Φ
The circle of the sky metes out my glory,
The libraries of the East contend for my poems,
Emirs seek me out to fill my mouth with gold,
Angels already know by heart my latest ghazal.
My working tools are humiliation and an anguish;
Would to God I’d been stillborn.
From the Divan of Abulcasim El Hadrami (12th century)
[From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Harold Morland]
. . . the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help from pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
[From Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach]
[Numbers in brackets indicate the ends of the pages of Joyce’s original manuscript notebook.]
*
Who? A pale face surrounded by heavy odorous furs.
Her movements are shy and nervous. She uses quizzing-
glasses.
Yes: a brief syllable. A brief laugh. A brief beat of the
eyelids.
Cobweb handwriting, traced long and fine with quiet
disdain and resignation: a young person of quality.
I launch forth on an easy wave of tepid speech: Sweden-
borg, the pseudo-Areopagite, Miguel de Molinos,
Joachim Abbas. The wave is spent. Her classmate, re-
twisting her twisted body, purrs in boneless Viennese
Italian: Che coltura! The long eyelids beat and lift: a
burning needleprick stings and quivers in the velvet
iris.
High heels clack hollow on the resonant stone stairs.
Wintry air in the castle, gibbeted coats of mail, rude
iron sconces over the windings of the winding turret
stairs. Tapping clacking heels, a high and hollow noise.
There is one below would speak with your ladyship.
/ [1] /
She never blows her nose. A form of speech: the lesser for the greater.
Rounded and ripened: rounded by the lathe of intermarriage and ripened in the forcing-house of the seclusion of her race.
A ricefield near Vercelli under creamy summer haze. The wings of her drooping hat shadow her false smile. Shadows streak her falsely smiling face, smitten by the hot creamy light, grey wheyhued shadows under the jawbones, streaks of eggyolk yellow on the moistened brow, rancid yellow humour lurking within the softened pulp of the eyes
/ [2] /
A flower given by her to my daughter. Frail gift, frail giver, frail blue-veined child.
Padua far beyond the sea. The silent middle aga, night, darkness of history sleep in the Piazza delle Erbe under the moon. The city sleeps. Under the arches in the dark streets near the river the whores’ eyes spy out for forni-cators. Cinque servizi per cinque franchi. A dark wave of sense, again and again and again.
Mine eyes fail in darkness, mine eyes fail,
Mine eyes fail in darkness, love.
Again. No more. Dark love, dark longing. No more. Darkness.
Twilight. Crossing the piazza. Grey eve lowering on wide sagegreen pasturelands, shedding silently dusk and dew. She follows her mother with ungainly grace, the mare leading her filly foal. Grey twilight molds softly the slim and shapely haunches, the meek supple tendonous neck, the fine-boned skull. Eve, peace, the dusk of wonder . . . . . . . Hillo! Ostler! Hilloho!
/ [3] /
Papa and the girls sliding downhill, astride of a to-boggan: the Grand Turk and his harem. Tightly capped and astice, boots laced in deft crisscross over the flesh-warmed tongue, the short skirt taut from the round knobs of the knees. A white flash: a flake, a snowflake:
And when she next doth ride abroad
May I be there to see!
I rush out of the tobacco-shop and call her name. She turns and halts to hear my jumbled words of lessons, hours, lessons, hours: and slowly her pale cheeks are flushed with a kindling opal light. Nay, Nay, be not afraid!
/ [4] /
Mio padre: she does the simplest acts with distinction. Unde derivatur? Mia figlia ha una grandissima ammira-zione per il suo maestro inglese. The old man’s face, handsome, flushed, with strongly Jewish features and long white whiskers, turns towards me as we walk down the hill together. O! Perfectly said: courtesy, benevo-lence, curiosity, trust, suspicion, naturalness, helpless-ness of age, confidence, frankness, urbanity, sincerity, warning, pathos, compassion: a perfect blend. Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!
This heart is sore and sad. Crossed in love?
