Paul Valery - Analects I

Taste is made of a host of distastes.
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Critics at large.
Scene: an exhibition of painting. A picture with two men in front of it.
One of them, leaning on the rail, is talking, explaining, raising his voice. The other says nothing. His air of bland politeness suggests that his thoughts are elsewhere. He lends his ear, but not his mind. He is in the Park, at the Stock Exchange, or visiting some lady friend; one couldn't be further away with so much tact and physical proximity.

Two paces behind them, a man who looks like an artist is watching me; his eyes convey all his scorn for these boom­ing explanations, audible some distance off.

As for me, posted in the foreground of this little scene, observing simultaneously the picture, the two friends, and the painter behind them, able to hear all the talker says and read the look in the eyes of the man who's sizing him up— I feel I contain them all and so possess a consciousness of a higher order, a supreme jurisdiction; I can bless or sentence everybody, misereor super turbam. . . .

But soon another thought dislodges me from this god­ like eminence whence I have been surveying the strata of opinions. I feel only too well that chance has placed me here; so in the end I don't know what to think . . . and nothing gives more food for thought.
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Nothing is more "original," nothing more "oneself" than to feed on others. But one has to digest them. A lion is made of assimilated sheep.
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The fear of being laughed at, and the dread of being dull; of having people point at you, and of passing unnoticed— parallel abysses.
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Novelty. The cult of novelty.
The new is one of those poisonous stimulants which end up by becoming more necessary than any food; drugs which, once they get a hold on us, need to be taken in progressively larger doses until they are fatal, though we'd die without them.

It's a curious habit, growing thus attached to that perish­able part of things in which, precisely, their novelty consists.

But it is surely obvious that these upstart ideas need to be given a certain air of nobility; that they should seem not the fruit of haste but gradually matured; not unusual, but ideas that have existed for ages; not made and found this morning, but merely forgotten and retrieved.
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An exclusive penchant for what is new and merely new points to a degeneration of the critical faculty, for nothing is easier than to gauge the "novelty" of a work.
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(...)
You set out to make a certain book?
"Well," I ask, "have you made it? What were you aiming at?
"Were you aspiring to scale the heights or to gain material rewards: pecuniary success or a feather in your cap? Or perhaps you had a less obvious purpose; perhaps you wished to appeal only to a few of your acquaintances, or even to a single one whom you hoped to 'get at' by the detour of a published work?
"Whom did you want to entertain? Whom did you want to beguile, to rival, to madden with envy; whose mind to preoccupy, and whose nights to haunt? Tell me, gentle Author, was it Mammon, Demos, Caesar, or maybe God, whom you were serving? Venus, perhaps—and perhaps a little of all five together.
"So now let's see how you went about it. . . ."
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(...)
But there are men whose hearing, healthy though it is, fails to distinguish sounds from noises.
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What is most "human." Some think that the duration of works depends on their "humanness," their endeavor to be true to life.
Yet what could be more enduring than certain works of fantasy?
The untrue and the wonderful are more human than the "real" man.
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Nearly all the books I prize, and absolutely all that have been of any use to me, are books that don't make easy reading.

One's mind may stray from them, it cannot skim them.

Some have helped me, despite their difficulty; others, because they were difficult.
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Two sorts of books: those which act as stimulants and merely stir up what I already have within me; and those which pro­ vide nourishment whose substance will be transmuted into mine. From these latter I shall derive forms of speaking or thinking, or else precise resources and ready-made answers— for we are bound to borrow the results of other men's researches and enrich ourselves with what they have seen and we have not.
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An author looks at his work.
Sometimes a swan that has hatched out a duck; sometimes vice versa.
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There are people who sparkle, talkers to the manner born, who dazzle you with a steady flow of unexpected remarks, verbal fireworks, striking conjunctions of ideas, some of which seem almost too apt, too finely phrased—and the quantity of which is no less amazing than their brilliance and felicity. Yet all this wordplay, all these inventions, richly varied and copious as they are, leave one with a curious impression that they are automatic. You can't help being reminded of a clockwork bird in a gilded cage warbling its prefabricated ditties. Certainly there is invention—but you know the wheels are turning. In short, the flow of bright remarks might be the output of a competent machine.
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Inspiration is an hypothesis that reduces the author to the role of an observer.
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"The spirit bloweth where it listeth." We may leave it to spiritualists and votaries of "inspiration" to explain-why that spirit does not blow in animals and blows so ineffectively in fools.
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Perfection is a barrier. One puts perfection between oneself and others. Between oneself and one's self.
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We should be as light as a bird, not as a feather.
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A man bent on his work says to himself: "I want to be stronger, cleverer, luckier than—Myself."
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A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.
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An artist wants to inspire jealousy till the end of time.
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What we write to amuse ourselves is read by someone else with passion, at high tension.
What we write with passion, at high tension, is read by someone else for his amusement.
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To love fame one must set much store by people in general; one must believe in them.
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Anyone who has never tried to make himself like the gods is less than a man.
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Statues and fame are forms of the cult of the dead, which is a form of ignorance.
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True pride is the homage paid to what one would wish to do, scorn for what one can do, and a lucid, fierce, implac­able preference for one's own "ideal." "My God is a stronger god than yours."

