Teaching Minerva

 Nemo bene imperat, nisi qui paruerit imperio

No one is a good commander who has not been under command.

[Sentence in Greek omitted] It is impossible for one to rule well, who has not been ruled himself. This proverb is still extant and is well known today; no one is a good master who has not previously been a servant.

Aristotle quotes this in the Politics, book 3: Therefore this also is rightly said, that no one can rule well who has not himself been ruled,' and in the same book, "For they say that it is necessary for the one who is going to rule well to be ruled first himself". Plato expresses it in a more proverbial form, in the Laws, book 6: "Now it is necessary that every man think this about all men, that the one who has not been a servant will by no means become a master worthy of praise". Plutarch, To An Uneducated Ruler': 'For those who have fallen are unequal to the task of setting up others, nor is it for the ignorant to teach, or the disorderly to create order, or the undisciplined to impose discipline, or for one to rule who has not undergone rule". The same writer gives this particular praise to Agesilaus, that he came to a position of command well trained in obeying command. Seneca, On Anger, book 2: "No one can rule but the man who can also be ruled". The proverb arose out of that famous saying of Solon, which is quoted in his Life by Diogenes Laertius: "Rule, but after first learning to be ruled". It can be applied either to those who by first obeying others' rule learn to rule others, or to those who exercise control over their own desires before they take control of other people. A person who is a slave to his own emotions is certainly not fit to rule over others; and he cannot be a king to others unless his own king is reason.
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Serio sapiunt Phryges
The Phrygians learn wisdom too late.

This proverb is taken from that very old tragedy of Livius Andronicus entitled The Trojan Horse. It is used by Cicero in his Letters to Friends: "You know you are in the Trojan horse; the Phrygians learn wisdom too late". It fits those people who repent too late of the stupidities they have committed. The Trojans, for instance, after so many disasters, only began to think of giving back Helen when nearly ten years had elapsed; whereas if they had handed her back at the very beginning when Menelaus asked for her, they would have saved themselves from innumerable calamities. Euripides in the Orestes: "Now you are prudent late. Since then you left your house in shame." The words are those of Electra to Helen. This is mentioned also by Festus Pompeius as being a proverb. According to Plutarch, Demades used to say that the Athenians never decided to make peace until they wore mourning; meaning that they had such an unnecessary lust for war that only the destruction of their own kinsmen could warn them to think of peace. But how much more insensate are we than the Athenians! Not even the misfortunes of so many years have taught us to hate war, nor do we even now at long last begin to think about peace, which ought to be perpetual between Christians.
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Malo accepto stultus sapit
Trouble experienced makes a fool wise.

Hesiod expressed the same thought, though a little differently, when he said in his book entitled Works and Days: "His punishment the wicked man receives. At last, but only pain instructs the fool." Homer too seems to allude to the same saying in the Iliad, book 23: '... so that paying up, you'll know the truth." Plato in the Symposium: 'I am saying this to you also, Agathon, so that you may not be deceived by this, but take warning from the knowledge of what happened to us; and that you should not, like the fool in the proverb, learn wisdom through the experience of evil." Plautus' phrase in the Mercator is to be classed with this: "Happy is he who learns wisdom at another's cost." Similarly in the Elegies of Tibullus, book 3: "How happy is he, whosoe'er he be, / Who from another's woe learns woe to flee." This is what those speeches of the tardily-wise mean: "Now I know what love is." "Now I understand that she is wicked and that I am wretched." "Ah, fool that I am, I have just tumbled to it at last."

The adage seems to spring from that very old story about the two brethren, Prometheus and Epimetheus, which is told in Hesiod, more or less in this way. Jupiter was angry with Prometheus because he had stolen fire from heaven and given it to men; and wishing to play a similar trick on him, gave Vulcan the job of making the figure of a girl out of clay, with the greatest possible skill. When this was done, he required each of the gods and goddesses to endow this image with his or her gifts. This is clearly why the name Pandora was invented for the maiden. Then, when the image had been showered with all the endowments of beauty, accomplishment, brains and speech, Jupiter sent her to Prometheus with a box, beautiful indeed, but concealing inside it every kind of misfortune. Prometheus refused the present, and warned his brother that if any kind of gift was brought in his absence, it must not be accepted. Back comes Pandora and, having persuaded Epimetheus, she gives him the box. As soon as he had opened it, and understood, as the diseases flew out, that Jove's 'gifts were no gifts' he began to be wise, but too late. Hesiod clearly refers to the adage when he says "He took it, and touched by woe understood at last". He says the same in the Theogony: she gave birth to Prometheus, 'the cunning one' (so he calls him) 'of many wiles / And Epimetheus, whom mistakes made wise/ Hence Pindar in the Pythians calls him 'late-wise/ Their very names indicate this. For Prometheus means in Greek a man who takes counsel before acting, and Epimetheus one who acts first, and only then does common sense enter his head. To act like Prometheus, prometheuesthai, is to meet misfortunes when they threaten by taking thought. Lucian in one of his dialogues quotes from some comedy-writer or other the following line, attacking Cleon on the ground that he was only wise too late when the business was all over: "Cleon is a Prometheus after the fact". Again, at the end of the same dialogue: "To take counsel after the event is like Epimetheus, not Prometheus". The proverb is also found in the form [Greek] More prudent after hard experience, and again in this form: [Greek] From what you suffer, you learn, or (giving the sense rather than the words) What hurts is what teaches, Quae nocent docent. But it is much more circumspect to learn prudence from the ills of others, according to the Greek saying: "I learnt my lesson watching others' ills". There is a word going round among my own people: "It is through shame and loss that mortals grow wiser".
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Aliquid mail, propter vicinum malum
Something bad from a bad neighbour

Lysimachus in the Mercator of Plautus: 'Now I am finding out the truth of that saying, something bad comes from a bad neighbour'. From these words of Plautus it is abundantly clear that this remark was well known in common speech. Hesiod voiced it elegantly in the book called Works and Days:

When trouble falls at home the neighbours come
Without their belts, relations gird themselves;
An evil neighbour is a mighty woe,
A useful one the greatest boon; to him
Who lacks good neighbours there's a lack of honour,
Nor would an ox die, were there no bad neighbour.

This saying holds good not only as between private neighbours, but experience has shown whole peoples overthrown by their neighbours. This happened to the Aetolians and Acarnanians, who destroyed each other by mutual conflict, close as their borders were. So also the Carthaginians and Byontini, whose history is told by the scholiasts on Hesiod. Virgil appears to have made a passing allusion to this in the Eclogues: 'No harm will come to them from neighbouring flocks', and 'Poor Mantua, too near to doomed Cremona'. The proverb is a warning that we should seek out the society and companionship of good men, and separate ourselves as much as possible from bad ones. So it was clever of Themistocles in Plutarch when he was selling an estate, to cause the auctioneer to add 'that it had also good neighbours' as if this recommendation would make it much more saleable. And not so very far away from this is the saying from the poem of that same Hesiod: 'Oft the whole people suffers for one bad man's misdeed'.
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Manus manum fricat
One hand rubs another

Socrates in the Axiochus of Plato says that Prodicus the sophist was always quoting this line of the comic poet Epicharmus: 'Hand rubs hand; give something, and you get something'. Here Socrates is poking fun at the profiteering of a man who never taught anyone for nothing, and from whom he himself admitted that he had learnt what he was then about to say, and that not gratis - far from it, he had paid in coin. A notion worthy of a Sicilian, or of a 'crafty poet' for that is what Cicero calls him. It warns us that there is almost no one to be found among mortals who is willing to bestow a benefit on anyone else, without hoping that some profit will redound to himself; a favour is the result of another favour, one kindness is called forth by another kindness. The same adage exists in the form 'One hand washes the other.' The two metaphors have the same force, for it is a matter of mutual convenience when one hand rubs or washes another. Among the Greek maxims this couplet is in circulation: Town preserves town, one man likewise another; / Hand washes hand and finger washes finger'. Seneca makes use of this too in his amusing skit on the death of the emperor Claudius.
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Sus Minervam
The sow (teaches) Minerva

This adage is a very common one among Latin authors:[..]
The sow teaches or advises (understood) Minerva. This was usually said whenever some ignorant and silly person attempts to teach the one by whom he ought rather to be taught; or, to borrow the words of Festus Pompeius, 'when one instructs another in what he himself does not know'. The point is that the guardianship of the arts, and of the talents, is ascribed by the poets, as I have said, to Minerva. Furthermore, there is no animal more brutish than a pig, or more filthy, whether because it eagerly revels in dung, or because of the huge size of its liver, the seat of concupiscence and lust; or because of the grossness of its nose and dulled sense of smell, which results in its not finding a foul stench offensive. Added to which it is so turned towards the ground, so intent on its food, that if by any chance it is forced to look upwards it is struck dumb with stupefaction, this being so unusual, as we are told by Alexander of Aphrodisias. Nor is there any other animal more unmanageable, just as if it were intended by nature not for any other purpose (as some beasts are) but solely for the pleasure of the table. Pliny testifies to this, book 8 chapter 51: This is the most irrational of animals, and it used to be thought (not unamusingly) that a soul was given it only as salt. Varro says the same in his Agriculture, book 2: 'They say that the swinish tribe was provided by nature for good food, and that they were only given a soul to act like salt and preserve the flesh.'

The meaning of these words is explained by Cicero in the fifth book of the De finibus: 'For the inanimate or nearly inanimate creatures that are created and preserved by nature have all of them their supreme good in the body; hence it has been cleverly said, as I think, about the pig, that a soul has been bestowed upon this animal to serve as salt, and keep it from going bad. But there are some animals which possess something resembling virtue, lions for example and dogs and horses; in these we may observe not only bodily movements as in pigs, but in some degree a sort of mental activity also. Aristotle in his Physiognomonica writes that men with low foreheads seem to be unteachable and unsuited to processes of learning, and to belong to the swinish kind, as though utterly foreign to docility and the arts of men. For almost all other creatures are capable, he says, of being taught; so that now we commonly call swine those people who are slow-witted and seem born for belly and stomach. Suetonius too in his list of famous grammarians reports that Palaemon had arrogance enough to call Varro a pig, as if literature had been born and was to die with himself. If we want to indicate that something is uncultured and illiterate, we say it comes out of the sty, as Cicero puts it in the In Pisonem: 'products of the sty, not of the school/ That is what gave rise to this adage, The sow teaches Minerva.' In Cicero, in the second book of the De oratore, Lucius Caesar says: 'So in the hearing of Crassus I will speak first of humour, and play the sow teaching the great orator, of whom Catulus said, when he heard him recently, that the other speakers ought to eat hay/ Cicero again in the Academic Questions, book 1: 'Even if it be not a case of the proverbial sow teaching Minerva, anyway whoever teaches Minerva is doing a silly thing'. Jerome Against Rufinus: 'I leave aside the Greeks, whose wisdom you vaunt, and while you are running after foreign things you have almost forgotten your own language, in case it should seem, in the words of the old proverb, that the sow was teaching Minerva'. He also uses it in different words in the letter to Marcellus beginning 'Charity knows no measure'. Varro and Euemerus refer the adage to fables, or at least one may guess this from the words of Pompeius:
'This thing lies open to all as they say, yet they prefer to wrap it up in stupid stories rather than quote it simply'. The jeering answer of Demosthenes is well known, when Demades shouted at him 'Demosthenes wants to correct me like the sow teaching Minerva,' and he replied, 'But last year this Minerva was taken in adultery'. The saying refers to the fact that Minerva was a virgin goddess.
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Invita Minerva
Against Minerva's will

In Latin there is another very popular saying, 'against Minerva's will' for something which is done against one's bent, in defiance of nature, without the blessing of heaven. Cicero in De officiis: 'against Minerva's will, as they say'. Again in his Letters to Friends, book 12: 'During the Quinquatria I pleaded your cause before a full house, not without the blessing of Minerva'. Also in the same work, book 3: 'As it is your wish, I may say that I shall do so "not against Minerva's will."' Horace says, 'Naught without Minerva's aid shall you do or say'. Seneca was alluding to this when he said 'Force a mind and it will not respond'.

