence. It's the "new" at work— a sure sign o( fatigue. •

A poetic idea is one which, stated in prose, still calls for verse. *

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The expression of true feelings is always commonplace, and the more sincere one is, the more commonplace one is. For, to avoid banality, we need to choose our words. All the same, if a man is genuinely unsophisticated or the feeling so strong as to rule out even banality, even the memory of the phrases commonly thought appropriate to the occasion, this Blind groping for one's words may give rise—by a fluke—to remarks having a beauty of their own. *

Perfection is a barrier. One puts perfection between oneself and others. Between oneself and one's self. *

We should be as light as a bird, not as a feather. #

The "ornate" style. How to embellish a style. Only the man who is capable of a spare, clean style can truly embellish it.

V A man bent on his work says to himself: "I want to be stronger, cleverer, luckier than—Myself." *

A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone. *

ODDS AND ENDS

The greatest men are men who have had the courage of their own convictions—and this goes also for the stupidest. *

An artist wants to inspire jealousy till the end of time. *

What we write to amuse ourselves is read by someone else with passion, at high tension. What we write with passion, at high tension, is read by someone else for his amusement. *

Celebrity is a sort of disease one catches from going to bed with an idea. *

To love fame one must set much store by people in general; one must believe in them.

Anyone who has never tried to make himself Hke the gods is less than a man.

Statues and fame are forms of the cult of the dead, which is a form of ignorance.

ANALECTS

True pride is the homage paid to what one would wish to do, scorn for what one can do, and a lucid, fierce, implac­ able preference for one's own "ideal." "My God is a stronger god than yours." In every religion "false gods" mean other people's gods; they are called false not because their existence is denied but because they lack the supreme prestige and power reserved to the god whom we personally adore. *

The notion of the "great poet" has brought into the world more minor poets than the laws of chance would lead one to expect. *

Man preens himself on his strokes of luck. #

Our strongest, most vital hatred goes to those who are what we would like to be ourselves; a hatred all the keener because this state is so closely wrapped up with the person whom we hate. It's a form of "theft" to have the wealth or the honors that we would like to have; and it is downright murder to have the physique, brains, or gifts that are some­ one's ideal. For the fact of another man's possessing them shows at a glance that this ideal is not unattainable and also that the place is bespoken. But our jealous man forgets the great and genuine advantage of not having what he wants: the advantage of being able to contemplate it from an angle denied the man who has it, and of having to learn how to belittle it, simply 22

ODDS AND ENDS

to keep alive! Whereas its possessor tends to underrate it simply because he is used to having it. . . . Every ideal is vtilnerable on two fronts; both the formula "the grapes are sour" and its counterpart, "they're rotten," conspire against it. *

We dislike a man who forces us not to be ourselves, but neither do we like the man who obliges us to show ourselves in our true colors. But we like the man who believes that we are what we'd wish to be, and this is the source of the pleasure given by fame, a pleasure against which it takes so many heart­ burnings combined with so much will power to steel our­ selves completely. •

The height of vulgarity, as I see it, consists in making use of arguments that can appeal only to a large public, in other words, to a type of listener or an audience necessarily scaled down to the lowest level of intelligence; arguments that have no hold on a man who thinks them out dispassionately, by himself. Yet whatever lasts owes its lastingness solely to the approval of such a man. *

Attacks on us alienate only those on whose defection we should congratulate ourselves; they are either people so con­ stituted as not to take an interest in us anyhow, or of such a kind that we could not wish to feel uncertain of their atti­ tude toward us. *

ANALECTS

Scorn and envy are the two verdicts of the tribunal of Pride. You don't exist; I do. You exist too much; I don't. *

Our true enemies are silent. *

A man who attacks you is merely a man relieving himself. Picture, then, the face of a man who has thought up and written down a really fine attack on you. He strikes it out and thinks up a still better one. Always keep this picture hanging on the wall of your mind. *

The wild men. All practitioners of fierceness in literature verge on comical effects. Insult is the easiest, and most traditional, mode of "poetic" exaltation. *

The ballistics of insult. As seen by a witness posted sufficiently far off, an insult does not settle on the point it's aimed at; each jet of spittle describes a closed curve. *

Hide your god. One should attack not other people, but their gods. But the first step is to discover them; for people take care to hide the gods they really worship. *

ODDS AND ENDS

If the Ego is hateful, "Love your neighbor as yourself" becomes a cruel irony. *

It's better to forgive offenses—than to forget them. But the forgiveness is never real; nothing can annul one's present sense of pain. And the man who forgives while it is still rankling pretends to be what he is not—as yet. A truly noble piece of play-acting. *

We are told to love our enemies. I love those who stimulate me and those whom I stimulate. For our enemies are stimulants. And at every moment the mood of the moment comes to us from outside. •

On relishing injustice.

