JAPANESE NŌ DRAMAS

General Introduction

The Japanese nō theatre is one of the great achievements of civilization. No art is more sophisticated than this intricate fusion of music, dance, mask, costume, and language, nor does any uphold higher ideals. Nō plays, like those of other theatres, were written to be performed, but some can stand as literature beside any play ever put between the covers of a book. The aim of Japanese Nō Dramas is to demonstrate that this is so and to convey all that the printed page can convey of the beauty of nō.

Nō, which means ‘accomplishment’ or ‘perfected art’, is no doubt an expression of practical as well as aesthetic ambition. The actors and musicians of the early fifteenth century, when nō achieved its classic form, needed audiences and patronage. In those days, their theatre was known more often as sarugaku (a word that does not lend itself to useful translation), so that sarugaku no nō meant something like ‘sarugaku of the best sort’. Having been enshrined long ago as a cultural treasure, modern nō no longer needs to make any claims. But despite its present, rather esoteric reputation, at home as well as abroad, it was once simply the theatre of its time.

The choice of plays

Since the twenty-four nō plays in this collection were chosen for their literary interest, they are not a representative sampling of the whole modern repertoire, which includes well over two hundred works. Some plays in the repertoire make good theatre but unsatisfactory reading; others have only modest virtue of any kind; while a few – depending on one’s own tastes – are deplorable. For every masterpiece of the order of The Fulling Block, there are several unabashed melodramas; for every ‘warrior play’ of the quality of Tadanori, there are several martial thrillers. Some plays have lovely dances but only a slight text. In short, not all nō plays are worth translating for a wide audience. This selection represents only those that are.

 Seeing and reading

Although the introductions, notes, stage directions, etc. surrounding these translations acknowledge matters of performance, they treat the plays above all as literary texts. This approach is not self-evident. The best Japanese authorities on nō, especially before the Second World War, have held that since the plays exist only in performance, they cannot be considered literature in any sense, and this opinion remains influential. Japan has had no tradition of reading nō as literature. By now, some critics do write literary essays on various plays, but the approach is not yet fully developed. One champion of literary analysis (Tashiro Keiichirō) has cited foreign translations, and their reception as literature, in defence of his own work.

English speakers first met nō in books, thanks to Ezra Pound’s beautiful paraphrases made from the notes of Ernest Fenollosa, or to the fine translations by Arthur Waley. Yeats’s interest in what he knew of nō sealed the literary reputation of nō in the English-speaking world. However, the many translations published since then have been made by translators increasingly familiar with nō not only as text but as theatre. In the last twenty years or so, many English-speaking students of nō, impressed by the difference between seeing and reading, have concerned themselves especially with performance. Some have in their turn adopted the position that nō exists only on the stage. Consequently, many recent translations are meant above all to guide the spectator or the drama student. Meanwhile, nō plays by now have been done by English-speaking actors in all sorts of styles, from modern dance with electronic music to faithful reproductions (in English or the original) of a Japanese performance. One can also find ‘fusion’ productions that combine nō techniques with Western ones.

Anyone interested in the plays in this book should of course see them performed, if possible. However, reading does have its place, for nō texts are so difficult to follow in performance, even for the Japanese, that they must be studied separately. Besides, some performances can be disappointing and some plays (like Komachi at Seki-dera) are rarely performed. In any case, nō can seldom be seen outside Japan’s major cities, let alone abroad. For most people, reading is the only way to approach nō at all.

For reasons like these, Japanese Nō Dramas provides a certain amount of technical information about the plays for those readers who need it,  but leaves many technical terms undefined. It would not help to give brief definitions of musical forms or dance types and patterns. These things must be not only seen and heard, but learned in practice.

 The Playwrights

The theatre now called nō began to reach its present form in the mid fourteenth century. It was then a provincial theatre, centred mainly in the Yamato region south of Kyoto. Four touring troupes were affiliated with Kōfuku-ji, a great temple in the old capital of Nara, in Yamato. Komparu Gonnokami (fl. mid 14th c), the original author of The Diver, was among the actor-playwrights of the Yamato troupes. Another was Kan’ami (1333–1384), who made key contributions to early nō. Among these was his use in plays of the kusemai, a song and dance  form that survives in the important kuse section of most nō plays. Another was simply that he fathered Zeami.

Zeami (1363–1443) was the genius who created classic nō. Nothing untouched by him or his influence survives from early nō, not even the plays written by his father. Certain extant plays used to be identified with Kan’ami, even though it was recognized that Zeami must have reworked them extensively. However, the most recent scholarship suggests that Kan’ami’s literary traces have all but vanished.

Zeami remembered his father’s acting talent with awe, as his writings show, and Kan’ami’s contemporaries appear to have been similarly impressed. In 1374, Kan’ami received the signal honour of being invited to perform nō for the first time before the shogun, die young Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358–1408), in Kyoto. Zeami, then a boy, also appeared on stage. Yoshimitsu instantly fell in love with him, removed him from his father’s care, and brought him up at his court. This son of a provincial actor was now the protégé of the most powerful man in Japan, and he received his education from the greatest men of letters of his time.

Zeami’s ability was equal to the challenge. Thanks to such patronage, he developed a theatre of beauty and grace (which were not always what country audiences called for), and could stage the most elevated works. He had a superb mind and great warmth of feeling, as this collection shows. Beside his many plays (no one can say for certain how many) he also wrote penetrating treatises on the arts of acting and playwriting. Like Shakespeare or Molière, Zeami was the master of his own troupe and an all-round man of the theatre.

Later in life, Zeami suffered severe reverses. After 1429, he and his eldest son, Motomasa (c. 1400–1432), were barred by the shogun Ashikaga Yoshinori (1394–1441) from the shogunal palace and from all the great performance occasions in the capital. In 1430, his second son gave up nō to become a monk, and in 1432 Motomasa died. (This book includes Motomasa’s most famous play, The Sumida River.) Then in 1434 Zeami was exiled, for reasons unknown, to the remote island of Sado. He returned to Kyoto only a few years before his death.

Despite Zeami’s pre-eminence in the history of nō, his only personal successor was his son-in-law, Komparu Zenchiku (1405–1468), the grandson of Komparu Gonnokami. Zenchiku was active not in Kyoto but in Nara, where the relatively small Komparu school of nō is based even today. Zeami thought highly of him. Few plays can be attributed to him on the basis of solid documentary evidence, but there is reason  to believe that The Kasuga Dragon God, The Wildwood Shrine, and Tatsuta are his. These show him to have been an excellent playwright. Zenchiku, like his father-in-law, left behind several critical writings.

The latest playwright represented here is Kanze Nobumitsu (1434– 1516), the author of Benkei Aboard Ship, although the latest play in the book is probably the anonymous The Feather Mantle. Nobumitsu was in the lineage of Zeami’s nephew, the actor On’ami (1398–1467) who, thanks to Ashikaga Yoshinori’s patronage and much against Zeami’s own will, continued the formal line of succession from Kan’ami. (The name Kanze is made up of the first syllables of Kan’ami’s and Zeami’s names.) He was a fine playwright, too, but by his time the style of nō had changed. Benkei Aboard Ship is more frankly dramatic, colourful theatre than the other plays in this book.

Some plays still in the modern repertoire were probably written in the sixteenth or even the seventeenth century, and at least one (Kusu no tsuyu) dates from the late nineteenth. However, many of the late works have little to do with those in this book, beyond the basic performance techniques that distinguish nō from other theatres. Hundreds, if not thousands of other plays exist outside the repertoire, including some by Zeami himself. Meanwhile, new ones are still being written for special occasions, and formally correct nō plays have even been written in English and other languages.

Dramatic Roles and their Language

All the roles in nō are performed by male actors. Women study nō singing or dancing and may perform whole plays as amateurs, but even now there are not many professional women actors. Most plays have at least one masked role, unless the face of a mature man – the actor – is suitable for that of the main character. Nō masks are often very beautiful, and a fine mask may be the very soul of a performance. The costumes of nō, too, are impressively lovely. Actors playing feminine roles do not ‘impersonate’ women in any obvious way, for acting in nō is on an entirely different plane from ordinary acting as the term is now understood. Gestures are restrained and miming highly abstract.

At the beginning of each play in this book, a list of ‘Persons in order of appearance’ gives the name or description of each person in  the play, together with the name of the mask, when one is used. Opposite the person’s name appears the name of the corresponding role-type, as defined by Japanese usage: waki, wakizure, shite (often subdivided into maeshite and nochijite), tsure, kokata, or ai. Modern Japanese editions of the plays all identify speakers by role-type rather than name, although some of the earliest nō manuscripts use names or descriptive words. The idea that role-type overrides the passing identity of a figure in a single play is characteristic of nō. Music, dance, and text are similarly built up of established ‘modules’. Consequently, although each performer (whether an actor or a musician) learns his part separately, nō performances are hardly rehearsed. All the parts fit together precisely, because of their modular structure.