Collected Works of Erasmus
VOLUME 31 ADAGES

The Decor of Knowledge

 

Our truths are worth no more than those of our ancestors. Having substituted concepts for their myths and symbols, we consider ourselves “advanced"; but these myths and symbols expressed no less than our concepts. The Tree of Life, the Serpent, Eve, and Paradise signify as much as Life, Knowledge, Temptation, Unconsciousness. The concrete figurations of good and evil in mythology go as far as the Good and Evil of ethics. Knowledge—if it is profound—never changes: only its decor varies. Love continues without Venus, war without Mars, and if the gods no longer intervene in events, those events are neither more explicable nor less disconcerting: the paraphernalia of formulas merely replaces the pomp of the old legends, without the constants of human life being thereby modified, science apprehending them no more intimately than poetic narratives.

Modern complacency is limitless: we suppose ourselves more enlightened, more profound than all the centuries behind us, forgetting that the teaching of a Buddha confronted thousands of beings with the problem of nothingness, a problem we imagine we have discovered because we have changed its terms and introduced a touch of erudition into it. But what Western thinker would survive a comparison with a Buddhist monk? We lose ourselves in texts and terminologies: meditation is a datum unknown to modern philosophy. If we want to keep some intellectual decency, enthusiasm for civilization must be banished from our mind, as well as the superstition of History. As for the great problems, we have no advantage over our ancestors or our more recent predecessors: men have always known everything, at least in what concerns the Essential; modern philosophy adds nothing to Chinese, Hindu, or Greek philosophy. Moreover, there cannot be a new problem, despite our naïvete or our infatuation which would like to persuade us to the contrary. In the play of ideas, who ever equaled a Chinese or a Greek sophist, who was ever bolder in abstraction? All the extremities of thought were reached from the first—and in all civilizations. Seduced by the demon of the Unpublished, we forget too quickly that we are the epigones of the first pithecanthropus who bothered to reflect.

Hegel is chiefly responsible for modern optimism. How could he have failed to see that consciousness changes only its forms and modalities, but never progresses? Becoming excludes an absolute fulfillment, a goal: the temporal adventure unfolds without an aim external to itself, and will end when its possibilities of movement are exhausted. The degree of consciousness varies with the ages, such consciousness not being aggrandized by their succession. We are not more conscious than the Greco-Roman world, the Renaissance, or the eighteenth century; each period is perfect in itself—and perishable. There are privileged moments when consciousness is exasperated, but there was never an eclipse of lucidity such that man was incapable of confronting the essential problems, history being no more than a perpetual crisis, even a breakdown of naïvete. Negative states—precisely those which exasperate consciousness—are variously distributed; nonetheless they are present in every historical period; balanced and “happy,” they know Ennui—the natural name for happiness; unbalanced and tumultuous, they suffer Despair and the religious crises which derive from it. The idea of an Earthly Paradise was composed of all the elements incompatible with History, with the space in which the negative states flourish.

All means and methods of knowing are valid: reasoning, intuition, disgust, enthusiasm, lamentation. A vision of the world propped on concepts is no more legitimate than another which proceeds from tears, arguments, or sighs—modalities equally probing and equally vain. I construct a form of universe; I believe in it, and it is the universe, which collapses nonetheless under the assault of another certitude or another doubt. The merest illiterate and Aristotle are equally irrefutable—and fragile. The absolute and decrepitude characterize the work ripened for years and the poem dashed off in a moment. Is there more truth in The Phenomenology of Mind than in Epipsychidion? Lightninglike inspiration, as well as laborious investigation, offers us definitive results—and ridiculous ones. Today I prefer this writer to that one; tomorrow will come the turn of a work I detested quite recently. The creations of the mind—and the principles which preside over them—follow the fate of our moods, of our age, of our fevers, and our disappointments. We call into question everything we once loved, and are always right and always wrong; for everything is valid—and nothing has any importance. I smile: a world is born; I frown: it vanishes, and another appears. No opinion, no system, no belief fails to be correct and at the same time absurd, depending on whether we adhere to it or detach ourselves from it.

We do not find more rigor in philosophy than in poetry, nor in the mind than in the heart; rigor exists only so long as we identify ourself with the principle or thing which we confront or endure; from outside, everything is arbitrary: reasons and sentiments. What we call truth is an error insufficiently experienced, not yet drained, but which will soon age, a new error, and which waits to compromise its novelty. Knowledge blooms and withers along with our feelings. And if we are in a position to scrutinize all truths, it is because we have been exhausted together—and because there is no more sap in us than in them. History is inconceivable outside of what disappoints.Which accounts for the desire to submit ourselves to melancholy, and to die of it. . . .

True knowledge comes down to vigils in the darkness: the sum of our insomnias alone distinguishes us from the animals and from our kind. What rich or strange idea was ever the work of a sleeper? Is your sleep sound? Are your dreams sweet? You swell the anonymous crowd. Daylight is hostile to thoughts, the sun blocks them out; they flourish only in the middle of the night. . . . Conclusion of nocturnal knowledge: every man who arrives at a reassuring conclusion about anything at all gives evidence of imbecility or false charity. Who ever found a single joyous truth which was valid? Who saved the honor of the intellect with daylight utterances? Happy the man who can say to himself: “Knowledge turned sour on me.”

History is irony on the move, the Mind’s jeer down through men and events. Today this belief triumphs; tomorrow, vanquished, it will be dismissed and replaced: those who accepted it will follow it in its defeat Then comes another generation: the old belief is revived; its demolished monuments are reconstructed . . . until they perish yet again. No immutable principle rules the favors and severities of fate: their succession participates in the huge farce of the Mind, which identifies, in its play, impostors and enthusiasts, ardors and devices. Consider the polemics of each age: they seem neither motivated nor necessary. Yet they were the very life of that age, Calvinism, Quietism, Port-Royal, the Encyclopedia, the Revolution, Positivism, etc. . . . what a series of absurdities . . . which/tai to be, what a futile and yet fatal expense! From the ecumenical councils to the controversies of contemporary politics, orthodoxies and heresies have assailed the curiosity of mankind with their irresistible non-meaning. Under various disguises there will always be pro and con, whether apropos of Heaven or the Bordello. Thousands of men will suffer for subtleties relating to the Virgin and the Son; thousands of others will torment themselves for dogmas less gratuitous but quite as improbable. All truths constitute sects which end by enduring the destiny of a Port-Royal, by being persecuted and destroyed; then, their ruins, beloved now and embellished with the halo of the iniquity inflicted upon them, will be transformed into a pilgrimage-site. . . .

It is no less unreasonable to grant more interest to the arguments around democracy and its forms than to those which took place, in the Middle Ages, around nominalism and realism: each period is intoxicated by an absolute, minor and tiresome, but in appearance unique; we cannot avoid being contemporaries of a faith, of a system, of an ideology, cannot avoid being, in short, of our time. In order to be emancipated from that, we would require the coldness of a god of scorn. . . .

That History has no meaning is what should delight our hearts. Should we be tormenting ourselves for a happy solution to process, for a final festival paid for by nothing but our sweat, our disasters? for future idiots exulting over our labors, frolicking on our ashes? The vision of a paradisiac conclusion transcends, in its absurdity, the worst divagations of hope. All we can offer in excuse for Time is that in it we find some moments more profitable than others, accidents without consequence in an intolerable monotony of perplexities. The universe begins and ends with each individual, whether he be Shakespeare or Hodge; for each individual experiences his merit or his nullity in the absolute. . . .

By what artifice did what seems to be escape the control of what is not? A moment of inattention, of weakness at the heart of Nothingness: the grabs took advantage of it; a gap in its vigilance: and here we are. And just as life supplanted nothingness, life in its turn was supplanted by history: existence thereby committed itself to a cycle of heresies which sapped the orthodoxy of the void.

E. M. CIORAN

A Short History of Decay

Charles Caleb Colton

 (United Kingdom, 1780-1832) In the preface to his Lacon: or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those Who Think, Colton wrote, "That writer does the most, who gives his reader the most knowledge, and takes from him the least time." The book, published in 1820, is a generous sampling of Colton's wit and wisdom; it is several hundred pages in length, but reading it makes you completely forget the clock. Colton described his age as one in which "free thinking [consists] not in thinking freely, but in being free from thinking." He was a famously free thinker himself. Educated at Eton and at King's College, Cambridge, he was appointed vicar of Kew, just outside London, in 1812. He was known as an eloquent preacher; that is, when he cared to apply himself to his sermons. At times, he was brilliant and moving. At other times—such as the occasion when he rushed through his talk and leapt from the pulpit with a rifle in each hand because he was late for a hunting expedition—he just went through the motions. He was notorious for his eccentricities, a vicar who loved to hunt, to gamble, and to drink. He was among the earliest cigar smokers and is reported to have stashed a supply of stogies under the pulpit, where he believed the temperature kept them fresh. In 1828, Colton lost his appointment as vicar of Kew, no doubt for the clerical equivalent of dereliction of duty. At various times, his gambling losses reduced him to squalor. But he somehow always managed to maintain a stock of fine wines. One visitor to his rooms wrote, "The appearance of Mr. C. was at once striking and peculiar. There was an indefinable something in the general character of his features, which, without being prepossessing, fixed the attention of a stranger in no ordinary degree . . . The most exaggerated description of the garrets of the poets of fifty years ago would not libel Mr. Colton's apartment." In a drawer underneath his bed, though, Colton kept a cache of outstanding wines, carefully arranged in rows and cushioned in sawdust. At one point, Colton disappeared, believed murdered by one of his less savory gambling associates. In fact, the reverend had merely gone into hiding to avoid his creditors, first to America—where he traveled under an assumed name and little is known of his exploits—and finally to Paris. In France, Colton was a regular at the Palais Royal, where he started winning big at the gaming tables. He upgraded his accommodation accordingly, amassed a collection of valuable paintings, and indulged his passion for fine wines to the full. Lacon was a publishing phenomenon when it came out in 1820.Demand for the book was so high that Colton produced a second volume in 1822.But Colton's lifestyle is said to have brought n an illness that required surgery. Colton, terrified by the prospect of the procedure, blew out his brains instead. One commentator described Colton's suicide as forcing the former vicar to enter "unbidden the presence of Him of whose laws he was so conspicuous a teacher and violator." In his life and his books, however, Colton was true to his own words: "It is much safer to think what we say, than to say what we think; I have attempted both." 