In every religion "false gods" mean other people's gods; they are called false not because their existence is denied but because they lack the supreme prestige and power reserved to the god whom we personally adore.
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Man preens himself on his strokes of luck.
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Our strongest, most vital hatred goes to those who are what we would like to be ourselves; a hatred all the keener because this state is so closely wrapped up with the person whom we hate. It's a form of "theft" to have the wealth or the honors that we would like to have; and it is downright murder to have the physique, brains, or gifts that are some­ one's ideal. For the fact of another man's possessing them shows at a glance that this ideal is not unattainable and also that the place is bespoken.

But our jealous man forgets the great and genuine advantage of not having what he wants: the advantage of being able to contemplate it from an angle denied the man who has it, and of having to learn how to belittle it, simply to keep alive! Whereas its possessor tends to underrate it simply because he is used to having it. . . . Every ideal is vulnerable on two fronts; both the formula "the grapes are sour" and its counterpart, "they're rotten," conspire against it.
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We dislike a man who forces us not to be ourselves, but neither do we like the man who obliges us to show ourselves in our true colors.
But we like the man who believes that we are what we'd wish to be, and this is the source of the pleasure given by fame, a pleasure against which it takes so many heart­ burnings combined with so much will power to steel our­ selves completely.

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The height of vulgarity, as I see it, consists in making use of arguments that can appeal only to a large public, in other words, to a type of listener or an audience necessarily scaled down to the lowest level of intelligence; arguments that have no hold on a man who thinks them out dispassionately, by himself. Yet whatever lasts owes its lastingness solely to the approval of such a man.
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Attacks on us alienate only those on whose defection we should congratulate ourselves; they are either people so con­stituted as not to take an interest in us anyhow, or of such a kind that we could not wish to feel uncertain of their atti­tude toward us.
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Scorn and envy are the two verdicts of the tribunal of Pride.
You don't exist; I do.
You exist too much; I don't.
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Our true enemies are silent.
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The ballistics of insult.
As seen by a witness posted sufficiently far off, an insult does not settle on the point it's aimed at; each jet of spittle describes a closed curve.
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Hide your god.
One should attack not other people, but their gods. But the first step is to discover them; for people take care to hide the gods they really worship.
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If the Ego is hateful, "Love your neighbor as yourself" becomes a cruel irony.
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It's better to forgive offenses—than to forget them. But the forgiveness is never real; nothing can annul one's present sense of pain. And the man who forgives while it is still rankling pretends to be what he is not—as yet. A truly noble piece of play-acting.
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We are told to love our enemies.
I love those who stimulate me and those whom I stimulate. For our enemies are stimulants. And at every moment the mood of the moment comes to us from outside.
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On relishing injustice.
Injustice is a bitter that gives a zest to solitude, whets the appetite for separation and singularity, and opens up to the mind its deepest avenues, those leading to the unique and the inaccessible.
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After all, this wretched life isn't worth the sacrifice of being to seeming, when we know to whose eyes—and to what eyes—that seeming must be directed.
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Powers of the gaze
A curious give-and-take begins when glance meets glance.

No one would think freely if his eyes could not detach themselves from another's eyes which followed them per­ sistently.

Once gazes interlock, there are no longer quite two persons and it's hard for either to remain alone.
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On "exchanging looks." This exchange (the term is apt) effects in a very short space of time a transposition, a metathesis or intercrossing of two "lifelines," two viewpoints. The result is a sort of simul­taneous, reciprocal limitation. You take my appearance, my image, and I take yours. You are not I, since you see me and I don't see myself. What is missing for me is this "I" whom you can see. And what you miss is the "you" I see.

And the better we get to know each other, you and I, the more we shall reflect each other, yet the more "other" we shall be. And all the rest will be identical, perhaps shared between us. And the more our looks diverge, the more we lose sight of each other, the more indistinguishable we shall be.

I see you so as not to be you, since I am not You.

This type of analysis can also be applied to one's relations with one's Self.
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All that people say of us is false, but no falser than what we think about it. Only it's a different kind of falsity.
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Polite society.
Supposing all the bodies around us were perfectly "pol­ished," we would see on every hand only images of our­ selves, though in greatly distorted states.

This is exactly what happens in "polite society," where an identity of manners, a punctilious give-and-take of words and smiles, and a semblance of perfect reciprocity encircle us with our own gestures and remarks.
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Intimacy.
We can be truly intimate only with people having our own standard of discretion. Other qualities—character, culture, tastes—count for little.