Long lewdly leering lips: dark-blooded mollusks
/ [5] /
Moving mists on the hill as I look upward from night and mud. Hanging mists over the damp trees. A light in the upper room. She is dressing to go to the play. There are ghosts in the mirror . . . . . Candles! Candles!
A gentle creature. At midnight, after music, all the way up the via San Michele, these words were spoken softly. Easy now, Jamesy! Did you never walk the streets of Dublin at night sobbing another name?
Corpses of Jews lie about me rotting in the mould of their holy field. Here is the tomb of her people, black stone, silence without hope . . . . . Pimply Meissel brought me here. He is beyond those trees standing with covered head at the grave of his suicide wife, wondering how the woman who slept in his bed has come to this end . . . . . The tomb of her people and hers: black stone, silence without hope: and all is ready. Do not die!
/ [6] /
She raises her arms in an effort to hook at the nape of her neck a gown of black veiling. She cannot: no, she cannot. She moves backwards towards me mutely. I raise my arms to help her: her arms fall. I hold the websoft edges of her gown and drawing them out to hook them I see through the opening of the black veil her lithe body sheathed in an orange shift. It slips its ribbons of moorings at her shoulders and falls slowly: a lithe smooth naked body shimmering with silvery scales. It slips slowly over the slender buttocks of smooth polished silver and over their furrow, a tarnished silver shadow . . . . Fingers, cold and calm and moving . . . . A touch, a touch.
Small witless helpless and thin breath. But bend and hear: a voice. A sparrow under the wheels of juggernaut, shaking shaker of the earth. Please, mister God, big mister God! Goodbye, big world! . . . . . . . Aber das ist eine Schweinerei!
/ [7] /
Great bows of her slim silver shoes: spurs of a pampered fowl.
The lady goes aspace, aspace, aspace . . . . . Pure air on the upland road. Trieste is waking rawly: raw sunlight over its huddled browntiled roofs, testudoform; a multitude of prostrate bugs await a national deliverance. Bellumo rises from the bed of his wife’s lover’s wife: the busy housewife is astir, sloe-eyed, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand . . . . . Pure air and silence on the upland road: and hoofs. A girl on horseback. Hedda! Hedda Gabler!
The sellers offer on their altars the first fruits: green-flecked lemons, jeweled cherries, shameful peaches with torn leaves. The carriage passes through the lane of canvas stalls, its wheel spokes spinning in the glare. Make way! Her father and his son sit in the carriage. They have owls’ eyes and owls’ wisdom. Owlish wisdom stares from their eyes brooding upon the lore of their Summa contra Gentiles.
/ [8] /
She thinks the Italian gentlemen were right to haul Ettore Albini, the critic of the Secolo, from the stalls because he did not stand up when the band played the Royal March. She heard that at supper. Ay. They love their country when they are quite sure which country it is.
She listens: virgin most prudent.
A skirt caught by her sudden moving knee; a white lace edging of an underskirt lifted unduly; a leg-stretched web of stocking. Si pol?
I play lightly, softly singing, John Dowland’s languid song. Loth to depart: I too am loth to go. That age is here and now. Here, opening from the darkness of desire, are eyes that dim the breaking East, their shimmer the shimmer of the scum that mantles the cesspool of the court of slobbering James. Here are wines all ambered, dying fallings of sweet airs, the proud pavan, kind gentlewomen wooing from their balconies with sucking mouths, the pow-fouled wenches and young wives that, gaily yielding to their ravishers, clip and clip again.
/ [9] /
In the raw veiled spring morning faint odours float of morning Paris: aniseed, damp sawdust, hot dough of bread: and as I cross the Pont Saint Michel the steel-blue waking waters chill my heart. They creep and lap about the island whereon men have lived since the stone age . . . . . Tawny gloom in the vast gargoyled church. It is cold as on that morning: quia frigus erat. Upon the steps of the far high altar, naked as the body of the Lord, the ministers lie prostrate in weak prayer. The voice of an unseen reader rises, intoning the lesson from Hosea. Haec dicit Dominus: in tribulation sua mane consurgent ad me. Venite et revertamur ad Dominum . . . . She stands beside me, pale and chill, clothed with the shadows of the sindark nave, her thin elbow at my arm. Her flesh recalls the thrill of that raw mist-veiled morning, hurrying torches, cruel eyes. Her soul is sorrowful, trembles and would weep. Weep not for me, O daughter of Jerusalem!