Injustice is a bitter that gives a zest to solitude, whets the appetite for separation and singularity, and opens up to the mind its deepest avenues, those leading to the unique and the inaccessible. •

After all, this wretched life isn't worth the sacrifice of being to seeming, when we know to whose eyes—and to what eyes—that seeming must be directed. *

The meeting.

Suppose two men running away from each other and un­ aware that the world is round were suddenly to find them-

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selves face to face, at the antipodes of their starting place— what a strange fluke this would seem to be! We find the same thing happening in our dealings with our worst enemies. In the structure of the Time through which life moves are curves leading imperceptibly from the impossible to the real, from the unthinkable to the achieved.

VI

Powers of the gaze A curious give-and-take begins when glance meets glance. No one would think freely if his eyes could not detach themselves from another's eyes which followed them per­ sistently. Once gazes interlock, there are no longer quite two persons and it's hard for either to remain alone. *

On "exchanging looks." This exchange (the term is apt) effects in a very short space of time a transposition, a metathesis or intercrossing of two "lifelines," two viewpoints. The result is a sort of simul­ taneous, reciprocal limitation. You take my appearance, my image, and I take yours. You are not I, since you see me and I don't see myself. What is missing for me is this "I" whom you can see. And what you miss is the "you" I see. And the better we get to know each other, you and I, the more we shall reflect each other, yet the more "other" we shall be. And all the rest will be identical, perhaps shared between us. And the more our looks diverge, the more 26

ODDS AND ENDS

we lose sight of each other, the more indistinguishable we shall be. I see you so as not to be you, since I am not Yon. This type of analysis can also be applied to one's relations with one's Self. *

Smiles.

Two persons meet. They exchange smiles, as if thrilled to see each other, and "hold" them for a while. Then the smiles take a rest and let one or two serious remarks get by. The smiles come back, part company, and, once separated from each other, unwrinkle and fade out. •

Small talk.

SmaM talk is conversation in which the remarks exchanged could be transferred from one pair of lips to another, indiffer­ ently. Such remarks are distinguishable only by the speakers' tones of voice. It is by the tone of voice that I judge or pre­ judge people I don't know, and even those I know. And it rarely misleads me. For the voice suggests to me certain qualities of the mind. This is rather like the method of graphologists, who decipher a man's character from his writing. But my "phonology" is less objective. *

Between ourselves.

Human relations are based on "ciphers." To decode them leads to confusion. For this code language has the merit of saying things without really saying them and keeping our

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reciprocal opinions in suspense—in a state of reversibility. It saves us from enouncing as dogmatic, definitive judgments opinions that are always only momentarily true. *

All that people say of us is false, but no falser than what we think about it. Only it's a different kind of falsity. *

Polite society. Supposing all the bodies around us were perfectly "pol­ ished," we would see on every hand only images of our­ selves, though in greatly distorted states. This is exactly what happens in "polite society," where an identity of manners, a punctilious give-and-take of words and smiles, and a semblance of perfect reciprocity encircle us with our own gestures and remarks. *

Intimacy. We can be truly intimate only with people having our own standard of discretion. Other qualities—character, culture, tastes—count for little. True intimacy rests on a common sense of what things are pudenda and tacenda. And that is why it permits an incredible freedom of speech; -with these exceptions you can say anything you like. But there are false intimacies, and total friendships are rare. The complete friend is rarely come by—which is why one usually has several friends of very different species. 28

ODDS AND ENDS

"He has as many friends as he has personalities within him." And it's not the most intimate that he prefers. Is it likely that a man reveals himself (or thinks that he reveals himself) most completely to the person he loves most? We try to beautify ourselves in the eyes of those whom we prefer. When two persons quarrel it is because they got on a shade too well. Superficial relations are always satisfactory, whereas intimacy makes the slightest variation keenly felt. We must not forget that intimacy resides in a permitted indiscretion, proffered or invited, whose limits are ill defined : one that produces greatly varying responses and needs watching with punctilious care for it to be exercised with impunity and without secret consequences that can be highly dangerous to friendship. *

When relations between two sensitive people are becoming intimate, there is a curious mixture of a fear of not being understood and a dread of being understood too well. "You must understand me without conveying by your look the idea of a man who has 'given himself away.' Do not forget that I can see myself in your attitude and I don't want to see anything intolerable in it. "Let your silence be a mirror without flaws"

. . . and

so forth. *

A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others. *

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A clevcr man's sccrct is less secret than a fool's. *

Stupid people think that jesting doesn't go with seriousness and that a play on words isn't an answer. Why are they so sure of this ? Because it's in their interest that this should be so; it's an unwritten law, and their very existence hangs on it. *

When you have had a silly idea and felt that it was silly, don't be in haste to throw it on the scrap heap. It lived its little hour. How could that be? Let's stop and think. *

"Love" consists in feeling that, against one's will, one has made over to another what was intended only for oneself. *

You never know who it is you are sleeping with. *

Meditation of the supremely beautiful, truly seductive woman: "I've often noticed that hardly any man comes near me without feeling he gets a sort of right over me, and develop­ ing a kind of proprietary jealousy. . . . I please them, therefore I belong to them.