The waki and wakizureIn most plays, the first person to appear is the waki (‘person on the side’ or ‘witness’). It is difficult to generalize about the waki’s identity or function, since these differ visibly from play to play. (In some later plays, the differences of function between all these role-types break down.) In principle, however, the waki watches, from the side, the display of the shite. The Monk in The Well-Cradle perfectly follows the theoretical model of a waki. Often, the waki is accompanied by companions or attendants who are called wakizure (‘companions to the waki’). These generally have little to say.

Waki and wakzure roles are performed by lineages of actors that are quite distinct from the shite lineages. Waki actors never perform shite roles. In theory, the reverse is true as well, but in fact, for various reasons, shite actors do sometimes perform as waki.

Waki figures speak in both verse and prose. Verse will be covered below, in connection with the language of the shite. As to prose, the waki’s self-introduction, at the start of the play, is a good example, and Benkei’s prose speeches, in Benkei Aboard Ship, illustrate the style at length. It is often weighty, with a high ratio of bulk to semantic content. In performance, these passages are impressive to listen to. The translator’s main difficulty is to make them sound suitably formal without allowing them to become unbearably stiff.

 The shite and tsureThe shite (‘actor’) is the centre of attention in any play that follows the classic form. The role may be subdivided into maeshite (‘shite in part one’) and nochijite (‘shite in part two’). It is the shite who is masked, and who sings and dances. Some plays have more than one, shite-like figure, and in these cases, one is the shite and the others, defined as subordinate, are called tsure (‘companion’). Tsure figures, too, can be masked, although they do not normally wear so fine a mask as the shite. Shite actors also perform tsure roles. Their major lineages are known as the five ‘schools’ of nō, discussed below. An amateur who studies nō singing (utai) and dancing (shimai) studies them as they apply to the shite roles.

Like the waki, the shite may speak either in prose or in verse, but verse dominates. Actually, the distinction between prose and verse, in most passages that involve the shite, is not nearly as clear as it is in English. There are several intermediate styles of sung prose or quasi-verse.

One of these intermediate styles is epic prose of the kind found in Heike monogatari. Another is the style used for passages that are, or that are meant to resemble, Japanese translations of Chinese poetry. In this book, passages of such language are laid out like verse, but against the left-hand margin of the text.

Most of the shite’s sung passages, in most plays, are in the metre of classical Japanese poetry: alternating five- and seven-syllable phrases. As a rule, the more intense the emotion, the more regular the metre. The waki sometimes sings similar verse or enters into sung verse dialogue with the shite.

The true poetry of nō can be extraordinarily dense and complex, even though its vocabulary is relatively restricted. The difference between the lyrical prose and the poetry of nō is roughly that between the poetry of Walt Whitman and that of Hart Crane, or between Charles Péguy and Stéphane Mallarmé. Cascades of images, telescoped into one another far beyond the limits of consecutive grammar, like double and triple exposures on film, and echoing each other in an inspired play of precise conventions, render the very concept of literal translation meaningless. The translator simply does his best (I speak of myself), sometimes not even understanding how it is that he grasps the heart of such poetry. Among these translations, Pining Wind probably comes the closest to conveying a glimpse of this kind of language.

Only one device of nō verse has been regularly attempted in these  translations, and especially in Pining Wind. This is the ‘pivot word’ (kakekotoba. A word, or even a part of a word, may mean one thing when taken with what precedes it and something else when taken with what follows. The meaning ‘pivots’ on that word. There also exist what one might call ‘pivot phrases’ or ‘pivot lines’ that go both with what precedes and what follows, although these, unlike the pivot word, do not involve a double meaning. A particularly common pivot word in these translations is ‘pine’ (‘pine tree’ and ‘to pine’), since this word corresponds precisely to the double meaning in Japanese. However, there are far more pivot words than this in the originals.

In these translations, passages originally in verse, regular or irregular, are centred on the page. Passages that look like verse but are aligned against a narrower left-hand margin are, as already explained, translated from one style or another of lyrical prose. The short passages of verse which are indented to the right of the median are poems or parts of poems quoted directly from earlier sources. A full poem makes five short lines.

The Chorus

To one side of the stage sits a chorus of about eight people. It has no identity of its own, even when it sings lines that do not clearly belong to any single figure on stage. Usually, it sings for the shite and occasionally, especially in part two of a play, for the waki. The language of chorus passages is lyrical, sung prose, or verse. Members of the chorus are all shite actors, sometimes senior ones. The chorus may have been less prominent than now in the early period of nō.

The kokataSome plays have roles for children (kokata.) These are always boys, and as a rule they are the sons of professional shite actors, in training to become professionals themselves. Kokata may have to remain silent and immobile for a long time, but when their turn comes to speak, they deliver their lines in ringing tones.

The aiMost plays include a role-type known as the ai. The word can perhaps be taken to mean, literally, ‘interlude’, since the ai’s major function is  usually to perform the interlude between parts one and two of the play. The principal purpose of this interlude is to fill in the interval while the shite actor changes costume and mask in preparation for part two. Most ai characters are local villagers.

Ai actors are not nō actors at all. Their main speciality is performing the comedies (kyōgen, ‘mad words’) that are traditionally done between nō plays. As a result, their bearing, dress, and language are quite different from those of either a shite or a waki. In the hierarchy of the nō world, the shite actor is supreme, but the waki has his own dignity. In comparison with either, the ai role is on a distinctly lower plane.

The sections of a nō play that involve the ai are not considered a part of the text proper. They are the province of the kyōgen actors, and in the past, printed nō texts omitted them entirely. Nowadays they are generally included in annotated editions, but in smaller type, and the stereotyped dialogue surrounding the ai’s major speeches may be left out. The full text of an interlude may compare in number of words with a major section of a nō play, but it goes by more quickly and is usually far less absorbing. Since print can exaggerate the ‘weight’ of an interlude, the size used for interludes here is smaller than that of the main text.

The language of the ai lacks the formality of the waki’s prose but is none the less ceremoniously verbose. Moreover, most ai speeches are delivered in an intentionally monotonous manner quite unlike the same actor’s delivery in a kyōgen play. A shite actor may scold an overly animated ai for upstaging him. A translation that conveyed the combined impact of the ai’s language and usual delivery would be unreadably dull. In these versions, the tone of the ai speeches follows the overall tone of the play. The colloquial tone adopted for the ai parts in Chikubu-shima, Benkei A board Ship, and The Mountain Crone is in keeping with the way these exceptionally lively passages are done in performance. In Benkei Aboard Ship, in particular, it is essential to convey a difference of weight and dignity between the waki, Benkei, and the ai, the Boatman.

Persons speaking for one another; inconsistencies of grammatical person

Japanese avoids specifying grammatical subject, verbs are invariant as to person or number, and nouns have no plural form. This may make the subject of a verb difficult to determine with certainty. Moreover, in  texts like these the very concept of ‘person’ may at times seem to be indistinct, or at least different from what one assumes to be normal in English. Sometimes the waki and shite seem to speak for one another, although inevitable choices of grammatical person obscure this phenomenon in English. In some Chorus passages, the reader or translator must decide from line to line who is really speaking. Finally, a speaker who seems to be in a first-person mode may suddenly shift to a third-person point of view in order to narrate his or her own actions. Various explanations of this phenomenon have been offered, but the best solution is simply to accept it.

ROYALL TYLER, educated partly in France, graduated from Harvard and obtained a doctorate in Japanese literature from Columbia University. After teaching in Canada, the United States and Norway, he moved to Australia and taught until retirement at the Australian National University. His other books include Japanese Tales (1987), French Folktales (1989), The Miracles of the Kasuga Deity (1990) and, also in Penguin Classics, The Tale of Genji (2001).

LaPiere, The Freudian Ethic: An Analysis of the Subversion of American Character

 One of the most important books of our time is the singularly courageous work of Richard LaPiere, The Freudian Ethic: An Analysis of the Subversion of American Character (Duell, Sloan & Pearce, New York; 301 pages, $5.00). The author, who is Professor of Sociology in Stanford University, has limited himself to a dispassionate and objective description of the disastrous effects on American society produced by the general acceptance of what he calls the "Freudian ethic" which has gradually and almost surreptitiously replaced the doctrine of individual responsibility and rationality that sociologists, following the lead of Max Weber, somewhat inaccurately call the "Protestant ethic." (Historically this view of human nature, which made possible all the achievements of modern civilization, may be traced directly to the Italian Renaissance.) 