True intimacy rests on a common sense of what things are pudenda and tacenda. And that is why it permits an incredible freedom of speech; -with these exceptions you can say anything you like.
But there are false intimacies, and total friendships are rare. The complete friend is rarely come by—which is why one usually has several friends of very different species.

"He has as many friends as he has personalities within him." And it's not the most intimate that he prefers. Is it likely that a man reveals himself (or thinks that he reveals himself) most completely to the person he loves most? We try to beautify ourselves in the eyes of those whom we prefer.

When two persons quarrel it is because they got on a shade too well. Superficial relations are always satisfactory, whereas intimacy makes the slightest variation keenly felt. We must not forget that intimacy resides in a permitted indiscretion, proffered or invited, whose limits are ill defined: one that produces greatly varying responses and needs watching with punctilious care for it to be exercised with impunity and without secret consequences that can be highly dangerous to friendship.
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When relations between two sensitive people are becoming intimate, there is a curious mixture of a fear of not being understood and a dread of being understood too well.

"You must understand me without conveying by your look the idea of a man who has 'given himself away.' Do not forget that I can see myself in your attitude and I don't want to see anything intolerable in it.

"Let your silence be a mirror without flaws" . . . and so forth.

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A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.
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Stupid people think that jesting doesn't go with seriousness and that a play on words isn't an answer. Why are they so sure of this?

Because it's in their interest that this should be so; it's an unwritten law, and their very existence hangs on it.
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"Love" consists in feeling that, against one's will, one has made over to another what was intended only for oneself.
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Meditation of the supremely beautiful, truly seductive woman: "I've often noticed that hardly any man comes near me without feeling he gets a sort of right over me, and develop­ ing a kind of proprietary jealousy. . . . I please them, therefore I belong to them.

"This pretension of theirs I find intolerable—and I couldn't live without it!"
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Nobody exists who is capable of loving another person just as he or she is. We insist on modifications, since the object of our love is always a phantom. What is real cannot be desired—for the good reason that it's real. I adore you, yes; but oh, that nose of yours, this dress you're wearing . . . !

Perhaps the acme of shared love consists in this frantic urge to transform each other and add new beauty to each other in an act comparable to the creative act in art and, like it, stirring some unknown source of personal transcendence.
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"All ears."
People conversing in whispers make a third party (though they are strangers to him) vaguely imagine that what they're saying must be worth overhearing. I say "imagine" because it's a dream that, in such cases, takes hold of the eavesdropper, possesses him, makes him "all ears," and changes him into a listening statue. By a sort of imitative reflex he becomes interested, if unconsciously, in the conversation.
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When a flash of wit or intelligence backfiring on its author gets him into trouble—what's the difference between it and a stupid remark?
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Intelligence cuts its way through conventions, beliefs, dog­mas, traditions, customs, sentiments, and social codes as an engineer hacks his way through forests and mountains, through peculiarities and local forms of nature, opening them up or slicing them away, forging ahead and forcibly imposing the shortest path.
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Something we see quite clearly, and which nonetheless is very difficult to express, is always worth the trouble of trying to put it into words.
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A clear-thinking mind makes understandable what it does not understand.

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Superiority may give rise to impotence: an incapacity for doing something silly that could be "rewarding."
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Intuition without intellection is an accident.
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I don't think that strong creative minds have any need for intense impressions. On the contrary, intensity is bad for them, since one oi their skills is that of making something out of nothing.
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Consciousness arises out of darkness, lives and thrives on it, and ends up by regenerating it, making it even darker than before by the very questions that it puts itself in virtue of— and in direct ratio to—its own lucidity.
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A very dangerous state of mind: thinking one understands.
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Small unexplained facts always contain grounds for up­ setting all explanations of "big" facts.
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The opinions of people who have not reshaped their minds according to their real needs and ascertainable capacities have no qualitative importance.

But whenever a man has undertaken this mental recon­ struction, he deviates—more or less dangerously—from the norm.

"Cleverness" is transmuted into "genius" when it takes the form of a simplification.
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Depth.
The profundity we assign to certain states of mind is due solely to their remoteness from the state of normal life, not to their proximity to very important and recondite things.
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Depth.
A profound idea is an idea (or remark) that changes a given problem or situation in depth. Otherwise its effect is a mere reverberation—and we lapse into "literature."
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You can never be too subtle, and you can never be too simple.

Never too subtle, because things insist on subtlety; never too simple, because our life and acts enjoin simplicity. [Such injoinment may be one of our problems VB]
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Most people stop at the first stages of their trains of thought, with the result that in the end their whole mental life is found to have consisted of beginnings.
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The proper task of the understanding is to clear up its own perplexities, like a man perpetually in the state of waking up, and perpetually trying to straighten out the tangle of his limbs and the confusion of his previous perceptions.