ODDS AND ENDS

"This pretension of theirs I find intolerable—and I couldn't live without it!" *

Nobody exists who is capable of loving another person just as he or she is. We insist on modifications, since the object of our love is always a phantom. What is real cannot be desired—for the good reason that it's real. I adore you, yes; but oh, that nose of yours, this dress you're wearing . . . ! Perhaps the acme of shared love consists in this frantic urge to transform each other and add new beauty to each other in an act comparable to the creative act in art and, like it, stirring some unknown source of personal transcendence. *

Sincerity. The will to sincerity leads to reflection, which leads to doubt—which leads nowhere. *

Human beings silently entreat each other to say what they do not think. "Tell us what we'd like to hear! Say some­ thing nice," our eyes implore. *

Sincerity. It's quite difficult to say "what one thinks" when (a) one is not thinking of anything; or (b) one would cause pain by saying it; or (c) when one isn't sure if the thought one has is right—or permanent; when we know all too well the effects 3i

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of concentration if we try to focus it on our presumed in­ most Self. For this kind of attention always contributes what it is looking for; it imports the known into the unknown. •

"All ears." People conversing in whispers make a third party (though they are strangers to him) vaguely imagine that what they're saying must be worth overhearing. I say "imagine" because it's a dream that, in such cases, takes hold of the eavesdropper, possesses him, makes him "all ears," and changes him into a listening statue. By a sort of imitative reflex he becomes interested, if unconsciously, in the conversation. *

A man of action is one who in every predicament chooses instinctively the course that will demand the greatest expend­ iture of energy. Risk is his stimulant. *

Cool-headed men—almost always second-raters—are help­ ful in emergencies, since they steady the others, calm them down, and sometimes provide the simple, stupid idea that saves the situation. *

Quod verbum in pectus Jugtirthae altius quam quisquam ratus erat descendit. (Sallust.) You never know at what point and upon what fiber of a man's nervous system a word (I mean a trivial one) will 32

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impinge, and how he will be affected by it. "Affected"— that is to say, changed. A word suddenly brings to maturity a child. Etc.

VII

When a flash of wit or intelligence backfiring on its author gets him into trouble—what's the difference between it and a stupid remark? *

Intelligence cuts its way through conventions, beliefs, dog­ mas, traditions, customs, sentiments, and social codes as an engineer hacks his way through forests and mountains, through peculiarities and local forms of nature, opening them up or slicing them away, forging ahead and forcibly imposing the shortest path. *

Something we see quite clearly, and which nonetheless is very difficult to express, is always worth the trouble of trying to put it into words. *

As there are "men of the world," so there also are "men of the universe." •

A clear-thinking mind makes understandable what it does not understand. * 3

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"Clarity" in nonpractical things always stems from an illusion. *

Ignorancc rings the changes on extreme rashness and extreme timidity. *

Superiority may give rise to impotence: an incapacity for doing something silly that could be "rewarding." *

A man is more complex, infinitely more so, than his thoughts. #

"Intuition" on the lips of many moderns means the mystical union of an image and a miracle. A miraculous image. A man is languishing in prison. A ray of light strikes in and reveals the key lying on the floor. The image plays the part of a new dimension or the organ of this dimension. It modifies the continuity of a given space by introducing into it a break—or the inverse of a break. *

Intuition without intellection is an accident. *

ODDS AND ENDS

I don't think that strong creative minds have any need for intense impressions. On the contrary, intensity is bad for them, since one oi their skills is that of making something out of nothing. •

Consciousness arises out of darkness, lives and thrives on it, and ends up by regenerating it, making it even darker than before by the very questions that it puts itself in virtue of— and in direct ratio to—its own lucidity. *

A very dangerous state of mind: thinking one understands. •

We may well be driven to adopting as the basis of our philosophy the axiom that all we have to go on is a hellish complex of elements and elementary phenomena. Therefore a mind capable of grasping the complication of its brain would have to be more complex than that which causes it to be what it is; since it would then be bound to add to each of its thoughts the notion of that perpetually varying mechanism, and to associate with every image of that mecha­ nism the wholly different actuality of which each thought con­ sists at every moment. *