I expound Shakespeare to docile Trieste: Hamlet, quoth I, who is most courteous to gentle and simple is rude only to Polonius. Perhaps, an embittered idealist, he can see in the parents of his beloved only grotesque attempts on the part of nature to produce her image . . . . . . . . . . . Marked you that?
/ [10] /
She walks before me along the corridor and as she walks a dark coil of her hair slowly uncoils and falls. Slowly uncoiling, falling hair. She does not know and walks before me, simple and proud. So did she walk by Dante in simple pride and so, stainless of blood and violation, the daughter of Cenci, Beatrice, to her death:
. . . . . . . . Tie / My girdle for me and bind up this hair / In any simple knot.
The housemaid tells me that they had to take her away at once to the hospital, poveretta, that she suffered so much, so much, poveretta, that it is very grave . . . . . . I walk away from her empty house. I feel that I am about to cry. Ah, no! It will not be like that, in a moment, without a word, without a look. No, no! Surely hell’s luck will not fail me!
Operated. The surgeon’s knife has probed in her entrails and withdrawn, leaving the raw jagged gash of its passage on her belly. I see her full dark suffering eyes, beautiful as the eyes of an antelope. O cruel wound! Libidinous God!
Once more in her chair by the window, happy words on her tongue, happy laughter. A bird twittering after storm, happy that its little foolish life has fluttered out of reach of the clutching fingers of an epileptic lord and giver of life, twittering happily, twittering and chirping happily.
/ [11] /
She says that, had A Portrait of the Artist been frank only for frankness’ sake, she would have asked why I had given it to her to read. O you would, would you? A lady of letters.
She stands black-robed at the telephone. Little timid laughs, little cries, timid runs of speech suddenly broken . . . . Palerò colla mamma . . . . Come! chook, chook! come! The black pullet is frightened: little runs suddenly broken, little timid cries: it is crying for its mamma, the portly hen.
Loggione. The sodden walls ooze a steamy damp. A symphony of smells fuses the mass of huddled human forms: sour reek of armpits, nozzled oranges, melting breast ointments, mastick water, the breath of suppers of sulphurous garlic, foul phosphorescent farts, opoponax, the frank sweat of marriageable and married womankind, the soapy stink of men . . . . . . All night I have watched her, all night I shall see her: braided and pinnacled hair and olive oval face and calm soft eyes. A green fillet upon her hair and about her body a green-broidered gown: the hue of the illusion of the vegetable glass of nature and of lush grass, the hair of graves.
/ [12] /
My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.
Those quiet cold fingers have touched the pages, foul and fair, on which my shame for glow for ever. Quiet and cold and pure fingers. Have they never erred?
Her body has no smell: an odourless flower.
On the stairs. A cold frail hand: shyness, silence: dark languor-flooded eyes: weariness.
/ [13] /
Whirling wreaths of grey vapour upon the heath. Her face, how grey and grave! Dank matted hair. Her lips press softly, her sighing breath comes through. Kissed.
My voice, dying in the echoes of its words, dies like the wisdom-wearied voice of the Eternal calling on Abraham through echoing hills. She leans back against the pillowed wall: odalisque-featured in the luxurious obscurity. Her eyes have drunk my thoughts: and into the moist warm yielding welcoming darkness of her womanhood, itself dissolving, has streamed and poured and flooded a liquid and abundant seed . . . . . . Take her now who will! . . . .
/ [14] /
As I come out of Ralli’s house I come upon her suddenly as we both are giving alms to a blind beggar. She answers my sudden greeting by turning and averting her black basilisk eyes. E col suo vedere attosca l’uomo quando lo vede. I thank you for the word, messer Brunetto.