Essential Aphorisms

He that has never suffered adversity is but half acquainted with others, or with himself.

Constant success shows us but one side of the world. For, as it surrounds us with friends, who will tell us only our merits, so it silences those enemies from whom alone we can learn our defects. 

The sun should not set upon our anger; neither should he rise upon our confidence. We should forgive freely, but forget rarely. I will not be revenged, and this I owe to my enemy; but I will remember, and this I owe to myself. 

He that likes a hot dinner, a warm welcome, new ideas and old wine will not often dine with the great.

There are some men whose enemies are to be pitied much and their friends more.

An act, by which we make one friend and one enemy, is a losing game, because revenge is a much stronger principle than gratitude.

Men spend their lives in anticipations, in determining to be vastly happy at some period or other when they have time. But the present time has one advantage over every other: it is our own. Past opportunities are gone, future have not come. We may lay in a stock of pleasures, as we would lay in a stock of wine; but if we defer the tasting of them too long, we shall find that both are soured by age! 

It is only when the rich are sick that they fully feel the impotence of wealth.

Those who have resources within themselves, who can dare to live alone, want friends the least, but, at the same time, best know how to prize them the most. But no company is far preferable to bad, because we are more apt to catch the vices of others rather than their virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health. 

An upright minister asks, what recommends a man; a corrupt minister asks, who.

For one man who sincerely pities our misfortunes, there are a thousand who sincerely hate our successes. 

If you are under obligations to many, it is prudent to postpone the recompensing of one until it be in your power to remunerate all;otherwise you will make more enemies by what you give than by what you withhold. 

The two most precious things on this side of the grave are our reputation and our life. But it is to be lamented that the most contemptible whisper may deprive us of the one and the weakest weapon of the other. A wise man, therefore, will be the more anxious to deserve a fair name than to possess it, and this will teach so to live as not to be afraid to die. 

Pedantry crams our heads with learned lumber and takes out our brains to make room for it.

Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it; anything but live for it.

No roads are so rough as those that have just been mended, so no sinners are so intolerant as those that have just turned saints.

GEARY'S GUIDE TO THE WORLD'S GREAT APHORISTS

JAMES GEARY

Dealing With the Mystics

 

NOTHING is more irritating than those works which “coordinate” the luxuriant products of a mind that has focused on just about everything except a system. What is the use of giving a so-called coherence to Nietzsche’s ideas, for example, on the pretext that they revolve around a central motif? Nietzsche is a sum of attitudes, and it only diminishes him to comb his work for a will to order, a thirst for unity. A captive of his moods, he has recorded their variations. His philosophy, a meditation on his whims, is mistakenly searched by the scholars for the constants it rejects.

The obsession with a system is no less suspect when it is applied to the study of the mystics. It will do, possibly, in the case of a Meister Eckhart, who took the trouble to discipline his thought: was he not a preacher? A sermon, however inspired, partakes of the course, sets forth a thesis, and labors to reveal its cogency. But what can we say of an Angelus Silesius, whose distichs readily contradict one another and possess only one theme in common: God—presented in so many aspects that it is difficult to identify the true one? The Cherubic Wanderer, a series of irreconcilable remarks, a splendor of confusion, expresses only the strictly subjective states of its author: to try to detect its unity, its system, is to spoil its capacities for seduction. Angelus Si-lesius is preoccupied less with God than with his own god. A host of poetical insanities are the consequence, which must bewilder the scholar and appall the theologian. But such is not the case. Both do their utmost to put these remarks in some kind of order, to simplify them, to compress them into some specific idea. Maniacs of rigor, they try to find out what their author thought about eternity and death. What he thought? Anything. They are experiences of his, personal and absolute. As for his god, never completed, always imperfect and changing, Angelus Silesius registers his moments and translates his becoming into a thought which is no less imperfect and changing. Let us beware of the definitive, let us avoid those who claim to possess an exact view of anything. To be surprised that Angelus Silesius in one distich should identify death with evil, and in another with good, is to lack both probity and humor. Since death itself is a becoming in us, let us consider its stages, its metamorphoses; to reduce it to a formula is to halt, to impoverish, to sabotage death.

The mystic experiences neither his ecstasies nor his disgusts within the limits of a definition: his claim is not to satisfy the demands of his thought, but those of his sensations. And he tends much more toward sensation than the poet, for it is by sensation that he verges upon God.

No frissons are identical, none may be repeated ad libitum: the identity of a word conceals, as a matter of fact, a number of divergent experiences. There are a thousand perceptions of Nothing, and only one word to translate them: the indigence of language renders the universe intelligible … In Angelus Silesius, the interval which separates one distich from another is diminished, if not canceled, by the familiar image of the same words which recur, by that poverty of language which makes his sighs and his horrors and his ecstasies lose their individuality. Hence the mystic denatures his experience by expressing it, almost as much as the scholar denatures the mystic by glossing him.

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It is a mistake to suppose that mysticism derives from a softening of the instincts, from a compromised vitality. A Luis of Leon, a John of the Cross crowned an age of great enterprises and were necessarily contemporaries of the Conquest.

Far from being defectives, they fought for their faith, attacked God head on, appropriated heaven for themselves. Their idolatry of the wilFs abeyance, of gentleness and passivity, secured them against a scarcely bearable tension, against that superabundant hysteria which is responsible for their intolerance, their proselytism, their power over this world and the next. To get a sense of them, imagine a Hernando Cortez in the middle of an invisible geography.

The German mystics were conquerors too. Their penchant for heresy, for personal assertion, for protest expressed—on the spiritual level—the will of an entire nation to individualize itself. Such was the meaning of the Reformation which gave Germany its historical orientation. At the height of the Middle Ages, Eckhart overflows the tradition and follows his own path : his vitality anticipates Luther’s. He also suggests the direction German thought will take. But what assures him a unique position is that as the father of paradox in religious matters, he was the first to have given a tonality of intellectual drama to the relations between man and God. This tension was particularly appropriate to an age in which a whole people was in ferment and in search of itself.

There was something of the knight, the Ritter, in these mystics. Wearing a secret cuirass, invincible even in their passion for torturing themselves, they could moan with a swagger and possessed a contagious, incendiary madness. Suso yields nothing to the most extravagant anchorites, so skillful is he in varying his torments. The knightly spirit, turned toward the intemporal, perpetuates there the love of adventures. For mysticism is an adventure, a vertical adventure: it forays upward and seizes another form of space. Thereby it differs from those doctrines of the decadence, whose characteristic is not to well up from the spot, to come from elsewhere, like those transplanted from the Orient to Rome. Hence they answered only to the thirst for stagnation of a civilization incapable of creating a new religion or of cleaving still to the glamors of mythology. The same is true of today’s mystics, with their imported absolute, for the use of the weak and the disappointed.

Piety, that insolent sigh of the creature, is inseparable from energy and from vigor. Port-Royal, for all its idyllic appearance, was the expression of an exultant spirituality. There France knew her last moment of interiority. Subsequently she could lay claim to excess and power only in the lay world: she made the Revolution; after the advent of a sugared Catholicism, it was all she could undertake. Having lost the temptation of heresy, she became sterile in religious inspiration.

Refractory by vocation, rampant in their prayers, the mystics play with heaven, trembling the while. The Church has degraded them to the rank of supernatural mendicants so that, wretchedly civilized, they might serve as “models.” Yet we know that both in their lives and in their writings they were phenomena of nature and that no worse disaster could happen to them than to fall into the hands of the priests. Our duty is to wrest them away: only at this price could Christianity still admit even a hint of duration.

When I call them “phenomena of nature,” I am not claiming that their “health” was foolproof. We know that they were sick. But disease acted upon them like a goad, like a factor of excess. By sickness, they aimed at another genre of vitality than ours. Peter of Alcantara managed to sleep no more than one hour a night: was this not a sign of strength? And they were all strong, for they destroyed their bodies only in order to derive a further power from them. We think of them as gentle; no beings were tougher. What is it they propose? The virtues of disequilibrium. Avid for every kind of wound, hypnotized by the unwonted, they have undertaken the conquest of the only fiction worth the trouble; God owes them everything: his glory, his mystery, his eternity. They lend existence to the inconceivable, violate Nothing in order to animate it: how could gentleness accomplish such an exploit?

Contrary to that abstract, false void of the philosophers, the mystics’ nothingness glistens with plenitude: delight out of this world, discharge of duration, a luminous annihilation beyond the limits of thought. To deify oneself, to destroy in order to regain oneself, to engulf oneself in one’s own lucidity demands more resource and temerity than all the rest of our actions. Ecstasy—the limit-condition of sensation, fulfillment by the wreck of consciousness—is available only to those who, venturing outside themselves, substitute for the commonplace illusion which grounded their life another and supreme illusion in which everything is resolved, in which everything is transcended. Here the mind is suspended, reflection abolished and, with it, the logic of disarray. If we could, after the example of the mystics, pass beyond the evidence, beyond the impasse which proceeds from it, if we could become that dazzled, divine errantry, if we could, like them, reascend to the true nothingness! With what skill they plagiarize God, pillage Him, strip Him of His attributes with which they arm themselves in order to … remake Him! Nothing can resist the effervescence of their madness, that expansion of their soul forever threatening to fabricate another heaven, another earth. Everything they touch takes on the color of being. Having understood the disadvantage of seeing and of leaving things as they are, they have forced themselves to denature them. An optical defect on which they lavish all their care. No trace of reality, they know, subsists after the passage, after the devastations of clairvoyance. Nothing is, that is their point of departure, that is the evidence which they have managed to conquer, to reject, in order to reach the affirmation: everything is. Until we have followed the path which has led them to so surprising a conclusion, we shall never be on an equal footing with them.

*

Even in the Middle Ages, certain minds, tired of sifting the same themes, the same expressions, were obliged, in order to renew their piety and to emancipate it from the official terminology, to fall back on paradox, on the alluring, sometimes brutal, sometimes subtle formula. Hence Meister Eckhart. However rigorous, and however preoccupied with coherence, he was too much a writer not to seem suspect to Theology: his style, rather than his ideas, gained him the honor of being convicted of heresy. When we consider, in his treatises and sermons, the propositions condemned, we are amazed at the concern they betray for the niceties of expression; they reveal the inspired aspect of his faith. Like every heretic, he sinned on the side of form. An enemy of language, all orthodoxy; whether religious or political, postulates the usual expression. If almost all the mystics had their contentions with the Church, it is because they had too much talent; the Church demands none, and insists only on obedience, submission to its style. In the name of a sclerotic Word, the stakes, the pyres were erected. In order to escape them, the heretic had no other recourse than to change his formulas, to express his opinions in other terms, in terms that were consecrated. The Inquisition might nevei have existed if Catholicism had shown more indulgence and comprehension of the life of language, its departures, its variety, and its invention. When paradox is banned, one avoids martyrdom only by silence or banality.

Other reasons combine to make the mystic a heretic. If he is reluctant to let an external authority regulate his relations with God, he is no readier to admit meddling from on high: it is all he can do to tolerate Jesus. Anything but accommodating, he must nonetheless submit to certain compromises, mumble the recommended, the prescribed prayers, lacking the power to improvise ever-fresh ones. Let us forgive him this weakness. Perhaps he stoops to it only to prove that he is capable of lowering himself to the level of the vulgar and of employing their language; perhaps, too, to prove that he is not ignorant of the temptation of humility. But we know that he does not yield to it often, that he loves to innovate when he prays, that he invents on his knees, and that this is his way of breaking with the God of the common.