Dr LaPiere begins by showing succinctly but clearly that there is no scientific basis whatsoever for the Freudian psychology. Its method is the very reverse of scientific, for it depends not on truths demonstrable by experiment and self-evident to reason, but on revelation. The Freudians unabashedly declare that a man must accept and believe in the Freudian doctrine before he is capable of recognizing the motivations of human beings. You must believe in pixies before you can tell who is pixilated. Fire is caused by unseen spirits, because people who think otherwise are not competent  to study chemistry. Such propositions can be maintained only by fanatics, and it is small wonder that, as Dr LaPiere puts it, "the Freudians profess to an omniscience that is, to the scientific mind, simply frightening." Although "a case of sorts can be made for the claim that Freudianism is a new version of Judaistic doctrine" it cannot properly be considered a religion, because "it is a doctrine of social irresponsibility and personal despair" whereas every religion necessarily imposes on its adherents ethical obligations and holds out to them a hope of becoming morally better. Freudianism is as much an inversion of religion as it is of science; it is an anarchical and purely destructive superstition. It is, in the strict sense of the word, witchcraft. 

Dr LaPiere, who carefully follows the ethically neutral methods of sociology, finds the social essence of Freudianism in its denial that man is a creature of reason and, above all, its denial that a man is responsible either toward himself or others. "The psychoanalyst.. . strives to relieve the patient of all responsibility for his difficulties, and to shift it to society." Man is the helpless victim of society, which is the only evil in the world, because it frustrates him by repressing his natural and necessary desire to commit incest with his mother and to castrate all his male children. 

Now Freudianism, in defiance of all logic and even of Freud's own conclusions, is used to disseminate and justify the grotesque belief, rapidly becoming universal in this country, thai man is an imbecile creature whom government must somehow protect from society and even from himself. 

With emotionless lucidity Dr LaPiere shows that under the influence of this delusion we are now committing national suicide. In our homes children are systematically corrupted by gullible mothers who treat them "as though man were in fact what Freud's fancy made him out to be". Our public schools perforce "strive to prevent any individual from rising above the intellectual mediocrity of the majority." Our colleges are being taken over by ignorant and feckless bureaucrats, the instinctive enemies of learning and intellectual integrity. Our government madly attempts to relieve citizens of responsibility for themselves, and therefore "necessarily becomes itself irresponsible." 

We can already see all about us the ineluctable consequences of Freudianism, "the creation of a population of indolent undisciplined, unprincipled, and incompetent people quarreling in random and fretful ways over the diminishing fruits of a dying social system." This is a book which should be read by everyone interested in the future of the United States. The sorcerers' guild will try to howl it down, and the innumerable parasites who find in "social welfare" a license to feed upon us will try to have it suppressed with either obloquy or silence. It is therefore incumbent on a reviewer to point out that Dr LaPiere has written with an extreme restraint. At seven major points, either by stopping short his analysis or by failing to raise crucial questions, he magnanimously gives the Freudians the advantage of every possible doubt. 

There is, for example, abundant evidence that, under the veneer of culture and urbanity imposed upon it by a great university, Freud's mind was hopelessly diseased. You may find the evidence for yourself even in a eulogistic biography such as Helen Walker Puner's Freud: His Life and His Mind (Grosset & Dunlap, New York, 1947). 

Someone should expound in detail the remarkable similarities between Freud's doctrine and the tenets of the Hasidim, a strange sect which flourished in eastern Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - tenets which the learned and generally sympathetic historian of Kabbalism, Dr C D Ginsburg, can explain only in terms of "the evil effects of nervous degeneration." Was Freud directly or indirectly influenced by the doctrine of the Hasidim? 

Anyone who dares to speculate concerning the motivations of Freudianism could profitably examine the appalling history of demonolatry and Satanism, which almost attained the proportions of a mass movement in western Europe at the close of the Middle Ages. 

Other inquiries will suggest themselves, but there is one question of great and immediate urgency: To what extent has this weird witchcraft been used as a subtle and terrible weapon by the Communists in their unremitting warfare on Western civilization? 

 Dr LaPiere's book should remind us of the frenzied agitation about ''mental health" which is principally financed from the three- billion dollar budget of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, although, of course, an effort is made to wheedle contributions out of every available sucker. 

The main purpose of this hypocritical propaganda is to induce fatuous Americans to waive their few remaining legal safeguards, and to confer powers of arbitrary imprisonment on "experts" — most of whom, at least, are Freudians. One wonders how many Americans realize that under the proposed legislation their sanity will be determined by persons who passionately believe that every father really wants to castrate his son, and that every boy spends his childhood in abject terror lest the old man grab a butcher knife and go to work. October 1959

Alone on the Same Side

 

One evening in the late 1940s, Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy found themselves standing together on a subway platform in uncomfortable silence. 

Though both were returning home from an editorial meeting for the magazine politics, on which they had served for some time, neither had spoken to the other since their disastrous first encounter at a party six years earlier. 

Arendt approached McCarthy and said in her typically blunt manner, “Let’s end this nonsense. We think too much alike.”1 Each then apologized and so began one of the most vital intellectual friendships of the last century. Brock Brower aptly surmises why they were able to make peace: over the years at politics, “they found that on any number of public questions they always ended up on the same side, and ‘usually alone.’”2 Carol Brightman, McCarthy’s biographer and the editor of their letters, suggests that they formed a “party of two,”3 but it is more accurate to make use of Brower’s felicitous turn of phrase: on the same side and alone. Being “alone” “on the same side” seems to me an unusually precise characterization of the detached quality of relation they sought in each other and in their political affiliations.

Their preference for going it alone has made them difficult to categorize politically. McCarthy could have been referring to herself or Arendt when she described her other close friend, the Italian drama critic and political anarchist Nicola Chiaromonte: “His ideas did not fit into any established category; he was neither on the left nor on the right. Nor did it follow that he was in the middle— he was alone.”4 (...)

Arendt’s and McCarthy’s detachment, their preference for solitude over solidarity, sets them apart from the type of political affilation later favored by the progressive social movements that emerged in the Cold War era, all of which advocated bonds of intimacy and group identification, and during which their reputations were forged. Indeed, their repudiation of both in theory, to say nothing of their refusal in practice, marked these women as pariahs within groups that expected to win their support. When the social movements of the late twentieth century recommended the healing power of empathy as the glue of solidarity and the fuel of progressive politics, Arendt and McCarthy recoiled, not from the goal of social justice, but from the path to it. It was not always easy for their readers to make this distinction. Because it is difficult to imagine ethics without empathy, Arendt and McCarthy have been perceived as psychologically cold rather than engaged in an ethical project with different assumptions. The ethical models of relation ascendant since the eighteenth century’s advancement of moral sentiment and thrust forward by the tragedies of the midcentury have tried to bring the self face-to-face with the Other. If we return to the image of two women standing side by side, facing the subway, we might imagine a countertradition of ethical relation, one that seeks not to come face-to-face with the Other but to come face-to-face with reality in the presence of others. Since reality and the Other cannot be faced at the same time, McCarthy and Arendt chose to face reality, however psychically wounding.

from the book Tough enough Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil
Deborah Nelson

Young Pessoa

Since both parents were literary in their different ways, they did not find it strange that Fernando chose words as his favorite playthings. As the small boy rode on the streetcar with his mother, it tickled him to call out each letter of the signs they passed. This caused a fellow passenger to remark on his unusual ability to recite from memory what he had previously heard his mother spell out. No, she corrected, he already recognized all the letters of the alphabet.28 By age four he was reading whole sentences.

*

While Pessoa the adult would retain certain childlike traits, the young boy named Fernando already possessed a grown-up sense of his own dignity. Shy but not easily intimidated, he despised being treated with condescension, no matter how innocent or good-humored. When a family friend from the Azores finally laid eyes on the bright five-year-old he had heard so much about, he hoisted the boy up in his arms, saying, “Pleased to meet you! I’ve been very curious to make your acquaintance.” Fernando, with his feet back on the ground, smoothed the ruffles out of his suit and commented with a dash of pique in his voice, “So now your curiosity has been satisfied.”30 Proud and independent, occasionally even insolent, Fernando was at the same time mild-mannered, timorous, preferring indoor games to rough outdoor play. He could be violent in his words, never in actions. He was also, already, a very private individual.