They spread under my feet carpets of the son of man. They await my passing. She stands in the yellow shadow of the hall, a plaid cloak shielding from chill her sinking shoulders: and as I halt in wonder and look about me she greets me wintrily and passes up the staircase darting at me for an instant out of her sluggish sidelong eyes a jet of liquorish venom.
A soft crumpled peagreen cover drapes the lounge. A narrow Parisian room. The hairdresser lay her but now. I kissed her stocking and the hem of her rustblack dusty skirt. It is the other. She. Gogarty came yesterday to be introduced. Ulysses is the reason. Symbol of the intellectual conscience . . . . Ireland then? And the husband? Pacing the corridor in list shoes or playing chess against himself. Why are we left here? The hairdresser lay here but now, clutching my head between her knobby knees . . . . Intellectual symbol of my race. Listen! The plunging gloom has fallen. Listen!
-I am not convinced that such activities of the mind or body can be called unhealthy.-
She speaks. A weak voice from beyond the cold stars. Voice of wisdom. Say on! O, say again, making me wise! This voice I never heard.
She coils towards me along the crumpled lounge. I cannot move or speak. Coiling approach of starborn flesh. Adultery of wisdom. No. I will go. I will.
-Jim, love! –
Soft sucking lips kiss my left armpit: a coiling kiss of myriad veins. I burn! I crumple like a burning leaf! From my right armpit a fang of flame leaps out. A starry snake has kissed me: a cold nightsnake. I am lost!
-Nora! –
/ [15] /
Jan Pieters Sweelink. The quaint name of the old Dutch musician makes all beauty seem quaint and far. I hear his variations for the clavichord on an old air: Youth has an end. In the vague mist of old sounds a faint point of light appears: the speech of the soul is about to be heard. Youth has an end: the end is here. It will never be. You know that well. What then? Write it, damn you, write it! What else are you good for?
“Why?”
“Because otherwise I could not see you.”
Sliding-space-ages-foliage of stars-and waning heaven-stillness-and stillness deeper-stillness of annihilation-and her voice.
Non hunc sed Barabbam!
Unreadiness. A bare apartment. Torbid daylight. A long black piano: coffin of music. Poised on its edge a woman’s hat, red-flowered, and umbrella, furled. Her arms: a casque, gules, and blunt spear on a field, sable.
Envoy: Love me, love my umbrella.
/ [16] /
*
She lived in storm and strife,
Her soul had such desire
For what proud death may bring
That it could not endure
The common good of life,
But lived as ’twere a king
That packed his marriage day
With banneret and pennon,
Trumpet and kettledrum,
And the outrageous cannon,
To bundle time away
That the night come.
Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honour bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbor’s eyes?
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read and dream of the soft look
Your eyes once had and of their shadows deep.
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
And bending down beside the glowing bars
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
Brevity is a great virtue [. . .] yet it may be overestimated. The reader’s mind must be permitted to eddy around the subject. . . . [Yes, brevity is a virtue,] but we must not make a fetish of it. . . . Must one never say great big dog because great equals big? Nay, it is a mark of man’s overflowing vitality and sheer joy in emphasis to say great big dog.
— Edwin Herbert Lewis
[Courtesy of The Boston Globe]
All great things are achieved in a light heart
— Ramtha
In formal logic, a formal signal is the signal of defeat: but in the evolution of real knowledge, it marks the first step in progress toward victory.
— Alfred North Whitehead
NASA astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell came to this conclusion on his return trip from space:
“In one moment I realized that this universe is intelligent. It is proceeding in a direction, and we have something to do with that direction. And that creative spirit, the creative intent that has been the history of this planet, comes from within us, and it is out there — it is all the same . . . . Consciousness itself is what is fundamental, and energy-matter is the product of consciousness . . . . If we change our heads about who we are — and can see ourselves as creative, eternal beings creating physical experience, joined at that level of existence we call consciousness — then we start to see and create this world that we live in quite differently.”
[From the BLEEP Book]
I am looking for a lot of men who have infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.
— Henry Ford
As the bonfires of knowledge grow brighter, the more the darkness is revealed to our startled eyes.