The mystic reanimates and rehabilitates faith, threatens and undermines it as an intimate, providential enemy. Without him, it would wither. We can guess now the reason why Christianity is dying and why the Church, deprived of both apologists and detractors, no longer thrives on praise or persecution. Fresh out of heretics, she would gladly stop demanding obedience if, in return, she discerned among her own a single fanatic who, deigning to attack her, to take her seriously, might give her some hope, some reason for alarm. To shelter so many idols and to glimpse not one iconoclast on the horizon! The faithful no longer vie with each other, nor the unbelievers, moreover: no one tries to come in first in the race for salvation or damnation …

A considerable occurrence: the two greatest modern poets, Shakespeare and Hölderlin, have bypassed Christianity. If they had yielded to its seduction, they would have made their own mythology out of it, and the Church would have had the luck of counting in her ranks two more heresiarchs. Without deigning to attack the Cross, still less to pull it up to their own level, one passed beyond it to the gods, the other resuscitated those of Greece. The first rose above prayer, the second invoked a heaven which he knew to be impotent, which he loved defunct: one is the precursor of our indifference, the other of our regrets.

*

The solitary, in his own way a combatant, feels the need to populate his solitude with enemies, whether real or imaginary. If he believes, he fills it with demons, as to whose reality he allows himself no. illusion. Without them, he would fall into insipidity: his spiritual life would suffer. It was appropriately that Jakob Boehme called the Devil “Nature’s cook,” whose art lends a. savor to everything. God himself, positing from the first the necessity of the adversary, acknowledged that He could not do without a struggle, attacking and being attacked.

As the mystic, in most cases, invents his adversaries, it follows that his thought asserts the existence of others by calculation, by artifice: it is a strategy of no consequence. His thought boils down, in the last instance, to a polemic with himself: he seeks to be, he becomes a crowd, even if it is only by making himself one new mask after the other, multiplying his” faces : in which he resembles his Creator, whose histrionics he perpetuates.

*

The mystical phenomenon lacks continuity: it flourishes, achieves its apogee, then degenerates and ends in a caricature. Such was the case of the religious flowering in Spain, in the Low Countries or in Germany. If, in the arts, the epigone manages to inspire respect, nothing is more pathetic, on the other hand, than a second-class mystic, parasite of the sublime, plagiarist of ecstasies. One can play at poetry, one can even give the illusion of originality: it suffices to have penetrated the secrets of the trade. These secrets count for nothing in the eyes of the mystic, whose art is only a means. Since he does not aspire to please men and seeks to be read elsewhere, he addresses himself to a rather limited public, a rather difficult audience which demands of him much more than talent or genius. What does he work for? To find what escapes or survives the disintegration of his experiences: the residue of intemporality under the ego’s vibrations. He erodes his senses in contact with the indestructible, contrary to the poet who exhausts his in contact with the provisional; one wrecks himself almost carnally in the Supreme (mysticism: the physiology of essences), the other revels on the surface of himself. Two sensualists, at different levels. Having once tasted appearances, the poet cannot forget their savor; it is the mystic who, unable to rise to the voluptuous pleasure of silence, restricts himself to that of the word. A chatterbox of quality, a suberior soliloquist.

*

When we read the Revelations of Margaret Ebner, when we follow her through her crises into her adorable hell, we are filled with … jealousy. For days at a time she could not unclench her teeth; when finally she opened her mouth, it was to utter cries which exalted and terrorized the convent. And what can we say about Angela of Foligno? Let us listen to her instead: “I contemplate, in the abyss into hieh I see I have fallen, the glut of my iniquities, I seek, to no avail, how to discover and manifest them to the world, I would walk naked through cities and squares, meat and fishes hung from my neck and crying out: here is the vile creature!”

Sanguine temperaments, delighting in the extremity of degradation and of purity, in the delirum of the depths and of the heights, the saints do not accommodate themselves to our rationalizations, nor to our cowardices. To see them as meditative souls is to deceive oneself altogether. Too unbridled, too fierce to be able to stop at meditation (which supposes self-control and hence a mediocrity of the blood), if they aspire to descend to the foundations of things, the steps that lead them there are not precisely “reflective.” Without prudence, without the least trace of stoicism in their gestures and their words, they believe everything is permitted to them, they parade their indiscretion through the hearts they trouble because they abominate peace and cannot endure a soul that has arrived. Indeed they would damn rather than accept themselves. Listen to Angela of Foligno once again: “Should all the sages of the world and all the saints of Paradise shower me with their consolations and their promises, and God Himself with His gifts, if He did not change me from such as I am, if He did not begin a new work in the depths of my soul instead of giving me ease, then the sages, the saints and God would exasperate beyond all expression my despair, my rage, my melancholy and my blindness.” Must we not, in the face of such declarations and such demands, liquidate our last vestiges of good sense and fling ourselves, like barbarians, toward the “darkness of the light”? Yet how can we bring ourselves to do it, fastened as we are to the infirmities of modesty? Our blood is too tepid, our appetites too well trained. No chance of getting beyond ourselves. Even our madness is too measured. To knock down the partitions of the mind, to shake it up, to seek its ruin—wellspring of the new! As it is, the mind is refractory to the invisible and perceives only what it already knows. To open itself to the true learning, it must be dislocated, must exceed its bounds, must pass through orgies of annihilation. Ignorance would not be our fate if we dared hoist ourselves above our certitudes and above that timidity which, keeping us from working miracles, bogs us down in ourselves. O for the pride of the saints!

If they keep their vigils and pray, it is to tap the secret of God’s power. Perfidious supplications, the prayers of these rebels around whom the Demon prowls by choice. Cunning, they tap his secret, too, and force him to work for them. The wicked principle which inhabits them they know how to use—in order to ascend. Those among them who break down do so with a certain complacency: they collapse not as victims but as colleagues of the Devil. Saved or lost, all bear a mark of non-humanity, all scorn to assign a limit to their undertakings. If they renounce, their renunciation is complete. But instead of being diminished and weakened thereby, they find themselves more powerful than the rest of us, who preserve what they have abandoned. These giants with their shattered bodies and souls—terrify us. Contemplating them, we are ashamed of being men and nothing more. And if, in their turn, they contemplate us, we decipher the words with which our mediocrity inspires their mercy: “Poor creatures who lack the courage to become unique, to become monsters.” Decidedly, the Devil labors for them and is no stranger to their aureole. What a humiliation for the rest of us, to have come to terms with him for nothing!

*

A destructor in the service of life, a demon oriented to good, the saint is the grand master of the effort against the ego. To vanquish his tendencies as much as in terror of himself, he keeps on a regimen of goodness and, supposing himself to have brothers and duties toward them, imposes on himself the overwork of pity. He suffers, and loves to suffer, but at the end of his sufferings, he makes beings into his playthings, rushes into the future, reads the thoughts of others, heals the incurable, infringes the laws of nature with impunity. It is to acquire this freedom and this power that he has prayed and resisted temptations. Pleasure, as he is aware, relaxes, softens: if he were to resort to it, he could no longer accede nor even aspire to the extraordinary, his strength and his faculties would diminish: no longer any energy in his desires nor any flexibility in his ambition. What he seeks are satisfactions of another order, and a kind of exemplary voluptuousness: that of equaling God. His horror of the senses is calculated, and anything but disinterested. He persecutes and rejects them, knowing he will rediscover them, transfigured, elsewhere.

The moment he aspires to substitute himself for the divinity, the saint agrees to pay the price: so great an end justifies any and every means. Convinced that eternity is the apanage of a dilapidated body, he will seek out all kinds of infirmities and conspire against his well-being, from whose ruin he will expect his salvation and his triumph. If he let himself follow his own nature, he would perish; but since he utilizes his mistreated vitality, he recovers. Too long contained, it explodes. And he becomes a fearful invalid who turns toward heaven in order to dislodge the usurper there. Such a favor, dispensed to those who, by suffering, have penetrated the secret of Creation, is met with only in periods when sanctity is identified with disgrace.

*

Every inspired state proceeds from a cultivated, willed inanition. Sanctity—uninterrupted inspiration—is an art of letting oneself die of hunger without … dying, a challenge hurled at one’s entrails, and a kind of demonstration of the incompatibility of ecstasy and digestion. A well-fed humanity produces skeptics, never saints. The absolute? A matter of diet. No “inner fire,” no “flame” without the virtually complete suppression of nourishment. Let us counter our appetites: our organs will burn, our substance catch fire. He who eats his fill is spiritually doomed.

Moved by savage impulses, the saints had managed to master them, hence to preserve them in secret. They were aware that charity derives its power from our physiological dramas, and that in order to attach themselves to beings they must declare war on the body, pervert it, martyr it, and subjugate it. Each of them evokes an aggressor who, suddenly converted to love, would subsequently employ himself in hating himself. And they knew how to hate themselves to the very end; but, since this self-hatred was exhausted, they were free, released from all shackles: the askesis had revealed to them the meaning, the usefulness of destruction, prelude to purity and deliverance. In their turn, they will reveal to us what pangs we must suffer if we, too, seek to be free.

At whatever level our life is lived, it will be truly our own only in proportion to our efforts to break its apparent forms. Ennui, despair, abulia itself will aid us here, on condition, of course, that we make our experience of them complete, that we live them through to the moment when, risking surrender, we rise up and transform them into auxiliaries of our vitality. What is more fruitful than the worst, for the man who knows how to desire it? For it is not suffering which liberates, but the desire to suffer.

*

How can we laugh at the hysteria of the Middle Ages? In your cell you sighed or shrieked: the others venerated you … Your troubles did not lead you to the psychiatrist. Lest you be cured of them, you exasperated them, while you concealed your health like a stigma, a vice. Disease was the general recourse, the great remedy. Nowadays, fallen into discredit, boycotted, it continues to reign, but no one loves k, no one seeks it out. Sick men, we are at a loss for what to do with our ills. More than one of our madnesses will remain forever unexploited.