Small unexplained facts always contain grounds for up­ setting all explanations of "big" facts. *

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Everyone has seen things that nobody else has seen. And the sum of all these things is . . . zero. What counts is what all men have seen, together. *

The opinions of people who have not reshaped their minds according to their real needs and ascertainable capacities have no qualitative importance. But whenever a man has undertaken this mental recon­ struction, he deviates—more or less dangerously—from the norm. "Cleverness" is transmuted into "genius" when it takes the form of a simplification. *

Depth. The profundity we assign to certain states of mind is due solely to their remoteness from the state of normal life, not to their proximity to very important and recondite things. *

Depth. A profound idea is an idea (or remark) that changes a given problem or situation in depth. Otherwise its effect is a mere reverberation—and we lapse into "literature."

*

You can never be too subtle, and you can never be too simple.

ODDS AND ENDS

Never too subtle, because things insist on subtlety; never too simple, because our life and acts enjoin simplicity. *

A truly "exact" mind can understand only itself, and only in certain states. *

Most people stop at the first stages of their trains of thought, with the result that in the end their whole mental life is found to have consisted of beginnings. *

The proper task of the understanding is to clear up its own perplexities, like a man perpetually in the state of waking up, and perpetually trying to straighten out the tangle of his limbs and the confusion of his previous perceptions. But some people seem to prefer to make confusion worse confounded.

VIII

Every cosmogony, every metaphysical system assumes man to be a spectator of phenomena from which he is excluded. And this holds good even for physics, even for history and our memory of yesterday. For what sees is always incompatible with what is seen, more or less obviously as the case may be. *

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Philosophy and Scicnce would not exist had not certain men who never troubled their heads about them, who saw no need for them and were unaware of their existence and even of their possibility, provided by their lives and actions the fundaments and subject matter, the languages, the "obscu­ rity," and the coherence basic to philosophy and science. *

Some theologians go far to making us think that God is stupid. *

Variation on Descartes. Sometimes I think; and sometimes I am. *

If a human being could live no life other than his own, he would be unable to live his own. For his life is entirely made up of an infinity of "accidents" each of which can belong to another life. *

The ideal of a "soul." The wish to have a soul and to be this selfsame soul uniquely through eternity must pale, remarkably, before the soul's desire to have a body and a lifetime. The soul would gladly give its kingdom for a horse. Or perhaps a donkey ? *

Who is the worst of all speakers? What being is it that stumbles and stammers; uses the most inapt words in the 38

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clumsiest way; hatches up the most absurd, incorrect, and incoherent phrases and employs the most preposterous argu­ ments ? Who is the horridest of writers and worst of tliinkers ? Our Soul. Until it remembers that others have ears and are the witnesses and judges before which its thoughts will be arraigned; before it calls in vanity and ideals to help it out— notions of Clarity, Logic, Common Sense, and Power, etc. —the Soul is beneath contempt at every moment. *

What's vilest in the world if not the Mind ? It is the body that recoils from filth and crime. Like the fly, the Mind settles on everything. Nausea, disgust, regrets, remorse are not its properties; they are merely so many curious phenomena for it to study. Danger draws it like a flame and if the flesh were not so powerful would lead it to burn its wings, urged on by a fierce and fatuous lust for knowledge. *

Thought escapes from itself in laughter, in sobs and swoons, in action, in tightenings of the throat, in fisticuffs, in stop­ page of the heart. It also takes flight from itself in the spoken phrase, but here there is a transformation enabling thought to recollect itself and turn back to the source. It is a "relay." •

Unless it's new and strange, every visualization of the world of things is false. For if something is real it is bound to lose

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its reality in the process of becoming familiar. Philosophic contemplation means reverting from the familiar to the strange and, in the strange, encountering the real. *

Memory glorified. Supposing there were only five or six persons in the world who had the gift of remembering (as there are some who have supernatural visions and paranormal perceptions), we would say of them: "How wonderful are these beings in whom the past is stored! They explain to us such hosts of things around us which have no present utility. They teach us what we were, and therefore what we are." These seers would be rated above prophets; pure memory above the highest genius. A widespread epidemic amnesia would change the values of the world of the intellect. And it would become evident that it is more wonderful to reproduce than to produce. *

For every thought and for everything deeply felt—for love and hatred—there exists a singularly active poison and that poison is "all the rest of the world": all that is other than the thought or feeling in question and distracts, dilutes, disperses it. In the strange faculty of doing certain things irrelevant to life with as much care, passion, and persistence as if one's life depended on them . . . there we find what is called It