— Terence McKenna
Philosophy is written in this grand book — the universe — which stands continuously open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures. Without these one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.
— Galileo Galilei
| S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, |
|
| Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. | |
| Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo | |
| Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero, | |
| Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.1 | |
| LET us go then, you and I, | |
| When the evening is spread out against the sky | |
| Like a patient etherised upon a table; | |
| Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, | |
| The muttering retreats | 5 |
| Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels | |
| And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: | |
| Streets that follow like a tedious argument | |
| Of insidious intent | |
| To lead you to an overwhelming question … | 10 |
| Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” | |
| Let us go and make our visit. | |
| In the room the women come and go | |
| Talking of Michelangelo. | |
| The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, | 15 |
| The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes | |
| Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, | |
| Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, | |
| Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, | |
| Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, | 20 |
| And seeing that it was a soft October night, | |
| Curled once about the house, and fell asleep. | |
| And indeed there will be time | |
| For the yellow smoke that slides along the street, | |
| Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; | 25 |
| There will be time, there will be time | |
| To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; | |
| There will be time to murder and create, | |
| And time for all the works and days of hands | |
| That lift and drop a question on your plate; | 30 |
| Time for you and time for me, | |
| And time yet for a hundred indecisions, | |
| And for a hundred visions and revisions, | |
| Before the taking of a toast and tea. | |
| In the room the women come and go | 35 |
| Talking of Michelangelo. | |
| And indeed there will be time | |
| To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?” | |
| Time to turn back and descend the stair, | |
| With a bald spot in the middle of my hair— | 40 |
| [They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”] | |
| My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, | |
| My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin— | |
| [They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”] | |
| Do I dare | 45 |
| Disturb the universe? | |
| In a minute there is time | |
| For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. | |
| For I have known them all already, known them all:— | |
| Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, | 50 |
| I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; | |
| I know the voices dying with a dying fall | |
| Beneath the music from a farther room. | |
| So how should I presume? | |
| And I have known the eyes already, known them all— | 55 |
| The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, | |
| And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, | |
| When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, | |
| Then how should I begin | |
| To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? | 60 |
| And how should I presume? | |
| And I have known the arms already, known them all— | |
| Arms that are braceleted and white and bare | |
| [But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!] | |
| Is it perfume from a dress | 65 |
| That makes me so digress? | |
| Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl. | |
| And should I then presume? | |
| And how should I begin?
. . . . . |
|
| Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets | 70 |
| And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes | |
| Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?… | |
| I should have been a pair of ragged claws | |
| Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . . |
|
| And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! | 75 |
| Smoothed by long fingers, | |
| Asleep … tired … or it malingers, | |
| Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me. | |
| Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, | |
| Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? | 80 |
| But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, | |
| Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter, | |
| I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter; | |
| I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, | |
| And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, | 85 |
| And in short, I was afraid. | |
| And would it have been worth it, after all, | |
| After the cups, the marmalade, the tea, | |
| Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me, | |
| Would it have been worth while, | 90 |
| To have bitten off the matter with a smile, | |
| To have squeezed the universe into a ball | |
| To roll it toward some overwhelming question, | |
| To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, | |
| Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”— | 95 |
| If one, settling a pillow by her head, | |
| Should say: “That is not what I meant at all. | |
| That is not it, at all.” | |
| And would it have been worth it, after all, | |
| Would it have been worth while, | 100 |
| After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, | |
| After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor— | |
| And this, and so much more?— | |
| It is impossible to say just what I mean! | |
| But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: | 105 |
| Would it have been worth while | |
| If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, | |
| And turning toward the window, should say: | |
| “That is not it at all, | |
| That is not what I meant, at all.”