But some people seem to prefer to make confusion worse confounded.
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Every cosmogony, every metaphysical system assumes man to be a spectator of phenomena from which he is excluded. And this holds good even for physics, even for history and our memory of yesterday.

For what sees is always incompatible with what is seen, more or less obviously as the case may be.
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Philosophy and Scicnce would not exist had not certain men who never troubled their heads about them, who saw no need for them and were unaware of their existence and even of their possibility, provided by their lives and actions the fundaments and subject matter, the languages, the "obscu­rity," and the coherence basic to philosophy and science.
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Some theologians go far to making us think that God is stupid.
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Variation on Descartes.
Sometimes I think; and sometimes I am.
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The ideal of a "soul." The wish to have a soul and to be this selfsame soul uniquely through eternity must pale, remarkably, before the soul's desire to have a body and a lifetime. The soul would gladly give its kingdom for a horse. Or perhaps a donkey ?
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Who is the worst of all speakers? What being is it that stumbles and stammers; uses the most inapt words in the clumsiest way; hatches up the most absurd, incorrect, and incoherent phrases and employs the most preposterous argu­ ments ? Who is the horridest of writers and worst of tliinkers?

Our Soul. Until it remembers that others have ears and are the witnesses and judges before which its thoughts will be arraigned; before it calls in vanity and ideals to help it out— notions of Clarity, Logic, Common Sense, and Power, etc. —the Soul is beneath contempt at every moment.
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What's vilest in the world if not the Mind? It is the body that recoils from filth and crime. Like the fly, the Mind settles on everything. Nausea, disgust, regrets, remorse are not its properties; they are merely so many curious phenomena for it to study. Danger draws it like a flame and if the flesh were not so powerful would lead it to burn its wings, urged on by a fierce and fatuous lust for knowledge.
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Unless it's new and strange, every visualization of the world of things is false. For if something is real it is bound to lose its reality in the process of becoming familiar. Philosophic contemplation means reverting from the familiar to the strange and, in the strange, encountering the real.
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For every thought and for everything deeply felt—for love and hatred—there exists a singularly active poison and that poison is "all the rest of the world": all that is other than the thought or feeling in question and distracts, dilutes, disperses it.

In the strange faculty of doing certain things irrelevant to life with as much care, passion, and persistence as if one's life depended on them . . . there we find what is called - "living".
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Durations.
What does not exist lasts a second.
Death lasts throughout life. In every hypothesis on the subject it ceases the moment it takes place.
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It is life, not death, that separates the soul from the body.
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At every moment spots of darkness are present in the soul, either getting bigger or fading out.
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Only the perfectly happy man has the right to kill himself.
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Everyman has his back to his death, like the talker leaning against the mantelpiece.
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The self.
In his best moments (as in his worst) a man no longer seems to be his real self; instead, he is lavish of, or possessed by, some other, improbable "I."
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Hatred and aversion (a priori) are often signs of the lack of organs, faculties, or activities that would enable us to turn to account, employ, use up (and so forth) the things for which we feel hatred.

I don't feel sure of overcoming, subjugating, and anni­hilating you; therefore I hate you, wipe you out in my mind.

Meaning: I don't know how to love you.
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Ourselves.
All a man knows of himself is what circumstances have enabled him to know (there are many things about myself I used not to know).

All the rest is induction, probability. Robespierre never dreamed that he would guillotine so lavishly; or many a man that he would love someone "to distraction."
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Of how many things must we be ignorant in order to "act"!
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The self.
The more a consciousness is "conscious," the more foreign to it seems the man who has it and equally foreign its opinions, actions, characteristics, and sentiments. For this reason it tends to regard all that is most personal and private in it as "accidental" and extraneous.

Certainly I cannot help having opinions, habits, a name, affections and aversions, a worldview of my own, just as the walls of my room are bound to have some color or other.

But relatively to all that I am, I am only what light is to that color; it could illuminate anything whatsoever.

What's your name ?
I don't know.
Your age? I don't know. Birthplace? Don't know. Occupation? Don't know. Very good: you must be my self.
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There are doctrines which cannot survive translation into a language other than the original; once translated, they lose the magic, the discretion, the consecration by use and wont that have been theirs since the time when they were crystal­ lized in words reserved to them and veiled in mystery.
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"Souls," thought-transfcrcncc, immortality, spirits, and all such hypothetical entities have a common ground in the belief that the normal means of communication, senses, bodies, physical apparatus, can be dispensed with. To see without eyes, live without flesh, touch without fingers, act without actions, know without learning, move without motive power, and above all, die without dying—what singular notions and preoccupations these involve!

Translated by Stuart Gilbert With