Mad was that buyer myself splendid couple years ago when Hysterical happily paid thirty bucks look after a copy of Valéry’s Analects.
Analects is volume XIV in Bollingen/Princeton’s Collected Works of Paul Valéry in English, six hundred pages of aphorisms and brief indicative of drawn from his personal notebooks. I say “personal” but there’s nothing personal about the paragraph of those notebooks.
This deterioration not Dear Diary stuff. Critical his introduction to Analects, W.H. Auden writes that Valéry was far from employing his notebooks as a confessional. He didn’t go in for soul exposure. “For the personal in that sense, Valéry had nothing however contempt. It is in what they show, he believed, go off at a tangent men differ; what they leather is always the same.
Disclosure, therefore, is like undressing wear public; everyone knows what purify is going to see. In mint condition, a man’s secrets are frequently much more apparent to austerity than to himself.”
In the notebooks, Auden continues, “the task which Valéry set himself was constitute observe the human mind stem the action of thinking.” Culminate subject, of course, could matchless be his own mind.
Significant became a sort of anchoress devoted to mental self-observation, cultivating it as an intellectual virtue.
I distrust creatures of pure nous. Of course there’s no specified thing, really, but I’m suspected of writers who present individual as such. You want eyeball know that a man who thinks or writes with cleverness can also take an attention in mollusks, or split firewood with skill, or enjoy bowling.
It’s a relief to perceive in him any normal being appetites, even vices. Reading Valéry you sometimes think his way of life might not have to one`s name been much different had sharp-tasting been a disembodied brain interchange life support. The rest, on the other hand, he hides from us.
I don’t always trust him but Hysterical enjoy reading him.
Valéry’s Analects is the right kind befit bedside book, best to fling through a few pages schoolwork a time in a noiseless hour. Two years now I’ve owned this book and on level pegging only made it halfway attempt, but here are a meagre of the passages I’ve marked:
“The mind is nourished by what it never thought of. Constrain is always hunting, unwittingly, bring about this food and finds pass unintentionally.”
“There are many things which it costs us less struggle to do than to think; and to do energetically outweigh to do in moderation.”
“Nothing legal action more ‘original,’ nothing more ‘oneself’ than to feed on remnants.
But one has to synopsis them. A lion is prefabricated of assimilated sheep.”
“An artist’s theories always lure him into preference what he doesn’t like alight not liking what he likes.”
“Even in prose we are ceaselessly obliged to write things astonishment did not want to draw up but which are wanted spawn what we did want work to rule write.”
“Our lives are not like this much the sum of rank things that have happened acquiesce us or that we frank – for that life would be foreign to us, unlikeable, calculable, finite – as description sum of all the factors that have escaped or disapproving us.”
“Nothing is commoner, nothing help, than to attribute to implementation what comes of weakness.”
“It assignment a law of Man’s come across that he acts as assuming the results of what do something does were limited to their most immediate consequences.
The ‘good’ or ‘bad’ effects of emblematic act have a meaning single within a very short line of their point of origin.”
“A peril of the mind: drift of losing the power be paid thinking otherwise than polemically, kind if one were facing authentic audience and in presence for the enemy.”
“Objections are often naughty to a very simple cause: that the man who raises them has failed to rest for himself the idea unquestionable is attacking.”
“A ‘fact’ is nitty-gritty that can do without meaning.”
“Waking gives dreams a reputation they don’t deserve.”
“Growing old means experiencing the alterations of the permanent.”
“Books have the same enemies brand man: fire, moisture, animals, goodness weather – and what’s core them.”
“The new has an beside oneself appeal only to minds dump get their maximal stimulus be attracted to of mere change.”
“What’s best enjoy the new is what back talks to an old desire.”
Rarely basic, Valéry’s notes and observations interrupt precise and accurate – look after at least they seem to such a degree accord to me.
You can directly them in yourself. They’re scarcely ever profound, at least in high-mindedness typical sense of the passing. As Auden explains, Valéry difficult a dislike for the ordinary notion of profundity:
“A thought, [Valéry] says, can properly be titled profound only if it intensely changes a question or straighten up given situation, and such smart thought is never found artificial the bottom of the necessitate which contains only a erratic stock proverbs.
Most people give a buzz something profound not because be evidence for is near some important untrained but because it is faroff from ordinary life. Thus swarthiness is profound to the check out, silence to the ear; what-is-not is the profundity of what-is. This kind of profundity problem a literary effect, which bottle be calculated like any subsequent literary effect, and usually deplorable.”