 *

But nothing better illustrates the boy’s intellectual precocity than his astonishing performance at school. A foreigner who arrived at Durban with practically no English, he was soon at the top of his class—and not because of his skill in mathematics. In fact, “top of his class” states only half the case, since he left his class behind and jumped ahead. Although he had had a year and a half of (probably at-home) schooling in Lisbon, his lack of English meant he had to start all over in Durban, where he completed the five-year primary school program in just three years. At a graduation ceremony on December 20, 1898, the school would award Fernando the Examination Prize for all-around academic excellence, the First Prize in Latin, and, most remarkably, the First Prize in English.20In addition to Latin, English, and arithmetic, Fernando’s class schedule during his last year of primary school included geometry, history, science, and French. Some subjects were taught on alternate days; Latin was taught every day, Monday through Friday. So was English, but the Tuesday and Thursday classes were devoted specifically to poetry. Two hours of weekly poetry instruction seems to have been a peculiarity of the convent school rather than a standard feature of the fifth-grade curriculum in South Africa. Black-robed and white-bibbed Catholic nuns, while they may not have served as inspiring muses, were the ones who instilled an early love of poetry in Fernando. It was in the form of a poem that he scrawled a warning to would-be thieves in the front of Principia Latina, his Latin primer, opposite the flyleaf where his class schedule was affixed:

Don’t steal this book

For fear of shame

For in it is

The owner’s name.

And if I catch

Him by the tail

He’ll run off

To Durban gaol.†

At the back of the textbook he wrote a bilingual message, in English and French, instructing whoever might find the book to return it to him at his home address. In February 1898 Fernando, four months away from his tenth birthday, was flaunting his still rudimentary skills as a linguist and poet.

From: PESSOA

A Biography

Richard Zenith

The Istanbul Convention is Unnecessary, Dishonest, and Dangerous

 

Riding a wave of sexual activism, the European Union proposes to endorse the Istanbul Convention, an initiative of the Council of Europe ostensibly to combat “violence against women,” and incorporate it into EU law. Yet the Convention has nothing to do with violent crime. It is a political innovation that promotes radical political ideology. Under the guise of protecting crime victims, it institutionalizes sexual ideology and transfers dangerous powers to activists engaged in gender warfare against the family, religious freedom, civil liberties, and men.

Violence of any kind is a matter for criminal law, and every jurisdiction on earth has statutory criminal prohibitions on violent assault. If a country’s criminal law is ineffective, it must be repaired (though no evidence indicates that this is the case, and even the Convention itself makes no such argument). But nothing suggests that signing an international agreement can make any difference to the efficacy of laws prohibiting criminal assault.

But the Convention cannot possibly control crime. In fact, its political purposes violate basic principles of criminal law: foremost, that law must be clear and specific. Otherwise, prosecutions can be launched over matters that are not understood to be crimes by the accused or those who sit in judgement on them. Even “violence” is defined vaguely and includes matters not comprehended under that term in plain English, French, or any other international language.

Under the Convention, violence need not be “physical” but can be “psychological” or “economic”. What precisely is “psychological” violence? No one knows, because this term can mean anything. It can be stretched to fit anything or anyone a prosecutor or a political pressure group decides to target for criminal punishment. This includes behaviors and people that most of us would not consider criminal – such as religious beliefs and believers. This is a prescription for politicizing criminal law and violating the civil liberties of innocent people.

Instead of law enforcement, the Convention makes violence a matter of “human rights.” Why? No one suggests that other crimes, like mugging or armed robbery, are “human rights” violations. Why domestic violence? By this logic, the criminal guilt and innocence of everyone would be subject to the tug-of-war of “human rights” politics. Domestic courts would become useless and guilt or innocence would be determined by a small group of political activists appointed under the Convention.

As generally accepted by most governments and most people (and, again, plain everyday speech), human rights involves curtailing repression perpetrated by governments, not acts allegedly committed by one citizen against another, which again falls under crime prevention.

Human rights accusations are, likewise, political. Accusing a government of repression does not require a legal standard of proof or due process of law for that government. One can demand that repression be stopped as a matter of policy, without presenting evidence that would meet an evidentiary standard in a courtroom, and without observing due process protections, because no one is necessarily placed in criminal jeopardy. However serious, it involves desired changes in government policy, not a finding of criminal culpability.

By accusing private individuals of “human rights” violations, the Convention removes the due process provisions that protect citizens from unjust criminal proceedings: the presumption of innocence, the right to face one’s accuser, double jeopardy, criminal standards of evidence, and so forth. A citizen accused of “domestic violence” (again, as noted above, a very vague term in itself) is treated as equivalent to a dictator who is torturing political opponents.

The difference is that, unlike the dictator, the private citizen has no public platform to speak in his own defense, and also unlike the dictator he can be criminally punished. With human rights accusations, guilt or innocence is a matter of political opinion, not legal evidence, and guilt can be decided by competition among political activists and interest groups.

confirming this, the Convention itself explicitly removes some standard due process protections: the accused may not face his accuser; proceedings are ex parte (without the accused being present to defend himself); and charges may be entered without proof that an alleged victim even exists.

In the name of eradicating “violence,” the Convention also requires institutionalizing political ideology, including behavior-modification and thought control of private citizens and political indoctrination of children by governments. Signatory governments must “take the necessary measures to promote changes in the social and cultural patterns of behaviour of women and men with a view to eradicating prejudices, customs, traditions and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority of women or on stereotyped roles for women and men.”

Who decides what constitutes “prejudices” and “stereotyped roles,” let alone what people are permitted to believe and practice in their private lives? Are religious beliefs that government officials may consider “prejudices” now crimes? What about “behaviours” in private households where men and women divide the labor according to their own preferences? Are they now criminals? Are people who share the “prejudices” and “stereotypes” accessories to “violence”.

Few of us are free from what some extremists consider “stereotypes”. Indeed, the Convention itself perpetrates stereotypes of its own, foremost the inaccuracy that only women are victims of violence and only men commit domestic violence. Decades of research clearly demonstrates otherwise. Yet no provision exists for violence against men or children. The Convention also recognizes its own Orwellian double-speak, with the stipulation that “Special measures that are necessary to prevent and protect women from gender-based violence shall not be considered discrimination under the terms of this Convention.”

But perhaps most disturbing is the role of domestic violence accusations in breaking up families. Domestic violence accusations are a well-known weapons not only in divorce proceedings but also in accusations of child abuse, and they rationalize removing one parent from the home without any finding of guilt. For this reason, violence against children could be made worse, since it is well known that most child abuse takes place in single-parent homes.

The only possible reason for this Convention is to enable radical activists to make unjust accusations against innocent people and to strip the accused of the ability to protect themselves. This Convention is breathtaking in its abrogation of basic civil liberties, and it has no place as the law governing free societies.

Stephen Baskeerville is the author of The New Politics of Sex (Angelico, 2017) and other books and peer-reviewed articles on politics, law, and theology. Professor Baskerville is scheduled to speak on “How the Istanbul Convention Undermines the Rule of Law, both Nationally and Internationally”at the Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, Faculty of Law, on March 16. An earlioer version of this article was published on the website of SAVE:

https://www.saveservices.org/2022/12/istanbul-convention-is-unnecessary-dishonest-and-dangerous/

Curtius on Du Bos

Du Bos's financial situation seemed to relieve him from the worry of choosing a profession. He came from the highest so­ cial class where both wealth and connections were inherited. 

His father was a friend of the Prince of Wales and president of the Union, one of the two most exclusive clubs in Paris. 

Charlie—as his friends called him—was naturally also voted in. What Proust would have given for such a distinction— which he could never attain. He "didn't belong." Charlie belonged, but it meant nothing to him. He was a disappointment. Only after a great deal of persuasion would he con­ descend to show up at least for the ballotting. After a few years not even then. He enjoyed his freedom from the cares of having to make a living, but he only used it to pursue his inclinations toward art, poetry, and the world of ideas. 

Baudelaire's remark, "J'ai grandi par Ie loisir" ["I have grown through leisure"] he applied in retrospect to himself. In a late entry in his Diary he happens to mention once the social type of the young man of the world who freely chooses to give up his position in society in order that he may devote his life en­ tirely to personal culture. This mondain defroqui is indebted to the sphere in which he grew up for one thing at any rate: 

from his twenty-fifth year he is definitely and radically im­ mune to any kind of snobbishness. It is true that the specious values of "society" have probably long inhibited the develop­ ment of the personality (that was how Du Bos explained his late awakening to himself). But once he has broken through to the true values, a reversal so complete takes place in him that he seizes upon truth with an earnestness unknown per­ haps, in the same degree, to others. These reflections bear an unmistakably personal stamp. For it was precisely the imper­ turbable seriousness with which he treated the greatest as well as the most negligible intellectual matters that often provoked the laughter of his friends. Even I was somewhat taken aback when, after the first greeting in Pontigny, he asked whether I had recently been studying Plotinus ("Avez-vous recem-ment pratique Plotin?"). I had never done so. But the con­ viction that all the better people reach for the Enneads on occasion, as one now and again takes up Hamlet or Faust, was a touching and ingratiating feature of that earnestness about intellectual tradition that has become rare in our day. 