There are other hysterias which are no less admirable, those which generate hymns to the Sun, to Being, to the Unknown. Dawn of Egypt, of Greece, frenzy of mythologies, accents in first contact with the elements! At their antipodes, we are unfit to thrill to the spectacle of origins: our interrogations, instead of leaping in rhythms, drag in the lees of concept or are disfigured beneath the sneer of our systems. Where is our hymnic sensibility, the intoxication of our beginnings, the dawn of our stupefactions? Let us fling ourselves at the Pythoness’ feet, returning to our old ecstasies: the philosophy of unique moments, the only philosophy …

*

Once we have ceased linking our secret life to God, we can ascend to ecstasies as effective as those of the mystics and conquer this world without recourse to the Beyond. And if, nonetheless, the obsession of another world were to pursue us, it would be permissible to construct, to project one for the occasion, if only to satisfy our thirst for the invisible. What matters are our sensations, their intensity and their virtues, as our capacity to fling ourselves into a madness that is not sacred. In the unknown, we can go as far as the saints, without making use of their means. It will be enough for us to constrain reason to a long silence. Handed over to ourselves, nothing will keep us from acceding to the delicious suspension of all our faculties. A man who has glimpsed these states knows that our movements there lose their habitual direction: we ascend to the abyss, we fall into heaven. Where are we? A question without object: we no longer take place …

The Temptation to Exist 

Cioran 

I didn’t need Lord of the Flies as a paradigm

 “When I was 12, I read a book called A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes. In it, good-natured pirates rescue some kids from a hurricane. But in the end the kids are responsible for having the pirates hanged. That killed the myth about innocent children for me. It was the sort of book you never forget, and you never feel the same because of it. I didn’t need Lord of the Flies as a paradigm.”17

***

“I have almost no friends, but the few I do I like very much,” Gorey confided in a January 1951 letter to Brandt.9 Chief among them was Alison Lurie. In later days, she would earn a reputation (and a Pulitzer) as a writer of social satires—sharply observed, subtly feminist comedies of manners, most of them drily amusing in the English way. Barbara Epstein, her Radcliffe schoolmate (and, later, editor of her essays for the New York Review of Books), thought she was “witty, skeptical and articulate” and, even as an undergraduate, a supremely gifted writer.10But when Lurie met Gorey, she was Alison Bishop, recent Radcliffe grad and newlywed. “After Ted finished Harvard he got a job working for a book publisher in Boston, in Copley Square,” she recalled in 2008. “I was working there, too, at the Boston Public Library, and we used to have lunch together in a cheap cafeteria on Marlborough Street. Neither of us liked our jobs very much, but they had compensations—we got first look at a lot of books, and we could meet regularly.”11 Until Gorey moved to New York, in ’53, she remembered, “we saw more of each other than of anyone else—we were best friends.”

They’d met in ’49, at the Mandrake, she thinks. They clicked instantly, bonding over their shared tastes in literature—“mostly literary classics and the poetry that people were beginning to read then.”12 Naturally, Gorey pressed Firbank and Compton-Burnett on Lurie, who liked Compton-Burnett but “couldn’t stand Firbank; it didn’t seem like literature, it was just posing. [Ted] liked the artificiality, the idea of an imagined world with artificial rules and a kind of old-fashioned overtone.” They went to the ballet and museums and the movies, taking in foreign films and the old movies Gorey was especially fond of. The Gorey Lurie knew was, in all the essentials, the Gorey we know. “Ted then was much like he was always—immensely intelligent, perceptive, amusing, inventive, and skeptical, though he was completely unknown,” she recalled.13 “He saw through anyone who was phony, or pretentious, or out for personal gain, very fast. As he said very early in our friendship,…‘I pity any opportunist who thinks I’m an opportunity.’”

She and Gorey were a matched pair. “We gossiped, we talked about books and movies, I saw his drawings, he looked at what I was writing,” she says.14 “We were both Anglophiles, definitely. [We shared] a love of British literature and poetry and films and all that. We’d both been brought up on British children’s books, so this was a world that was romantic and interesting to us.…Back then, when neither of us had been abroad, it was a kind of fantasy world.”

The Gorey Lurie knew in Cambridge was “strikingly tall and strikingly thin,” a head-turning apparition in his unvarying costume of black turtleneck sweater, chinos, and white sneakers—the standard-issue uniform of that late-’40s hipster, the literary bohemian.15 (By then, he’d shed the long canvas coats with sheepskin collars that he sported at Harvard but hadn’t yet replaced them with the floor-sweeping fur coats of his Victorian beatnik phase. They’d come later, when he moved to Manhattan.)

Gorey “was already eccentric and individual when I first knew him,” said Lurie in 2008.16 One of his distinguishing quirks, she remembers, was that enigmatic combination of sociability and reserve John Ashbery had in mind when he described Gorey as “somehow unable and/or unwilling to engage in a very close friendship with anyone, above a certain good-humored, fun-loving level.” “He had a lot of friends,” she notes, and could be gregarious in the right setting—she recalls him chatting with “a lot of people” who came into the Mandrake—but “was solitary in the sense that he didn’t form a partnership with anybody.”17

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, she says. “Not everybody wants to wake up in the morning and there’s somebody in bed with them, you know? Some people value their solitude, and I think Ted was like that. He wanted to live alone; he wasn’t looking for somebody to be with for the rest of his life. He would have romantic feelings about people, but he wouldn’t really have wanted it to turn into a full-blown relationship, and that’s why it never did.”18 He wasn’t a recluse, she emphasizes, just solitary by nature. “It was important to him to have a place where he could do, and be, by himself.”

Some of Lurie’s most sharply etched memories of Ted are recollections of their rambles in cemeteries, fittingly. In the Old Burying Ground, near Harvard Square, they made rubbings of the “really strange and wonderful” headstones—impressions created by taping a sheet of paper onto a stone, then rubbing it with a crayon.19 Visual echoes of the images they collected—urns and weeping willows from the nineteenth-century tombstones, grinning death’s heads and skull-and-crossbones motifs and “circular patterns that looked like Celtic crosses or magical symbols” from the colonial grave markers—reverberate in Gorey’s books and in the animated title sequence he created for the Masterpiece Theatre spin-off series Mystery! Unsurprisingly, Ted was much taken with “the older tombstones with strange inscriptions and scary verses,” says Lurie. A particular favorite read:

Behold and think as you pass by,

As you are now, so once was I.

As I am now, so you will be.

Prepare to die and follow me.

“It was on one of these trips that I realized for the first time that I was not going to live forever,” Lurie recalled. “Of course I knew this theoretically, but I hadn’t taken it personally. We were in a beautiful graveyard in Concord”—Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, most likely, where Hawthorne, Thoreau, and all the Alcotts sleep on Authors Ridge—“and I said to Ted, ‘If I die, I want to be buried somewhere like this.’ And he said, ‘What do you mean, if you die?’…He was more aware of mortality than I was,” she reflects. “He’d been in the army, and even though he hadn’t been overseas, he’d seen people come back from overseas. Or not come back.”

At the same time, Gorey’s susceptibility to the morose charms of Puritan memento mori had as much to do with his desire to escape the stultifying ’50s, Lurie suggests, as it did any sense that we’ll all end up moldering in the ground. “One of the things you want to remember is what the 1950s were like,” she says. “All of a sudden everybody was sort of square and serious, and the whole idea was that America was this wonderful country and everybody was smiling and eating cornflakes and playing with puppies.” Gorey’s ironic appropriation, in his art, of Puritan gloom and the Victorian cult of death and mourning “was sort of in reaction to this 1950s mystique…that everything was just wonderful and we lived forever and the sun was shining,” she believes.

**

The Willowdale Handcar is one of the capstones of Gorey’s body of work. Each scene is a postage-stamp masterpiece, the understated wittiness of its prose joined seamlessly to needlepoint-fine drawing. The surrealism of the story’s dreamlike chain of events is suffused with what the New Yorker writer Stephen Schiff calls “an air of almost metaphysical mystery.”5That, in fact, is what The Willowdale Handcar is: a metaphysical mystery—specifically, a metaphysical mystery in the guise of a silent movie. (The book is dedicated to Lillian Gish.)6 Three young people—Edna, Harry, and Sam—discover their ticket out of dull-as-dishwater Willowdale: a handcar at the railroad station, which they promptly mount and ride out of town, following the call of the open road. The time, as always, is vaguely Victorian-Edwardian; the town, whose name recalls the Wilmette of Gorey’s boyhood as well as the 1888 small town in the Twilight Zone episode “A Stop at Willoughby” (1960), appears to be somewhere in the Midwest. Thematically, The Willowdale Handcar is a variation on a quintessentially American myth—the road trip. Gorey’s illustrations, most notably the Hopperesque picture of a house burning mysteriously in the middle of a vast field, and Wobbling Rock tumbling off its pedestal to crush some picnickers, are among his finest. The draftsmanship is impeccable, the compositions beautifully balanced.

Running on a parallel track to the dominant narrative is an Agatha Christie subplot involving the mysterious Nellie Flim, a missing person whose “frantic face” the trio glimpses pressed against a parlor window as a train flashes past and whom they ultimately meet up with, tied to the tracks like the imperiled heroine of one of D. W. Griffith’s Biograph shorts. When they free her, she hops on her bicycle and rides away without explanation. A week later, they think they see her “walking the grounds of the Weedhaven Laughing Academy.”

As for the metaphysical mystery, the description on the book’s back cover is intriguing, especially if we entertain the possibility that Gorey wrote it, as authors sometimes do. “In which three Pilgrims find mystery, abort peril and partake of religious community,” the blurb reads. “And the discerning Reader discovers Meaning in their Progress.” We’re invited to read the Willowdale trio’s trip in explicitly religious terms: as an allegorical journey—a pilgrim’s progress, not to put too fine a point on it.

Is The Willowdale Handcar a “subtle yet magisterial view of the human condition,” as Schiff suggests, chronicling our voyage from youth to tomb?7 Undoubtedly the book has an elegiac feel: death and decay are everywhere, from the burning house to the trio’s contemplative stop at a cemetery to the final scene, a wonderfully evocative drawing of the travelers pumping their handcar into the Stygian gloom of a tunnel. “At sunset they entered a tunnel in the Iron Hills and did not come out the other end.” The pitch-black mouth of the tunnel that swallows the travelers forever is inescapably tomblike, a portal to Hamlet’s “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” Willowdale is suggestive, too: weeping willows, in Victorian memorial iconography, symbolize mourning.

As for the Black Doll of the title, it, too, remains a cipher. We see it only briefly, sitting on a writing desk.a Perhaps it’s meant to be an absent presence—a disquieting reminder of the irreducible mystery of things. An effigy of the god of naught, it personifies the black hole in Gorey’s cosmos, right where the discerning Reader looks for Meaning.

* * *

During his tedious time at Bobbs-Merrill, Gorey produced three classic works, one of which, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, would become his best-known title—the dictionary definition, in the public mind, of the Goreyesque.

The Gashlycrumb Tinies; or, After the Outing; The Insect God; and The West Wing appeared in 1963, in a boxed set published by Simon and Schuster called The Vinegar Works: Three Volumes of Moral Instruction. It debuted a year after the arrival of Maurice Sendak’s four-volume Nutshell Library. Since he knew Sendak and seemed to have kept abreast of children’s book publishing, it’s unlikely Gorey hadn’t gotten wind of Sendak’s wry take on Puritan primers and Struwwelpeter-type cautionary tales. Whether The Vinegar Works is his response we don’t know, but the timing is suggestive.

Written in sprightly dactylic couplets, The Gashlycrumb Tinies is a mocking abecedarium steeped in the gothic aesthetic and the real-life horrors of the penny dreadful. It purports to teach children their ABCs through the unhappy (but often hilarious) ends of twenty-six lugubrious-looking children: “A is for Amy who fell down the stairs / B is for Basil assaulted by bears,” and so on. Tinies was inspired, said Gorey, by “those 19th century cautionary tales, I guess, though my book is punishment without misbehavior.”8The drawings are wonderful, in their restrained way. Gorey’s compositions, as always, are expertly balanced: he conducts duets between dark or densely patterned shapes and white or gray space and between his little victims and the mostly empty spaces that surround them.