. . . . . |
110 |
| No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; | |
| Am an attendant lord, one that will do | |
| To swell a progress, start a scene or two, | |
| Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, | |
| Deferential, glad to be of use, | 115 |
| Politic, cautious, and meticulous; | |
| Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; | |
| At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— | |
| Almost, at times, the Fool. | |
| I grow old … I grow old … | 120 |
| I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. | |
| Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? | |
| I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. | |
| I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. | |
| I do not think that they will sing to me. | 125 |
| I have seen them riding seaward on the waves | |
| Combing the white hair of the waves blown back | |
| When the wind blows the water white and black. | |
| We have lingered in the chambers of the sea | |
| By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown | 130 |
| Till human voices wake us, and we drown. |
Notes:
1 A passage from Dante Alighieri’s Inferno (Canto 27, lines 61-66) spoken by Guido da Montefeltro in response to the questions of Dante, who Guido supposes is dead, since he is in Hell:. The flame in which Guido is encased vibrates as he speaks: “If I thought that that I was replying to someone who would ever return to the world, this flame would cease to flicker. But since no one ever returns from these depths alive, if what I’ve heard is true, I will answer you without fear of infamy.” [Note from Reading About the World, Volume 2, published by Harcourt Brace Custom Books]
Why should it be evident that simplicity and theoretical abstractness are desiderata in a piece of philosophical writing? Couldn’t a text be a work of moral philosophy precisely by showing the complexity and indeterminacy that is really there in human life, and by refusing to make any simplifying theoretical statements? . . . By saying only what can be said and by refusing to say anything simpler, less storylike, than human life is, the novel does make a philosophical claim (about the human truth and, implicitly, about the limits of theory) that could not simply be paraphrased in a nonnovelistic text. (For such a text can so easily claim, in and by its very style, that complexity is reducible, even if its content denies this.)
–Martha Craven Nussbaum (paraphrasing a point made by Cora Diamond) [From the Vol. 15, No. 1, Autumn, 1983 issue of New Literary History]
And as so often, he set out to follow him.
— Thomas Mann, Death in Venice [translated by David Luke]
‘One has to allow people to be in the right,’ he replied to all the insults. ‘It’s some consolation for the fact that they don’t have anything else.’
*
‘Everything you once held in such high esteem you’ve thrown on the bonfire,’ he said. ‘A little late in the day, perhaps, but the flame burns all the more brightly for that.’
*
‘. . . If you had come to dinner I should have offered you some Shiraz, the wine that Hafiz sang about, but it’s too late now. It must be drunk on an empty stomach. Would you accept liqueur instead?’
I accepted, thinking that he would join me, but I was surprised when they brought only one glass.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but I rarely drink.’
‘Are you afraid of getting drunk?’
‘Oh no,’ he replied. ‘Quite the opposite. It’s just that I find sobriety a more powerful form of intoxication, one where I retain my lucidity.’
‘And you offer drinks to others . . .’
He smiled.
‘You smoke, at least?’
‘Not any more. It’s an impersonal, negative sort of intoxication which is achieved too easily. I seek to heighten life, not diminish it, through intoxication.’
*
‘. . . I hate resting. Possessions encourage this; when one feels secure one falls asleep. I love life enough to prefer to live it awake. So within all this wealth I preserve a sense of precariousness with which I aggravate, or at least intensify, my life. I can’t claim that I love danger, but I do like life to be risky. I like it to make demands on my courage, my happiness, my health at every moment . . .’
*
‘I care little for the approval or disapproval of others, so I am not likely to sit in judgement myself. These terms are meaningless to me.’
*
But how pale are mere words compared to actions! Wasn’t Ménalque’s life, his smallest action, a thousand times more eloquent than my lectures? Now I understood that the moral lessons of the great philosophers of Antiquity were given as much by example as by words, if not more so.
*
‘. . . Leave all that nonsense to the newspapers. They seem surprised to discover that someone with a questionable reputation can also have virtues. I cannot recognize such distinctions and reservations, for I exist as a single whole. My only claim is to be natural; if something gives me pleasure, I take that as a sign that I should do it.’
‘That can have consequences,’ I said.