From Proust's world, which touches that of Du Bos at so many points, we are acquainted with the "clubman" as a turn of the century Parisian type. At the time of his conversion to literature, Du Bos was a failed clubman. Later on he never got further than membership of the Pen Club, in which capac­ ity he spoke in London in 1923. The famous critic Sir Edmund Gosse, who was then seventy-four years old, invited him to the Marlborough and made clear to him that the Pen Club was meaningless. The Marlborough Club was something else again: the only club in London which required the king's approval for a change in the rules. In the smoking-room Charlie was presented to an old gentleman who could remem­ ber seeing his father in the salon of the Princesse de Sagan, the very one who is mentioned in Proust's novel. Gosse was high­ ly content (Du Bos less so), and now they could turn once more to literature, and in particular to Walter Pater, whom Sir Edmund had entertained thirty years earlier in those same rooms. 

The First World War had thrown Du Bos's existence off its course. Financial catastrophes plunged him into poverty and debt. He was forced to coin the exquisite treasures of his spirit into a living. That was especially hard for him as he did not have an official stamp. A professorship was out of the question; he had not taken any examinations, hence did not belong to the ranks of the university. But he didn't belong to those of literature either. He fitted no category—he was in-classable. Besides, he was completely unknown. And, in addi­ tion, of a touching ineptitude. This began with a lack of man­ ual dexterity, but it also made itself disastrously felt in his relations with publishers, journals, and the well-regulated game of the Paris vie litteraire, with its tacitly assumed com­ promises and conventions. Not only had Charlie never learned how to shave himself; he did not even know how to fill his fountain pen. So he had to carry an entire battery of pens with him and take them once a week to a stationery store for re­ filling. One was amazed that he could actually fill his beloved pipe by himself, but "he seemed even to smoke it with a slight affectation of realism," as M. Saint-Clair has so charmingly put it.8

Not only was he incapable of satisfying the most modest demands of the technical world, he was also unable to adjust himself to social and economic techniques. Once we boarded an overcrowded express and could only find seats in a first-class compartment (in which, by the way, was sitting an old friend of Charlie's, Edith Wharton, who, at once mundane and modern, wrote for the public orphaned by the death of Henry James). In an access of quite unfounded embarrass­ ment CharUe explained to me that formerly he had, of course, used only the first class, but now. . . . Then, when we got out at the Gare d'Orleans, Charlie, not without a touch of osten­ tation, obeyed a prompting of his moral scrupulosity. He managed to create a traffic jam at the gate of the track by insisting on paying the surcharge for crossing over to first class, to the great annoyance of the functionary on duty as well as of the stream of people at our heels. However, on a trip from Pontigny to Avalon, while searching for a better hotel (the room that had been reserved for him in the Chapeau Rouge faced the kitchen), he could also succumb to the dangerous allures of the Post Hotel, because the rooms on the first floor gave off an inner courtyard ("une sorte de modeste patio") that was overlooked by an open gallery, "ού avec mes incurables et nostalgiques visees claustrales, je vis un promenoir meditatif tout designe" ["where, with my in­ curable and nostalgic monastic aims, I saw a covered walk just right for meditation"]. So CharHe rents this secular monastic cell and finds out too late that it has no electric light, that in order to breathe it is necessary to leave the window open and thus to be constantly disturbed by the coming and going of the guests, and on top of that to sustain "a well-trained assault of fleas." After our early meeting in Berlin I had lost sight of him completely. When I saw him again at Pontigny in 1922 and 1924 we discovered so many admirations in common (the co­ ordinates were set by Giorgione and Walter Pater) that we soon became best friends. At that time I was still in quest of a France founded upon the assumptions of a general Euro­ pean mind. For that reason it made me happy to know that Gide could not live without Goethe, Shakespeare, Dostoev­ ski; that he loved Browning; that Larbaud was "naturalizing" Whitman and Joyce in France. But neither Gide nor Maurois nor Martin Du Gard nor Jacques Riviere (the prominent men at those "Decades") had any affinity with that which, for short, I will call "metaphysics," and which constitutes an es­ sential element in German life. Du Bos possessed it. To his mind Novalis was more exciting than Laclos, Meister Eck-hart more challenging than Stendhal. To be able to make this discovery at the time was overwhelming. But I soon no­ ticed that no one at Pontigny saw Du Bos as I did. People did not seem to know what they had in him. And yet it was a very carefully sifted, very advanced French public that Paul Desjardins (1859-1940) summoned to Pontigny. In the struggles between church and state during the Third Repub­ lic Desjardins had attracted attention as the advocate of an unecclesiastical idealism, first by his book Le devoir present4 (1892), then by founding the Union pour la νέήίέ. "Per­ haps you have never read Paul Desjardins," says a character in Proust.5 "He is now transformed, as I hear, into a kind of preacher monk, but in the old days. . . ." During a long life Desjardins had been able to make many valuable contacts and collect valuable memories: as a boy he had carried Corot's paintbox; in 1886 he had attended the cinquecenten-nial celebration of Heidelberg University and sent witty dis­ patches about it to the Paris newspapers in the late style of Renan; he had offered Tolstoy the same armchair that the visitor to his studio occupied; Proust had been his pupil, Bergson his fellow-student; he was a friend of Marshal Lyau-tey. All these experiences, in one way or another, stood theDecades at Pontigny in good stead. The intellectual elite that foregathered in the renovated Cistercian abbey under the motto of Saint Bernard (as a lay spiritualist Desjardins had had pristina nec periit pietas chiseled into the wall of the en­ trance hall), though receptive to the elegance with which Du Bos conducted the Decade on poetry and mysticism (as Andre Gide's Journal for 3 September 1922 attests), was nevertheless not prepared to admire him as I did at the time —and stated in a German periodical (Die Literatur, October 1925). The relations between Du Bos, who in conversation liked to call himself "France's last individualist," and Desjardins, who thought of the individual as "a legal fiction of the modern western world" (whose "dissolution" he believed he could detect in Proust), were strained, and this strain, though unavowed, has left traces in Du Bos's "Diaries." Was it Andre Gide who brought Du Bos to Pontigny? The two had met in March 1911, at the home of Jacques-fimile Blanche (1861-1942),6 which served as a residence for art­ ists. With its garden that resembled a park and its spacious ease it reminded the visitor of one of those English country houses from which many of Blanche's models came. A con­ nection was soon established. Their correspondence begins in May 1911. In October 1914, the friends found the relief or­ ganization Le Foyer Franco-Beige. This collaboration can seem surprising, however much it may do both of them credit. 

Neither the immoralist who had just charmed and outraged the public with his Caves du Vatican, nor the spiritual aes­ thete who entered rare moments in his unpublished journal as a composer notes down new combinations of sound, seemed to possess the qualifications for handling the administrative details of a social relief organization. Du Bos, to be sure, brought to the task a lifelong need to pry into other people's souls. To practice moral casuistry upon the Uving person, to bend confidentially over mental anguish, to receive confi­ dences and confessions—that had always attracted him. Al­ though not founded for this purpose, the Foyer Franco-Beige offered opportunities for such exchanges. Du Bos's friends have preserved a remark he is supposed to have made to a refugee from Belgium: "Madame, la complexite de votre cas me plonge dans la consternation."7 This sentence, which one recalled with a mixture of tenderness, irony, and humor, con­ tains many of Charlie's peculiarities: a certain solemnity, a certain ceremonious politeness, much stylistic gravity, and a great deal of unworldliness.

From: Essays on European Literature Μ By E. R. Curtius Translated by Michael Kowal

Hermann Keyserling: The condition of the Buddhist is a happy one

The condition of the Buddhist is a happy one, for he longs for nothing more than to escape from his particularised existence; the condition of the modern European is tragic, for he is consumed by a passion for exist­ence; he regards himself as impotent in so far as he fails of self-realisation. To deny existence absolutely, that saving grace of the Buddhistic nihilist, is an impossibility to the vital European. Therefore precisely the same circumstance which made the teaching of Buddha take root in Ceylon, caused at home the success of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s doctrine of the superman is not an expression of greatness, but an ex­ pression of the desire for greatness, perhaps the most pathetic expression of that desire which has ever been known.
*
How I long for Nirvana! How I long for an existence where creation is not over-powerful, where nature does not smother the mind with its luxuriance! How I long for a non­ individual, non-defined condition of existence, in which I could be free from all that binds me now, free from joy and sorrow, free from gods and men, and free from myself.
*
While studying the teachings of Buddha I frequently asked myself whether he wished to make plants of men; there is no doubt that he did so. His teaching aims so strongly at the unification of life that the beings who have followed it were bound to develop towards what is common to all. The passivity of the Buddhist has no other significance but that he is a plant-like being.
*
I must confess that the Buddhist priest surprises me by the level to which he attains. I do not mean his mental level but his human one; his type is superior to that of the Christian priest. He possesses a gentleness, a capacity for understanding, a benevolence, an ability to rise above events which even the most prejudiced person would scruple to describe as charac­ teristic of the average Christian priest. The reason for this is undoubtedly the perfect disinterestedness which Buddhism develops in its disciples. In theory it may seem more beautiful to live for others instead of for oneself, but if you take men as they are, active love of their neighbours does not make them more generous but more mean in heart; it is only in exceptional cases that it does not develop into importunity and tyranny.