Gorey could be a great single-panel gag artist when he wanted to be. The verse is often uproarious, and the artwork showcases his cartoonist’s gift for illustrating a joke in the most amusing way. “N is for Neville who died of ennui” takes an inherently hilarious notion—expiring from world-weariness, a concept only Gorey could dream up—and makes it even funnier by showing us nothing but the top of Neville’s bored little head, his black-dot eyes peering blankly at us out of an enormous window. (This was one of Gorey’s favorite scenes. When an interviewer noted one of the many paradoxical aspects of the man—“He delivers punch lines and sardonic commentary with ease, but rarely laughs”—Gorey observed, “I don’t set out to be funny. Obviously, if I find myself giggling about something, I’ll keep it in.…I must say I did think at the time that ‘N is for Neville who died of ennui’ was rather fetching.”)9The Gashlycrumb Tinies. (Simon and Schuster, 1963)

Gorey’s ironic distance absolves us of the moral obligation to empathize. It gives us license to chuckle at the messy end we know is in store for the dapper little gent in tweeds, eagerly opening his booby-trapped gift in “T is for Titus who flew into bits.” Sometimes it’s the cluelessness of the little dears that turns tragedy into slapstick: why is Olive, in “O is for Olive run through with an awl,” tossing such a nasty implement into the air? To see where it will land? In The Gashlycrumb Tinies, parents are nowhere to be seen, leaving children to their fates, which, nine times out of ten, the little ninnyhammers richly deserve.

Actually there is one parental figure in the book. The cover illustration depicts Death as a skeletal nanny surrounded by his charges. Like the child-snatching bogeyman of every parent’s worst nightmares, Death is only posing as the Tinies’ guardian. The book’s back cover reveals their fate: a cluster of headstones huddles where the children stood. This, presumably, is what happened “after the outing.” Death is ever present, even in the coziest domestic settings, just waiting for one dumb move (say, swallowing tacks), a freak accident (suffocating under a rug), or an Act of God (managing, somehow, to be devoured by mice). And it doesn’t make exceptions for youth or cuteness.

The Gashlycrumb Tinies broaches the subject of death in a children’s book, or at least in what looks like a children’s book. And it did so at a time when the Little Golden Books, which dominated kinderculture, were serving up a steady diet of treacle and mush. Seen in that light, it really does offer moral instruction after all. Gorey’s gift to his youngest readers is a book of ABCs that uses a variation on that schoolyard staple, the dead-baby joke, to teach them that death is part of life. “When you were a child, would you have relished The Gashlycrumb Tinies?” an interviewer asked. “Probably, yes,” was his predictable reply.10

* * *

Wonderfully weird as it is, grotesquely funny as it is, The Insect God is a slight work—another one-line joke and, at fourteen panels, one of Gorey’s shortest. A cautionary tale, told in rhyme, about the dangers of taking candy from strangers (and what could be stranger than man-size mantids who sacrifice humans to their six-legged deity?), The Insect God recounts the fate of little Millicent Frastley (one of Gorey’s funniest faux-English names).

We meet her in the park, where she’s playing unattended, “nibbling grass.” “There was no one with her to keep her from straying / Away in the shadows and oncoming dark.” (Adults in Goreyland are always neglectful.) A sinister “black motor” rolls up, looking like a funeral hearse on spoked wheels, and a “tiny green face” regards the startled mite. Out comes an arm with two elbows (Gorey has a flair for the telling detail) holding a tin of cinnamon balls; Millicent is tempted, and in a trice she’s snatched up and spirited away.

After long hours on the road, the insects and their victim arrive “at the foot of a vast and crumbling wall,” a moment Gorey stages with a superbly cinematic sense of visual drama: the car, little more than a black silhouette in the middle distance, is stopped before a dark, brooding monolith of a mansion, so colossal it reduces the vehicle to toylike proportions. All those hours spent watching silent movies have paid off: Gorey deftly intercuts a shot of the Frastleys, anguishing over what has become of Millicent, then returns us to the mansion’s ballroom, where the mirrors are “streaked with a luminous slime.” Leaping “through the air with buzzings and twangings,” the monstrous mantids “work themselves up to a ritual crime.” Their frenzy culminates in the stripping and stuffing of little Millicent into “a kind of pod,” after which she is, at last, “sacrificed to THE INSECT GOD.”

Brow-knitting analysis of a one-line joke runs the risk of becoming a joke itself. Still, the title is a giveaway: something’s going on with religion. Gorey’s insects resemble praying mantises; their blood sacrifice can be read as a sardonic parody of Christianity—an Aesop’s fable for unbelievers. Is Gorey’s lapsed Catholicism showing? To atheist eyes, the insects’ worship of an insect god calls to mind Voltaire’s quip that man created God in his own image.

Gorey, of course, was no help. The inspiration for The Insect God, he claimed, was some medieval woodcuts of insects he’d seen on cards or notepaper at the Metropolitan Museum. “Poor Millicent. It wasn’t her fault.”11

* * *

What, exactly, is The West Wing? That it’s one of Gorey’s bona fide masterpieces everyone seems to agree: the Gorey scholar Karen Wilkin thinks it’s one of his “most beautiful and poetic achievements”; Mel Gussow, writing in the New York Times, called it a “wordless masterwork.”12

Yes, but what is it? At first glance, it’s a picture book that tells its story in thirty “silent” panels, meaning: without a word of accompanying text. Gorey’s first experiment with wordless narrative, it was surely prompted by his fondness for playing with form. But he liked to toss critics a red herring by pointing out that the book was dedicated to Edmund Wilson, who had taken him to task for the awkwardness of his limericks in The Listing Attic. “Edmund Wilson castigated me wildly for them,” he told an interviewer. “That’s why when I finally dedicated a book to him, it had no text. I thought, ‘That will fix you, Edmund. Now what will you be able to say?’”13A visual poem in pen and ink, The West Wing is a series of scenes linked by the free-associated logic of dreams.b Nearly all the exquisitely rendered drawings depict rooms in what appears to be the usual Gorey manse, most of them empty yet all of them thick with atmosphere. We can’t shake the creeping sensation that something has happened, or is about to happen, or is happening before our unseeing eyes in the spirit realm. What’s going on in the fourth panel, where an open door in one bare, disused-looking room gives onto the open door in another? There’s a sense of communication between the two untenanted rooms; of something passing between them. The main character in The West Wing, as in all haunted-house stories, is the house itself.

Nowhere is Gorey’s synthesis of surrealism and the gothic more seamless. He has mastered the surrealist art, perfected by Magritte, of charging the most banal imagery with an occult electricity and of presenting the marvelous—a room full of ocean, its ruffled waters halfway up the walls; a boulder sitting on a Chippendale table—with jarring matter-of-factness. But he’s fluent, too, in his use of gothic and horror-movie tropes: a sheeted ghost glimpsed in a mirror, a mummy making its foot-dragging way down a hall, a flickering candle floating in midair.

The book’s title underscores its spookiness: the West, in religion, myth, and folklore, is the land of the setting sun—the abode of the dead. Since time immemorial, the sun’s nightly disappearance in the west has been seen as a descent into the afterworld. The Western Lands, in the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, are where the departed live and gods and monsters dwell. Twilight is the Goreyest time of day, as noted earlier, because it’s “neither one thing nor the other”—not day, not night, but in between, a transitional state like dying, which it has come to symbolize. (The dying of the light in the west recurs in Gorey stories. In The Unstrung Harp, “there is a drowned sort of yellow light in the west, and the impression of desolation and melancholy is remarkable.”)

Twilight is a borderland, and “the border of borders is of course death,” Gorey told Peter Neumeyer.14 Then comes a revelation: “The title the book does not have, but which is there in my mind, is The Book of What Is in the Other World”—a chapter in the Egyptian Book of the Dead detailing the sun god Re’s descent into the underworld through a portal in the far west and his travels in the kingdom of the dead during the night.cIn a 1963 interview, Gorey left no doubt about the book’s meaning: “The West Wing,” he said, “is where you go after you’re dead.”15 That candle hanging in midair (held, we assume, by some spectral hand) leaves us, on the book’s last page, with a potent image of the frailty and brevity of human existence. Soon it will gutter and go out, an extinction foreshadowed by the act of closing the book, which has the effect of snuffing it. On the back cover, a skull-faced moon peers down on the mansion, whose stone facade and pitch-black windows give it the look of a sepulchre or a death’s head. The West Wing is Gorey’s gothic-surrealist Book of the Dead.

It’s also the purest expression of his belief that meaning is in the eye of the beholder and that the most successful works of art leave gaps for us to fill, avoiding the Jamesian pitfall of leaving “nothing left to think about, nothing left to question,” as Gorey put it.16The West Wing is nothing but gaps, a truism literalized in panel 16, which consists almost entirely of a densely crosshatched wall with an empty niche in it. Fill the niche, Gorey urges.

Mark Dery

Born to Be Posthumous

Hermann Hesse on Discovering the Soul Beneath the Self and the Key to Finding Peace

 

“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight,” E.E. Cummings told students from the hard-earned platform of his middle age, not long after Virginia Woolf contemplated the courage to be yourself.

It is true, of course, that the self is a place of illusion — but it is also the only place where our physical reality and social reality cohere to pull the universe into focus, into meaning. It is the crucible of our qualia. It is the tightrope between the mind and the world, woven of consciousness.

On the nature of the self, then, depends our experience of the world.

The challenge arises from the fact that, upon inspection, there is no single and static self but a multitude of selves constellating at any given moment into a transient totality, only to reconfigure again in the next situation, the next set of expectations, the next undulation of biochemistry. This troubles us, for without the sense of a solid self, it is impossible to maintain a self-image. There is but a single salve for this disorientation — to uncover, often at a staggering cost to the ego, the constant beneath this flickering constellation, a constant some may call soul.

Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) takes up the question of discovering the soul beneath the self in his 1927 novel Steppenwolf (public library).

He writes:

Even the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men* habitually sees the world and himself through the lenses of delusive formulas and artless simplifications — and most of all himself. For it appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again… And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key.

Accepting the fact of the bundle is not easy, for it requires seeking the deeper unifying principle, the mysterious superstring binding the bundle. (After all, daily you confront the question of what makes you and your childhood self the same person despite a lifetime of physiological and psychological change — a question habitually answered with precisely this illusion of personality.)

With compassion for this universal human vulnerability to delusion, Hesse observes:

Every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though it were a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares the delusion.

Considering this ego-self a kind of “optical illusion,” Hesse insists that, with enough courage to break the illusion and enough curiosity about these “separate beings” within, one can discern across them the “various facets and aspects of a higher unity” and begin to see this unity clearly. He writes:

[These selves] form a unity and a supreme individuality; and it is in this higher unity alone, not in the several characters, that something of the true nature of the soul is revealed.

A generation before Hesse, Whitman, after boldly declaring that he contains multitudes, recognized across them “a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal.”

We call this consciousness, this higher unity of personhood, soul.

Knowing that even the soul is two-fold, Hesse offers his prescription for resisting the easy path of illusion and annealing the soul from the self. Half a century before Bertrand Russell insisted that the key to a fulfilling life is to “make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life,” Hesse writes:

Embark on the longer and wearier and harder road of life. You will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and complicate your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace.

It is only by nurturing and expanding the soul that the self, fluid and fractal, can be held with tenderness. And without tenderness for the self, Hesse reminds us a century before the self-help industry commodified the concept, there can be no tenderness for the world and no peace within:

Love of one’s neighbor is not possible without love of oneself… Self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.

