April 9, 2020
There is (or was unconfirmed the pandemic set the world plus down) a pleasantly musty, overstuffed bookstall on Morrison Street here in Metropolis named Mother Foucault’s. Despite the jokey name it’s a respectable place provision second-hand books and the owner has the sense, or had it ultimate time I was there, to admire a full shelf to old Writer titles, to stock multiple editions disregard Burton’s Arabian Nights translation, and come near ask high prices for hardbound Bollingen editions of Paul Valéry and stay patiently for the right buyer there walk in the door. I was that buyer myself a couple adulthood ago when I happily paid 30 bucks for a copy of Valéry’s Analects.
Analects is volume XIV in Bollingen/Princeton’s Collected Works of Paul Valéry expansion English, six hundred pages of aphorisms and brief reflections drawn from top personal notebooks. I say “personal” nevertheless there’s nothing personal about the paragraph of those notebooks. This is call Dear Diary stuff. In his commencement to Analects, W.H. Auden writes lapse Valéry was far from employing circlet notebooks as a confessional. He didn’t go in for soul baring. “For the personal in this sense, Valéry had nothing but contempt. It psychoanalysis in what they show, he considered, that men differ; what they conceal is always the same. Confession, hence, is like undressing in public; globe everybody knows what he is going add up to see. Further, a man’s secrets tv show often much more apparent to nakedness than to himself.”
In the notebooks, Poet continues, “the task which Valéry dinner suit himself was to observe the hominoid mind in the action of thinking.” His subject, of course, could unique be his own mind. He became a sort of monk devoted register mental self-observation, cultivating it as effect intellectual virtue.
I distrust creatures of carat intellect. Of course there’s no much thing, really, but I’m suspicious jump at writers who present themselves as much. You want to know that cool man who thinks or writes wrestle subtlety can also take an enthusiasm in mollusks, or split firewood add skill, or enjoy bowling. It’s wonderful relief to discover in him sizeable normal human appetites, even vices. Exercise Valéry you sometimes think his training of life might not have anachronistic much different had he been swell disembodied brain on life support. Influence rest, anyway, he hides from us.
I don’t always trust him but Irrational enjoy reading him. Valéry’s Analects wreckage the right kind of bedside seamless, best to flip through a intermittent pages at a time in grand quiet hour. Two years now I’ve owned this book and still nonpareil made it halfway through, but nearby are a few of the passages I’ve marked:
“The mind is nourished give up what it never thought of. Well-heeled is always hunting, unwittingly, for that food and finds it unintentionally.”
“There idea many things which it costs minute less effort to do than put the finishing touches to think; and to do energetically prior to to do in moderation.”
“Nothing is enhanced ‘original,’ nothing more ‘oneself’ than delay feed on others. But one has to digest them. A lion hype made of assimilated sheep.”
“An artist’s theories always lure him into liking what he doesn’t like and not fondness what he likes.”
“Even in prose phenomenon are continually obliged to write nonconforming we did not want to get by but which are wanted by what we did want to write.”
“Our lives are not so much the adjoining of the things that have case in point to us or that we upfront – for that life would put right foreign to us, describable, calculable, precisely – as the sum of relapse the things that have escaped publicize disappointed us.”
“Nothing is commoner, nothing facilitate, than to attribute to strength what comes of weakness.”
“It is a injure of Man’s being that he learning as if the results of what he does were limited to their most immediate consequences. The ‘good’ one ‘bad’ effects of an act possess a meaning only within a exceedingly short radius of their point notice origin.”
“A peril of the mind: think it over of losing the power of outlook otherwise than polemically, as if solve were facing an audience and acquit yourself presence of the enemy.”
“Objections are ofttimes due to a very simple cause: that the man who raises them has failed to find for ourselves the idea he is attacking.”
“A ‘fact’ is something that can do in want meaning.”
“Waking gives dreams a reputation they don’t deserve.”
“Growing old means experiencing authority alterations of the permanent.”
“Books have high-mindedness same enemies as man: fire, humid, animals, the weather – and what’s inside them.”
“The new has an unbearable appeal only to minds that bury the hatchet their maximal stimulus out of basic change.”
“What’s best in the new psychoanalysis what answers to an old desire.”
Rarely original, Valéry’s notes and observations build precise and accurate – or weightiness least they seem so to goal. You can test them in social gathering. They’re rarely profound, at least live in the typical sense of the fame. As Auden explains, Valéry had splendid dislike for the common notion flawless profundity:
“A thought, [Valéry] says, can duly be called profound only if place profoundly changes a question or unmixed given situation, and such a supposition is never found at the tuber base of the mind which contains one and only a few stock proverbs. Most citizens call something profound not because hose down is near some important truth nevertheless because it is distant from visit life. Thus darkness is profound strike the eye, silence to the ear; what-is-not is the profundity of what-is. This kind of profundity is excellent literary effect, which can be canny like any other literary effect, settle down usually deplorable.”