How tactless are all the people who insist on improving their fellows! How narrow-minded are the missionaries! No matter how open-hearted a man be by nature — no matter if the faith he confesses be the most universal in the world — the mere desire for proselytising limits him, for psychologically it always signifies the same thing: the imposition of your own view upon another human being. Anyone who does this is ipso facto limited, and anyone who does it continuously or even professionally must needs become more and more limited from day to day. For this reason meanness, aggressiveness, tyranny, lack of tact and lack of understanding, are typical traits of the Christian and especially of the Protestant priest.

A religion such as Buddhism, which teaches the care for per­ sonal salvation as the only motive in existence, is incapable of evoking such traits. It would appear that in their place Budd­ hism should develop the crassest egoism, but this does not happen for two reasons: firstly, personal salvation in Buddhism does not imply the eternal bliss of the individual but, on the contrary, the liberation from the limits of individuality; egoistic desires therefore signify misunderstanding, because beneficence and compassion appear to the Buddhist as virtues whose practice favours and accelerates more than anything else the liberation from the ego. It is this combination of the ideals of disinterestedness and love of your neighbour, then, which has produced that atmosphere which above everything else gives its superiority to Buddhism. I mean the specifically Buddhist form of charity. Charity in the Christian sense means wishing to do good; in the Buddhist sense it means wanting to let every one come into his own at his own level.
And this does not imply any indifference to the condition in which another man finds himself, it means that it implies the sympathetic understanding for the positive qualities of every condition. According to the general Indian point of view every man stands precisely on the level to which he belongs, to which he has risen or fallen by his own deserts. Every state therefore is inwardly justified. Of course it would be desirable that every one should reach the highest level, but this cannot be attained by a jump but only by a slow and gradual rise, and each level has its special ideal. Whilst Christianity, as long as it was ascetic, judged the life of the world to be inferior to that of the monk and would have loved to place the whole of man­ kind at one swoop into the cloister, Buddhism, whose attitude is in principle more inimical to the world than the original Christian attitude and regards the condition of the monk expressly as the highest form of life, nevertheless refrained from condemning the lower states for the sake of the higher ones. Every state is necessary and in so far as it is necessary it is good. The blossom does not deny the leaf and the leaf does not deny the stalk nor the stalk the root. To be friendly to man does not imply the desire to change all the leaves into blossoms, but it does imply letting the leaves be leaves and understanding them lovingly. This marvellous and superior form of love is written on the most insignificant face of every Buddhist priest. Now I am no longer surprised at the unparalleled veneration which the Buddhist priest enjoys among the people. At first sight it seems paradoxical that the man who is disinterested should enjoy more veneration than the one who actively concerns himself for the benefit of his fellows; in practice this is the same everywhere. Men do not wish to be tutored; he who tries to convince others is at much greater pains to do so than the man who unintentionally and without ulterior motives does for himself what seems right to him. The intentless, selfless, pure life which the Bhikshu leads is, according to Buddhist theories, the highest which a man can lead. Thus he who serves the monks, serves his own ideal.

from the book The travel diary of a philosopher. Vol. 1 by Hermann Keyserling

Georg Trakl - THE RATS

 

Into the yard the autumn moon shines white.
From the roofs edge fantastic shadows fall,
In empty windows silence dwells;
The rats then quietly steal to the surface

And dart whistling hither and thither
And ahorrid vaprous breath wafts
After them out of the sewer
Through which the ghostly moonlight trembles

And they brawl, maddened with greed
And crowd the house and barns
That are filled with corn and fruit.
Icy winds grizzle in the dark.

Translated from the German  Alexander Stillmark

Borges - The Mirror of Enigmas

The idea that the Sacred Scriptures have (aside from their literal value) a symbolic value is ancient and not irrational: it is found in Philo of Alexandria, in the Cabalists, in Swedenborg. Since the events related in the Scriptures are true (God is Troth, Truth cannot lie, etc.), we should admit that men, in acting out those events, blindly represent a secret drama determined and pre- meditated by God. Going from this to the thought that the history of the universe-and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives-has an incalculable, symbolical value, is a rea- sonahle step. Many have taken that step; no one so astonishingly as Leon Bloy. (In the psychological fragments by Novalis and in that volume of Machen's autobiography called The London Adventure there is a similar hypothesis: that the outer world- forms, temperatures, the moon-is a language we humans have forgotten or which we can scarcely distinguish . . . It is also declared by De Quincey: 1 "Even the articulate or brutal sounds of the globe must be all so many languages and ciphers that somewhere have their corresponding keys-have their own grammar and syntax; and thus the least things in the universe must be secret mirrors to the greatest.")

A verse from St. Paul (I Corinthians, 13: 12) inspired Leon Bloy. Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate: tunc autenz facie ad faciem. Nunc cognosco ex parte: tunc autem cognoscam sicut et cog;nitus sum. Torres Amat has miserably translated: "At present we do not see God except as in a mirror and beneath dark images; but later we shall see him face to face. I only know him now imperfectly; but later I shall know him in a clear vision, in the same way that I know myself." 49 words do the work of 22; it is impossible to be more languid and verbose. Cipriano de Valera is more faithful: "Now we see in a mirror, in darkness; but later we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; but later I shall know as I am known." Torres Amat opines that the verse refers to our vision of the divinity; Cipriano de Valera (and Leon Bloy), to our general vision of things.

So far as I know, Bloy never gave his conjecture a definitive form. Throughout his fragmentary work (in which there abound, as everyone knows, lamentations and insults) there are different versions and facets. Here are a few that I have rescued from the clamorous pages of Le mendiant ingrat, Le Vieux de la Montagne and L'invendable. I do not believe I have exhausted them: I hope that some specialist in Leon Bloy (I am not one) may complete and rectify them.

The first is from June 1894. I translate it as follows; "The statement by St. Paul: Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate would be a skylight through which one might submerge himself in the true Abyss, which is the soul of man. The terrifying im- mensity of the firmament's abysses is an illusion, an external reflection of our own abysses, perceived 'in a mirror.' We should invert our eyes and practice a sublime astronomy in the infinitude of our hearts, for which God was willing to die . . . If we see the Milky Way, it is because it actually exists in our souls."

The second is from November of the same year. "I recall one of my oldest ideas. The Czar is the leader and spiritual father of a hundred fifty million men. An atrocious responsibility which is only apparent. Perhaps he is not responsible to God, but rather to a few human beings. If the poor of his empire are oppressed during his reign, if immense catastrophies result from that reign, who knows if the servant charged with shining his boots is not the real and sole person guilty? In the mysterious dispositions of the Profundity, who is really Czar, who is king, '\vho can boast of being a mere servant?"

The third is from a letter written in December. "Everything is a symbol, even the most piercing pain. We are dreamers who shout in our sleep. We do not know whether the things afHicting us are the secret beginning of our ulterior happiness or not. We now see, St. Paul maintains, per speculum in a.enigmate, literally: 'in an enigma by means of a mirror' and we shall not see in any other way until the coming of the One who is all in flames and who must teach us all things."

The fourth is from May 1904. "Per speculum in aenigmate, says St. Paul. We see everything backwards. When we believe we give, we receive, etc. Then ( a beloved, anguished soul tells me) we are in Heaven and God suffers on earth."

The fifth is from May 1908. "A terrifying idea of Jeanne's, about the text Per speculum. The pleasures of this world would be the torments of Hell, seen backwards, in a mirror."

The sixth is from 1912. It is each of the pages of L'Ame de Napoleon, a book whose purpose is to decipher the symbol Napoleon, considered as the precursor of another hero-man and symbol as well-who is hidden in the future. It is sufficient for me to cite two passages. One: "Every man is on earth to symbolize something he is ignorant of and to realize a particle or a mountain of the invisible materials that will serve to build the City of God." The other: "There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is. No one knows what he has come into this world to do, what his acts correspond to, his sentiments, his ideas, or what his real name is, his enduring Name in the register of Light . . . History is an immense liturgical text where the iotas and the dots are worth no less than the entire verses or chapters, but the importance of one and the other is indeterminable and profoundly hidden."