Couple with Virginia Woolf on how to hear your soul, then revisit Hesse on the courage to be yourself, the wisdom of the inner voice, and how to be more alive.

BY MARIA POPOVA

https://www.themarginalian.org/

The Second-Hand Thinker

 

The Second-Hand Thinker—Advantages of Debility—The Parasite of Poets—Tribulations of an Alien—Ennui of Conquerors—Music and Skepticism—The Automaton—On Melancholy—The Thirst for Power—Position of the Poor.

Ideas are substitutes for griefs.

—Marcel Proust

The Second-Hand Thinker

I live in expectation of the Idea; I foresee it, close in upon it, get a grip—and cannot formulate it, it escapes me, does not yet belong to me: might I have conceived it in my absence? And how, once imminent and vague, to make it present and luminous in the intelligible agony of expression? What conditions should I hope for if it is to bloom—and decay?

Anti-philosopher, I abhor every indifferent idea: I am not always despondent, hence I do not always think. When I consider ideas, they seem even more useless than things; hence I have loved only the elucubrations of the great invalids, the ruminations of insomnia, the flashes of an incurable fear, and the doubts intersected by sighs. The amount of chiaroscuro an idea harbors is the only index of its profundity, as the despairing accent of its playfulness is the index of its fascination. How many white nights does your nocturnal past conceal? That is how we ought to confront every thinker. The man who thinks when he wants to has nothing to tell us: above—or rather, alongside—his thoughts, he is not responsible for them, not committed to them, neither wins nor loses by risking himself in a struggle in which he himself is not his own enemy. It costs him nothing to believe in Truth. Which is not the case for a mind where true and false have ceased to be superstitions; destroyer of all criteria, such a mind verifies itself like invalids and poets; it thinks by accident: the glory of a discomfort or of a delirium suffices. Is not an indigestion richer in ideas than a parade of concepts? Malfunctions of our organs determine the fruitfulness of our minds: the man who does not feel his body will never be in a position to conceive a living thought; he will wait to no purpose for the advantageous surprise of some disadvantage. . . .

In affective indifference, ideas assume a profile; yet none can take shape: it is up to melancholy to afford a climate to their blossoming. They require a certain tonality, a certain color in order to vibrate, to shine. To be sterile a long time is to lie in wait for them, to yearn for them without being able to compromise them in a formula. The mind’s “seasons” are conditioned by an organic rhythm; it is not up to “me” to be naive or cynical: my truths are the sophisms of my enthusiasm or of my dejection. I exist, I feel, and I think according to the moment—and in spite of myself. Time constitutes me; in vain I oppose myself—and / am. My undesired present unfolds, unfolds me; unable to command it, I comment upon it; slave of my thoughts, I play with them, fatality’s buffoon. . . .

Advantages of Debility

The individual who fails to transcend his quality as a splendid example, a finished model, and whose existence is identified with his vital destiny, locates himself outside the mind. Ideal masculinity—obstacle to the perception of nuance—involves an insensitivity to the aspect of the everyday supernatural, from which art draws its substance. The more one is a nature, the less one is an artist. Homogeneous, undifferentiated, opaque vigor was idolized by the world of legends, by the fantasies of mythology. When the Greeks turned to speculation, the cult of the anemic ephebe replaced that of the giants; and the heroes themselves, sublime dolts in Homer’s time, became, thanks to tragedy, bearers of torments and doubts incompatible with their rough nature.

Internal wealth results from conflicts sustained within oneself; now, the vitality which is entirely self-possessed knows only external struggle, the attack upon the object. In the male weakened by a dose of femininity, two tendencies are at grips: by what is passive in himself he apprehends a whole world of relinquishment; by what is imperious, he converts his will into law. As long as his instincts remain unslaked, he concerns only the species; once a secret dissatisfaction creeps in, he becomes a conqueror. The mind justifies, explains, and excuses him, and classifying him among the superior simpletons, abandons him to History’s curiosity—the investigation of stupidity in action. . . .

The man whose existence does not constitute a disease both vigorous and vague can never establish himself among problems nor know their dangers. The condition favorable to the search for truth or for expression is to be found halfway between man and woman: the gaps in “virility” are the seat of the mind. . . . If the pure female, whom we can accuse of no sexual or psychic anomaly, is internally emptier than an animal, the intact male fits the definition of “cretin.” Consider any human being who has caught your attention or roused your fervor: something in his mechanism has been unhinged to his advantage. We rightly scorn those who have not made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone “happy,” no greater flattery than to grant him a “vein of melancholy". . . . This is because gaiety is linked to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone.

“Inner life” is the prerogative of the delicate, those tremulous wretches subject to an epilepsy with neither froth nor falling: the biologically sound being scorns “depth,” is incapable of it, sees in it a suspect dimension which jeopardizes the spontaneity of his actions. Nor is he mistaken: with the retreat into the self begins the individual’s drama—his glory and his decline; isolated from the anonymous flux, from the utilitarian trickle of life, he frees himself from objective goals. A civilization is “affected” when its delicate members set the tone for it; but thanks to them, it has definitively triumphed over nature—and collapses. An extreme example of refinement unites in himself the exalté and the sophist: he no longer adheres to his impulses, cultivates without crediting them; this is the omniscient debility of twilight ages, prefiguration of man’s eclipse. The delicate allow us to glimpse the moment when janitors will be tormented by aesthetes' scruples; when farmers, bent double by doubts, will no longer have the vigor to guide the plow; when every human being, gnawed by lucidity and drained of instincts, will be wiped out without the strength to regret the flourishing darkness of their illusions. . . .

The Parasite of Poets

I. There can be no issue in a poet’s life. It is from everything he has not undertaken, from all the moments fed on the inaccessible, that his power comes to him. If he finds existence a disadvantage, his expressive faculties are thereby reinforced, his inspiration dilated.

A biography is legitimate only if it focuses the elasticity of a fate, the sum of variables it contains. But the poet follows a line of fatality whose rigor nothing inflects. Life belongs to dolts; and it is in order to fill out the life they have not had that we have invented the lives of the poets. . . .

Poetry expresses the essence of what cannot be possessed; its ultimate meaning: the impossibility of all “actuality.” Joy is not a poetic sentiment (though it proceeds from a sector of the lyric universe in which chance unites, in one and the same bundle, flames and fatuities). Who has ever read a song of hope which failed to inspire a sensation of discomfort, even of disgust? And how sing a presence, when the possible itself is shadowed with vulgarity? Between poetry and hope, complete incompatibility: hence the poet is a prey to an ardent decomposition. Who would dare to wonder how he has experienced life when it is by death that he has been alive at all? When he succumbs to the temptation of happiness—he belongs to comedy. . . . But if, on the other hand, flames spring up from his wounds and he sings felicity—that voluptuous incandescence of woe—he rescues himself from the nuance of vulgarity inherent in any positive accent. Thus a Hölderlin withdrawing to a dream Greece and transfiguring love by purer intoxications, by those of unreality. . . .

The poet would be an odious deserter of reality if in his flight he failed to take his suffering alone. Unlike the mystic or the sage, he cannot escape himself, nor leave the stage of his own obsession: even his ecstasies are incurable, and harbingers of disasters. Unable to run away, for him everything is possible, except life. . . .

II. This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself: not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. Valéry and Stefan George leave us where we picked them up, or else make us more demanding on the formal level of the mind: they are geniuses we have no need of, they are merely artists. But a Shelley, but a Baudelaire, but a Rilke intervene in the deepest part of our organism which annexes them as it would a vice. In their vicinity, a body is fortified, then weakens and disintegrates. For the poet is an agent of destruction, a virus, a disguised disease, and the gravest danger, though a wonderfully vague one, for our red corpuscles. To live around him is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears. . . .

III. Whereas verse permits everything—you can pour into it tears, shames, ecstasies, complaints above all—prose forbids you to give vent, to lament: its conventional abstraction is opposed to overflowing. Prose requires other truths: verifiable, deduced, measured. But what if you were to steal those of poetry, if you pillaged its substance and dared as much as the poets? Why not insinuate into discourse their indecencies, their humiliations, their grimaces, and their sighs? Why not be decomposed, rotten, corpse, angel, or Satan in the language of the vulgar, and pathetically betray so many aerial and sinister moods? Much more than in the school of the philosophers, it is in the academy of poets that we learn the courage of intelligence and the audacity to be ourselves. Their “affirmations” outdo the most strangely impertinent sayings of the ancient sophists. No one adopts them: has there ever been a single thinker who went as far as Baudelaire or who steeled himself to systematize a Lear’s howl, Hamlet’s soliloquy? Nietzsche perhaps before his end, but unfortunately he kept harping on his prophet’s string. . . . And if we looked among the saints? Certain frenzies of Teresa of Avila or Angela of Foligno. . . . But here we meet God too frequently—God, that consoling blank who, reinforcing their courage, diminishes its quality. To advance without convictions and alone among the truths is not given to a man, nor even to a saint; sometimes, though, to a poet. . . .

I can imagine a thinker exclaiming in an impulse of pride: “I’d like a poet to make his fate out of my thoughts!” But for such an aspiration to be legitimate, he himself would have to have frequented the poets a long time, he would have to have borrowed from them the joys of malediction, and given back, abstract and completed, the image of their own defections or their own deliriums; above all he would have to have succumbed on the threshold of song and, a living anthem this side of inspiration, to have known the regret of not being a poet, of not being initiated into the “science of tears,” the scourges of the heart, the formal orgies, the immortalities of the moment. . . .

Many times I have dreamed of a melancholy and erudite monster, versed in all idioms, familiar with numbers and souls alike, who would wander the world feeding on poisons, fervors, ecstasies, crossing Persias, Chinas, defunct Indies, and dying Europes—many times I have dreamed of a friend of the poets who would have known them all out of his despair at not being one of them.

Tribulations of an Alien

Offspring of some wretched tribe, he prowls the boulevards of the West. Cherishing one country after the next, he no longer hopes for any; stuck in a timeless twilight citizen of the world—and of no world—he is ineffectual, nameless, powerless. . . . Peoples without a destiny cannot give one to their sons who, thirsting for other horizons, attach themselves to a fate and ultimately exhaust it to finish their days as ghosts of their admirations and their exhaustions. Having nothing to love at home, they locate their love elsewhere, in other lands, where their fervor astonishes the natives. Overworked, the feelings erode and disintegrate, admiration first of all. . . . And the Alien who dispersed himself on so many highways of the world, exclaims: “I have set up countless idols for myself, have raised too many altars everywhere, and I have knelt before a host of gods. Now, weary of worship, I have squandered my share of delirium. One has resources only for the absolutes of one’s breed; a soul—like a country—flourishes only within its frontiers. I am paying for having crossed them, for having made the Indefinite into a fatherland, and foreign divinities into a cult, for having prostrated myself before ages which excluded my ancestors. Where I come from I can no longer say: in the temples I am without belief; in the cities, without ardor; among my kind, without curiosity; on the earth, without certitudes. Give me a specific desire and I could shake the world to its foundations. Release me from this shame of actions which makes me perform, every morning, the farce of resurrection and, every night, that of entombment; in the interval, nothing but this torment in the shroud of ennui. .. . I dream of wanting—and all I want seems to me worthless. Like a vandal corroded by melancholy, I proceed without a goal, self without a self, toward some unknown corner . . . in order to discover an abandoned god, a god who is his own atheist, and to fall asleep in the shadow of his last doubts and his last miracles.”