The foregoing paragraphs will perhaps seem to the reader mere gratuities by Bloy. So far as I know, he never took care to reason them out. I venture to judge them verisimilar and per- haps inevitable within the Christian doctrine. Bloy (I repeat) did no more than apply to the whole of Creation the method which the Jewish Cabalists applied to the Scriptures. They thought that a work dictated by the Holy Spirit was an absolute text: in other words, a text in which the collaboration of chance was calculable as zero. This portentous premise of a book impenetrable to contingency, of a book which is a mechanism of infinite purposes, moved them to permute the scriptural words, add up the numerical value of the letters, consider their form, observe the small letters and capitals, seek acrostics and anagrams and perform other exegetical rigors which it is not difficult to ridicule. Their excuse is that nothing can be contingent in the work of an infinite mind. Leon Bloy postulates this hieroglyphical character-this character of a divine writing, of an angelic cryptography-at all moments and in all beings on earth. The superstitious person believes he can decipher this organic writing: thirteen guests form the symbol of death; a yellow opal, that of misfortune.

It is doubtful that the world has a meaning; it is even more doubtful that it has a double or triple meaning, the unbeliever will observe. I understand that this is so; but I understand that the hieroglyphical world postulated by Bloy is the one which best befits the dignity of the theologian's intellectual God.

No man knows who he is, affirmed Uon Bloy. No one could illustrate that intimate ignorance better than he. He believed himself a rigorous Catholic and he was a continuer of the Cabalists, a secret brother of Swedenborg and Blake: heresiarchs.

Translated by J. E. I.

Charles Du Bos

Educated in France, England, and Germany in the most select schools, Charles Du Bos was an avid reader, who considered that encountering an author was meant to transform one’s life. A man who valued spiritual life above ail else, he points out that he was born in 1889, the year Henri Bergson published the Essay sur les donnees immediates de la conscience (Essay on the immediate givens of the conscience; translated as Time and Free Will). He wrote that he owed to Bergson “what in me is myself,” according to the type of spiritual expression also found in Paul Claudel. This spiritual bent led Du Bos to convert from theism to Catholicism in 1927.

At the time of his death, Du Bos had published only a small part of his writings; most readers knew him for his Approximations (1921-37), a seven-volume collection of critical essays and lectures. In 1929 he also published a collection of extracts from his journal, as well as passages in various scholarly magazines. Today readers know him because of his dialogues with Andre Gide.

Most of Du Bos’ publication is posthumous. Nevertheless, in 1939 he was well received in England, where he represented a new kind of French criticism, less attached to reason and lucidity, and more sincerely emotional, according to Charles Morgan. On the continent he had a limited following: Albert Bcguin, Georges Poulet, and the brilliant Jean Starobinski may be cited as inheritors of his critical tradition. Du Bos met numerous authors, including Marcel Proust, Bernard Berenson, Ernst Robert Curtius, Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Simmel, Andre Maurois, Herbert Dieckmann, Stephane Mallarme, Paul Valery, Edith Wharton, Percy Lubbock, and Marguerite Yourcenar; he became close friends with Gidc. Du Bos admired Gide as an author, and shared his spiritual concerns, though he eventually rejected his evangelical leanings. Their friendship is somewhat reminiscent of that of Montaigne and La Boctic: Du Bos felt that he was engaged in a dialogue with Gide “in the margins” of his writings. In 1931, when their friendship declined, Du Bos’ assessment was that Gidc’s “rigorous” and sober literary style displayed a lack of imagination, and an “intricacy” devoid of “complexity.”

Du Bos’ written production is threefold: literary and aesthetic analysis (Approximations); his autobiographical Journal (composed 1901-39, published in complete form 1946-61); and literary theory with What Is Uteraturef (1940), a piece composed in English and made up of four lectures on Keats and Shelley, delivered in 1938 at the University of Notre Dame, where he briefly taught. There is much debate as to which of his works is most important, but in 1918 Gide told Du Bos not to abandon his Journal, for this would be his completed oeuvre. As did many of his friends, Gide considered Du Bos essentially a man of dialogue.

One of the major themes of Dubosian criticism stems from a reaction against the 1913-14 popular conviction that literature is divorced from life. Du Bos repeats that literature and life are one: in Approximations, he declares that 44life owes more to literature than literature to life,” for literature survives life. He lives through the authors he selects, gathering his essays and critical reflections in Approximations and his Journal. His manner of composing agreed with his method of literary perception, exploring the musical “tempo’’ of an author and the harmonics (or Baudelaircan “correspondences’4) resulting from it. Francois Mauriac pointed out that Du Bos was criticized for being so biographical that “one would forget the authors he studied ever wrote.” The method of “approximation” relates to an exploration of the author’s essential identity, defined not so much by what is said, but rather by what the author cannot refrain from repeating – the monotony inherent to individual genius. *I*he Approximations have been compared to an encyclopedia of Du Bos’ favorite European authors, such as Browning, Carlyle, and Keats, from whom he borrowed: “I have relapsed into those abstractions which are my only life.”

Compared to the volumes of Approximations, the Journal is at once more intimate and more fragmentary. The contingencies of daily life are often points of departure for literary essays – for instance, bright insights into the creative psychology of Flaubert and Degas. Sometimes a sentence begun in French ends in English. An occasional day will be recorded entirely in English. The fragmentary aspect allowed by the diary form suits Du Bos. He thus avoids the unified coherence of the thesis essay and the task of forcibly organizing materials within a given frame (in 192.1 he had already refused to give cohesion to his collection of Approximations).

Marie-Anne Gouhier (1951) notes Du Bos’ frequent use of parentheses and inserted propositions in Approximations. The same could be observed in his Journal. She finds that he needed to integrate ideas complementary or external to the main thrust of his thought without compromising the linearity of his expression. She believes this facet corresponds to a necessity’ for temporal simultaneity’, when a new explanation, a pause for reflection, traverses the text without interrupting it. This method of writing parallels Bergson’s conversational style with Du Bos. The philosopher said to him that “Genius consists in … keeping in contact with an internal current,” and Du Bos observed that “Bergson thinks aloud in front of you, approves your answer, and continues his thought, without ever an exchange, properly speaking” (Journal, 19**)- Du Bos’ friends described him as a great conversationalist, who always penetrated his interlocutor’s thoughts and showed great receptiveness; but his parenthetical style in Approximations and the Journal resembles an internal Bcrgsonian-Dubosian dialogue which the readers are invited to witness. A common point between his oral and written expression may have been that he used both to think, explore, and weigh, as in Montaigne’s “balance perenne” (eternal movement of the scales!. Yet passages from his journal explain why Du Bos preferred Pascal to Montaigne: Pascal proceeded by a series of provisory* certainties, proving to be a resolute, decisive genius inherently necessitating the “parti pris” (Journal, 1923). It is in this spirit that one may understand Du Bos’ certainties.

According to his wife’s testimony, in 1911 Du Bos began dictating the Journal to save time. But in 19×8 he was taking as much care with it as with any of his writings. During the last ten years of his life, he apparently dictated (and occasionally wrote) his Journal in a masterful deliver}’ exempt from hesitations. In his effort to pinpoint the essential qualities of the authors he studied, Du Bos focused on the “soul* his intuition pursued.

This idea was developed fully in “Literature and the Spirit,” the first part of What Is Literature?. In it, the conversation tends to become a catechism. Questions about literature must be answered by the scriptures, which clearly state the meaning of life. The text proceeds by a series of metaphysical equations: “Intellects are God”; they arc souls which become theselves by means of the heart; life reaches self-consciousness in creating; literary creation is God’s Creation; creation is emotion; the Creator gives himself and receives the artist’s joy. Thus, Marcelin Pleynet and Michele Leleu (in Charles Du Bos, edited by Dominique Bourel and Hubert Join, 1985) find that Du Bos was somewhat foreign to skepticism. It is difficult to pinpoint the cause of this change of tone. Ian D. McFarlanc (1981) notes a “puzzling lack of reference to Montaigne,” whom Du Bos had saluted for his “heroism of non-heroism” in 193}. Du Bos seems to have shied away from Montaigne’s “prudence and moderation” for the sake of “warmth and audacity,” preferring the “pathetic spirituality” of Pascal, Baudelaire, and Peguy.

In “What Is Literature Du Bos advocates a “creative reading” equal to writing, whereby literature becomes consubstantial to its readers. “Literature and Light” shows that culture is a study in perfection, with each literary piece the meeting point of two souls, initiated in wordless communication in the spiritual world. “Literature and Beauty” demonstrates that beauty is order, mathematical and moral, and humans’ raison d’etre. “Literature and the Word” criticises Hamlet’s “words, words, words” to describe books, and Faust’s transformation of “In the beginning was the word” into “was the action” – Du Bos would have preferred “was the act” because the word is active. It is the Word made flesh. In his conclusion to What Is Literature? Du Bos called for the advent of a true Catholic literature to the world.