Ennui of Conquerors

Paris weighed on Napoleon, by his own admission, like a “leaden garment": for which ten million men were to die. This is the balance sheet of the mal du siède when a René on horseback becomes its agent. Born of the idleness of the eighteenth-century salons, this disease, in the indolence of an over-lucid aristocracy, extended its ravages deep into the countryside: peasants were to pay with their blood for a mode of sensibility alien to their nature and, with them, a whole continent. The exceptional natures in which Ennui insinuated itself, horrified by any one place and obsessed by a perpetual elsewhere, exploited the enthusiasm of the nations only to multiply their graveyards. This condottière who wept over Werther and Ossian, this Obermann who projected his void into space and who, according to Josephine, was capable of no more than a few moments of abandon, had as his unavowed mission to depopulate the earth. The dreaming conqueror is the greatest calamity for men; they are no less eager to idolize him, fascinated as they are by distorted projects, ruinous ideals, unhealthy ambitions. No reasonable being was ever the object of worship, left a name, or marked a single event with his individual stamp. Imperturbable before a precise conception or a transparent idol, the mob is roused by the unverifiable, by false mysteries. Who ever died in the name of rigor? Each generation raises monuments to the executioners of the one which preceded it. It is nonetheless true that the victims were willing enough to be immolated once they believed in glory, in that victory of one man alone, that defeat of all. . . .

Humanity adores only those who cause it to perish. Reigns in which citizens died in their sleep do not figure in history, nor the wise prince, inveterately scorned by his subjects; the crowd loves the fictive, even at its expense, the scandal of behavior constituting the web of human curiosity and the underground current of every event. The unfaithful woman and the cuckold provide comedy and tragedy, even the epic, the quasi-totality of their motifs. Since virtue has neither biography nor charm, from the Iliad to vaudeville, only the luster of dishonor has entertained and intrigued. Hence it is quite natural that humanity should have offered itself up to the conquerors, that it should seek to be trampled underfoot, that a nation without tyrants should never be talked about, that the sum of iniquities a people commits should be the sole index of its presence and of its vitality. A nation which no longer rapes is in its decadence; the number of rapes reveals its instincts, and its future. Find out in which war it has stopped practicing, on a large scale, this variety of crime: you will have found the first symbol of its decline; find out at what moment love has become for a nation a ceremonial, and the bed a condition of orgasm, and you will identify the beginning of its deficiencies and the end of its barbaric inheritance.

Universal history: history of Evil. Take away the disasters from human evolution and you might as well conceive of nature without seasons. If you have not contributed to a catastrophe, you will vanish without a trace. We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us. “I never made anyone suffer!"—an exclamation forever alien to a creature of flesh and blood. When we feel enthusiasm for a character of the past, or the present, we unconsciously ask ourselves: “For how many people was he the cause of disaster?” Who knows if each of us doesn’t aspire to the privilege of killing all his kind? But this privilege is assigned to very few, and never integrally: this restriction alone explains why the earth is still inhabited. Indirect murderers, we constitute an inert mass, a multitude of objects confronting Time’s true subjects, the great criminals who came to something.

But we can take comfort: our descendants, remote or immediate, will avenge us. For it is not difficult to imagine the moment when men will cut each other’s throats out of disgust with themselves, when Ennui will get the best of their prejudices and their diffidences, when they will run out into the street to slake their thirst for blood, and when the destructive dream prolonged for so many generations will become the universal reality. . . .

Music and Skepticism

I have searched for Doubt in all the arts, have found it there only disguised, furtive, breaking out during the entr'actes of inspiration, rising from slackened impulse; but I have given up searching for it—even in this form—in music; it cannot bloom there: ignorant of irony, music proceeds not from the pranks of the intellect but from the tender or vehement nuances of Naïvete, stupidity of the sublime, heedlessness of the infinite. . . . Wit having no equivalent in sound, we denigrate a musician by calling him intelligent. This attribute diminishes him and is not suitable in that languorous cosmogony where, like a blind god, he improvises one universe after another. If he were conscious of his gift, of his genius, he would succumb to pride; but he is not responsible for it; born in the oracle, he cannot understand himself. Let the sterile interpret him: he is not a critic, as God is not a theologian.

Limit-case of unreality and the absolute, infinitely real fiction, a lie more authentic than the world, music loses its prestige as soon as, dry or morose, we dissociate ourselves from the Creation, and Bach himself seems no more than insipid rumors; this is the extreme point of our non-participation in things, of our coldness and our collapse. To jeer amid the sublime—sardonic victory of the subjective principle, and one which makes us members of the Devil’s brood! Lost is the man who has no more tears for music, who Eves now only by the memory of those he has shed: sterile lucidity will have vanquished ecstasy—which once created worlds. . . .

The Automaton

I breathe out of prejudice. And I contemplate the spasm of ideas, while the Void smiles at itself. . . . No more sweat in space, no more life; the least vulgarity will make it reappear: a second’s waiting will suffice.

When we perceive ourselves existing we have the sensation of a stupefied madman who surprises his own lunacy and vainly seeks to give it a name. Habituación blunts our amazement at being: we are—and move on, we go back to our place in the asylum of the existing.

A conformist, I live, I try to live, by imitation, by respect for the rules of the game, by horror of originality. An automaton’s resignation: to affect a pretense of fervor and secretly to laugh at it; to bow to conventions only to repudiate them on the sly; to be numbered in every ledger but to have no residence in time; to save face whereas it would be only duty to lose it. . . .

The man who scorns everything must assume an air of perfect dignity, deceive the others and even himself: thereby he will the more easily accomplish his task of counterfeit living. What use displaying your failure when you can feign prosperity? Hell lacks manners: it is the exasperated image of a frank and uncouth man, it is the earth conceived without one superstition of elegance and civility.

I accept life out of politeness: perpetual rebellion is in bad taste, as is the sublimity of suicide. At twenty we rage against the heavens and the filth they hide; then we grow tired of it. The tragic attitude suits only an extended and ridiculous puberty; but it takes a thousand ordeals to achieve the histrionics of detachment.

The man who, liberated from all the principles of custom, lacks any gift as an actor is the archetype of wretchedness, the ideally unhappy being. No use constructing this model of ingenuousness: life is tolerable only by the degree of mystification we endow it with. Such a model would be the immediate rain of society, the “pleasure” of communal life residing in the impossibility of giving free rein to the infinity of our ulterior motives. It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false. No moral hero who is not childish, ineffectual, or inauthentic; for true authenticity is the flaw in fraud, in the proprieties of public flattery and secret defamation. If our fellow men could be aware of our opinions about them, love, friendship, and devotion would be forever erased from the dictionaries; and if we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an “I” without shame. Masquerade rules all the living, from the troglodyte to the skeptic. Since only the respect for appearances separates us from carrion, it is death to consider the basis of things, of beings; let us abide by a more agreeable nothingness: our constitution tolerates only a certain dosage of truth. . . .

Let us keep deep down inside a certitude superior to all the others: life has no meaning, it cannot have any such thing. We should kill ourselves on the spot if an unlooked for revelation persuaded us of the contrary. The air gone, we should still breathe; but we should immediately smother if the joy of inanity were taken from us. . . .

On Melancholy

When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves. In vain we call upon the Lord of Shades, the bestower of a precise curse: we are invalids without disease, and reprobates without vices. Melancholy is the dream state of egoism: no longer any object outside oneself, no reason for hate or love, but that same fall into a languid mud, that same circling of the damned without a hell, those same reiterations of a zeal to perish. . . . Whereas sadness is content with a circumstantial context, melancholy requires a debauch of space, an infinite landscape in order to spread out its sullen and vaporous grace, its shapeless evil, which, fearing to recover, dreads any limit to its dissolution and its undulation. It expands—strangest flower of self-love—among the poisons from which it extracts its vital juices and the vigor of all its failures. Feeding on what corrupts it, melancholy hides, under its melodious name, Self-Commiseration and the Pride of Defeat. .

The Thirst for Power

A Caesar is closer to a village mayor than to a mind sovereignly lucid but lacking the instinct of domination. The important fact is to command: almost all men aspire to this. Whether you have in your hands an empire, a tribe, a family, or a servant, you deploy your talent as a tyrant, glorious or absurd: a whole world or a single person obeys your orders. Thus is established the series of calamities which rise from the need, the thirst to excel . . . We jostle none but satraps: each of us—according to his means—seeks out a host of slaves or is content with just one. No one is self-sufficient: the most modest of men will always find a friend or a companion to authenticate his dream of authority. The man who obeys will be obeyed in his turn: the victim will become the executioner; this is the supreme desire—universally. Only beggars and sages do not experience it; unless theirs is an even subtler game. . .

The thirst for power permits History to renew itself and yet to remain basically the same; religions try to oppose this appetite, but manage only to exasperate it. Christianity would have found an issue whether the earth was a desert or a paradise. Under the variable forms man can assume is concealed one constant, an identical basis which explains why, against all the appearances of change, we move in a circle—and why, if we lost, following some supernatural intervention, our quality as monsters and clowns, history would immediately vanish.

Try to be free: you will die of hunger. Society tolerates you only if you are successively servile and despotic; it is a prison without guards—but from which you do not escape without dying. Where to go, when you can live only in the city and you lack the instincts for doing so, and when you are not enterprising enough to beg your bread, nor balanced enough to give yourself up to wisdom? In the end, you stay there like everyone else, pretending to busy yourself; you convince yourself of this extremity by the resources of artifice, since it is less absurd to simulate life than to live it.

As long as men have the passion of the city, a disguised cannibalism will rule there. The political instinct is the direct consequence of Sin, the immediate materialization of the Fall. Each man should be assigned to his solitude, but each man keeps an eye on that of everyone else. Angels and bandits have their leaders; how could the intermediary creatures—the very texture of humanity—lack theirs? Take away their desire to be slaves or tyrants and you demolish the city in the wink of an eye. The monkey-pact is sealed forever; and history follows its course, the horde gasping between crimes and dreams. Nothing can arrest it: even those who execrate it participate in its progress. . . .

Position of the Poor

Owners and beggars: two categories which oppose any change, any renewing disorder. Placed at the two extremities of the social ladder, they fear any modification in good and evil: they are equally settled the former in opulence, the latter in destitution. Between diem are located—anonymous sweat, the basis of society—those who strive, labor, persevere, and cultivate the absurdity of hope. The State feeds on their anemia; the notion of citizen would have neither content nor reality without them, any more than luxury and alms: the rich man and the beggar are parasites of the poor, the Pauper’s dependents.

If misery has a thousand remedies, poverty has none. How succor those who persist in not dying of hunger? God himself could not correct their lot. Between fortune’s darlings and the tatterdemalion circulate these honorable starvelings, exploited by splendor and by rags, pillaged by those who, loathing labor, settle, according to their luck or their vocation, in the salon or the gutter. And so humanity advances: with a few rich men, with a few beggars—and with all its poor. . . .

E. M. CIORAN

A Short History of Decay