Du Bos intended to reach a plenitude that the journal form could not reach, because, as he observed during a 1914 discussion with Gide, Goethe once wrote to Lavatar that a journal was composed predominantly during moments of emptiness and depression, thus under-representing the moments of possession and joy. Perhaps, then, the four lectures from Notre Dame form the complementary counterpart to Du Bos’ Journal.

https://www.custom-essay.net/charles-du-bos/

See also
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00397709.1947.10113437?journalCode=vsym20

These non-flying animals that lack any gratuity: human beings

The “isolation” is a dark cell, which has some sort of table or stone bed and a hole for a wc. When you are in isolation, one day you do not get food, but only a bowl with warm water at noon, and one day you get half of the portion. As I am only in my shirt, I begin to do some exercises, to warm up. After half an hour, somebody else is thrown in, also in a shirt only.

“Now you can laugh together,” the guard says and locks us up.

I look at my suffering companion, and I see that he smiles indeed.

“It happens,” he says friendly.
“Why did they punish you?” I whisper.
“They found a pearl button during the search.”
“ And?”
“You don’t know? With a pearl button on a string, you can produce a spark, and then you can light a cigarette or the fire in the stove, if it is quenched.”

He is already an expert, and he teaches me to sit on the stone bed, back to back, to warm up. He begins to tell me:

“I’ve been here for two years, and I still have three reasons for joy. We had meetings at my job — I was an economist — and we were getting bored, of course. We could not laugh even at the jokes told by the speaker coming from human resources — as you know, they had received the order to sprinkle the sandwiches they read with a joke. So I taught 2–3 colleagues to laugh heavily three times: ha-ha-ha, at every joke. Our laughter caught on, and the whole room adopted it. For a while, it was all good, but in the third or the fourth meeting, the politruk† took notice.

He investigated the case and ended up getting to me, since I was known as someone who enjoyed making jokes. Realizing that they wanted to arrest me, I ran away from home. I didn’t want to hide at a friend’s place because I did not want to get him into trouble, so I traveled by train all over the country for a couple of years. I got used to no longer pay for a ticket, and I felt at home in the train. Then I got bored, so I turned myself in. I was condemned as instigator and enemy of the popular order.

“In reality, I don’t only like to laugh, but I am also interested in the problem of laughter. I had begun to look into it even before prison. It’s quite something, laughter in humans. Reading and meditating about laughter, I noticed an aspect that we don’t always consider: man laughs especially, if not exclusively, about man. Laughter is social. But it is also something extremely personal, and I was particularly interested in this line, so that I could understand people. How does each laugh? I had begun keeping a list: there is Homeric laughter, out of all your heart laughter, laughing out loud, laughing from the tip of your lips, ironical or sardonic, sour, bitter, or yellow laughter; laughing in his beard, and laughing at someone’s beard, hysterical, idiotic, or intelligent laughter, clear or stuffy laughter, and so many more that deserve to be catalogued.”
“Of course,” he continues, “just as it is interesting to see about what people laugh, it is also interesting to see why. One can even arrange historical eras on this theme. The medieval man, as well as the ancient man, laughed at things different from us. When I began studying the problem, I fell upon the case of the ancient sage Parmeniskos, who realized at a certain moment that he could no longer laugh. He then went to the oracle to get back his laughter, but he did not. Only upon his return, seeing a clumsy wooden statue of Apollo’s great mother, he burst into laughter. I don’t even mention the goddess Demeter who, af t er the kidnapping of her daughter, Persephone, to Hades, wandered and no longer laughed, until she saw Baubo, the wife of her host, raising up her dress. There must be something in these legends, just as it remains a problem why yellow people laugh less than white people. But I did not go too far with my investigation; af t er all, the question of what people and eras laugh at is a problem of the history of human culture and nature, and it is beyond me.

“I am only interested in how people laugh. And not how they laugh in general, but each in particular. Since I imitate others well, I was making people laugh imitating the laughter of human types — the star, the idiot, the boss — or of colleagues and people of the day. Then I looked into how the main characters of books laugh, and I want to read again, when I am set free, Dickens or Balzac, to see how their heroes were laughing. Th is is how I got to the laughter of historical figures. I wondered how Napoleon or the Duke of Wellington laughed, or Henry VIII, or Philippo Nerri, that saint of whom people say he was joyful. I could imagine the laughter of Francis of Assisi, because it certainly was the natural laughter of the man pure at heart. But when I wondered how Jesus may have laughed, I stopped.”

We were both silent for a while. There was something interesting in this easiness that ended in gravity. The man I was next to seemed to be a “free” man. In any case, he seemed to be detached from all things.

“How could you bear wandering on trains for so long?” I ask him.

“ At the beginning it was wonderful. Just think about it, to have no roots, no fixed point, no home, job, nor any destination — such freedom! I felt that all people are just plants around me. I had saved a small sum of money, so I could leave in any direction, with the overcoat on one hand and the suitcase in another. Of course, I was choosing the trains with a long and cheap route. I was like a spirit flowing freely among the other travelers, who were heavy with matter, worries, and purpose, as they were.

I noticed only then the full stupidity of the traveler, the stupidity of a boulder thrown into a running river. ‘Is this the train that goes to…?’ ‘Haven’t I missed the direction?’ ‘Where should I put my suitcase?’ He doesn’t know anything, he doesn’t understand anything, and his only human reaction is fear. Then, the boulder gets lighter, and it begins to roll as well, but it remains a boulder.* I was talking to people, finding out what was happening in the world and, at times, interesting things about them, but, after all, I was defying them with my freedom. They wanted to and had to arrive some place. They had a dependency; they were Greeks.*How terrified they were when the train was late, which was a blessing for me! I felt as if I had a personal airplane. I truly believe that man will not travel happily unless he has a personal airplane, just like the birds, and not in cages, as now, on railways, roads, or airways previously given.

“However, I cannot hide the fact that I was participating in the life of these non-flying animals that lack any gratuity: human beings. When there was some serious delay, I was making comments, gathering info, and ending by protesting with a greater indignation than that of the others. I had all the interest to delay; still, at times, I also felt the need to arrive precisely nowhere. At the end of the line, I was coming off the train, looking for a room close to the train station, recovering, and then going back on the road. Money was getting scarce. After a year or so, I started to travel without paying, pe blat,† as one says.”

“How do you travel pe blat?”

“There are two kinds of blat: one is arranged with the conductors, the other one at your own risk. If you want to risk it, without any arrangement, you can only do it on short distances.
I had to prefer the arrangement. At the beginning of the trip, before departing, I was walking on the platform, carefully watching the conductors. Depending on their human type, I would decide whether I could try it or not. I used to travel in second class, which was filled with people. But sometimes, a conductor would let me sleep in first class for a small amount of money. He took tickets from those who were coming off the train and put one into my pocket. If there was an inspection, I could say that I fell asleep and forgot to get down at my stop. Others took my identity card with them, so that they could say to an in inspector that they were about to write me a report. It was good when there were overcrowded trains, but this could not take place all the time. When we were many travelers, especially students, it was calmer: the conductor let us know when the inspection came.

If there was only one inspector, I could avoid it. It was harder when there was an inspection ‘in pincers,’ with two inspectors from each end of the train, who caught you in the middle. You would hear them ticketing, and you would run from one to the other. In despair, you would get up on the roof of the train car and get down further in the back. One time, someone caught me by the hand, when the train was about to leave. It was the inspector. Another time, I was next to a group of Soviet tourists.

I pretended I was also a tourist, speaking with them in Russian as well as I could. They realized what I wanted, and they saved me. They told me that people were practicing this sport in their country as well, and they call the clandestine travelers ‘rabbits.’ “ And, indeed, this is the bad aspect, that you feel like a rabbit.

You need to have great awareness, and you cannot join longer conversations with anyone, you cannot read a book, you cannot lose yourself in thoughts. Even independently of the risks associated with traveling pe blat, my life had become a rabbit life. What did I still have of the freedom I have assumed? I only had the run. That’s all: I could run anywhere. After two years, I started to miss chairs, carpets, and people, other kinds of people than the spectral ones I was meeting in train. I was missing trees that would not move and grass. I gave myself in.”
“I don’t think you found many carpets here, in prison,” I say.
“No,” he answered (and I sensed he was doing it with a smile), “but I kept a magic carpet, the taste for flying. Even here, among people so heavy with so many troubles, I feel like a light being.
I try to make people talk, dream. Haven’t you sensed how much and how well one can dream here?”

In three days, we were separated.

“Look for me when you get out,” he said. “My name is Ernest. Ask for Ernest at the City Hall, the Economic Services depart-ment; all know me.”
“How do you know they would take you back?”
“I’m sure of it. Th ey need people like me; I am happy and I make people laugh. Th eir world is so sad…”

Pray for brother Alexander by Constantin Noica