‘I certainly hope so,’ Ménalque replied. ‘If only these people here could see the sense of that. But most of them believe the only good comes from restraint; their pleasure is counterfeit. People don’t want to be like themselves. They all choose a model to imitate, or if they don’t choose a model themselves, they accept one ready-made. Yet I believe there are other things to be read in a man. No one dares. No one dares turn the page. The law of imitation — I call it the law of fear. They fear finding themselves alone, so they don’t find themselves at all. I detest this moral agoraphobia, it is the worst form of cowardice. He who invents must do so alone. But who here is trying to invent? The things one feels are different about oneself are the things that are rare, that give each person his value — and these are the things they try to repress. They imitate, and they make out they love life!’
*
‘. . . I hate all people of principle.’
‘There is nothing more contemptible,’ Ménalque replied, laughing. ‘They don’t possess an ounce of sincerity, for they only ever do what their principles decree or, failing that, see what they do as wrong.’
*
As if speaking his thoughts aloud, he murmured, ‘One has to choose. The main thing is to know what one wants . . .’
‘. . . There are thousands of ways of life and each of us can know only one. It’s madness to envy other people’s happiness. Happiness doesn’t come off the peg, it has to be made to measure. I leave tomorrow. I know — I have tried to tailor this happiness to fit me . . .’
*
‘Do you know why poetry and especially philosophy are so lifeless these days? It is because they are detached from life. The Greeks created their ideals directly from life. The life of the artist was itself an act of poetic creation, the life of the philosopher an enactment of his philosophy. Both were bound up with life: instead of ignoring each other, philosophy fed poetry and poetry expressed philosophy, with admirably persuasive results. Nowadays beauty no longer appears in action, action no longer aspires to be beautiful, and wisdom exists in a separate sphere.’
‘But you live your wisdom,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you write your memoirs? Or simply,’ I went on, seeing him smile, ‘your recollections of your travels?’
‘Because I don’t wish to remember,’ he replied. ‘It would be like forestalling the future and allowing the past to encroach upon me. I create each hour anew only by completely forgetting the past. I am never content simply to have been happy. I don’t believe in dead things. For me, being no more is the same as never having been.’
*
‘If only our mediocre brains were able to embalm our memories! But they aren’t easy to preserve. The most delicate ones shrivel away, the more voluptuous ones rot. The most delicious ones are the most dangerous in the long run. The things one repents are the things that were delicious when they happened.’
There was another long silence, then he continued, ‘Regrets, remorse, repentance: past joy, seen in retrospect. I don’t like to look back, I leave my past behind as a bird leaves its shade when it takes flight. Oh Michael, joy is out there waiting for us, but it always wants to find the bed empty, to be the one and only; it requires us to come to it free of attachments. Oh, Michael, joy is like manna in the desert, which goes stale after a day. It is like the water from the fountain of Ameles, which, as Plato tells us, no vase can contain . . . Every moment should take away with it everything it brings.’
*
[From André Gide’s The Immoralist]
Referring to the end of Latin civilization, I represented artistic culture as a type of secretion welling up within a people, at first indicating a plethora, an abundance of health, but later congealing, solidifying, forming a hard membrane preventing direct contact between spirit and nature, creating an appearance of vitality which disguises the decline of life within, like a casing in which the spirit languishes, wilts and finally dies. Pushing these thoughts to their natural conclusion, I made the assertion that Culture, which is born of life, ends up killing it.
Historians accused me of overgeneralization. Others criticized my methods. And those who complemented me were the ones who had understood me the least.
— André Gide, The Immoralist
(Ulysses, 8.637-39)
My flesh is sad, alas! . . .
–Stéphane Mallarmé
His youth is roaring inside him, he does not hear.
–Madame de Sévigné
We heal as we console ourselves; the heart cannot always weep or always love.
–La Bruyér, Characters, Chapter IV, The Heart
The poets say that Apollo tended the flocks of Admetus; so too each man is a God in disguise who plays the fool.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
And so, beginning with the rising sun, he was consumed, on the seaweed of the shore, keeping at the bottom of his heart, like an arrow in the liver, the burning wound of the great Kypris.
–Theocrites: The Cyclops
Amid the oblivion we seek in false
delights,
The sweet and melancholy scent of lilac
blossoms
Wafts back more virginal through our
intoxications.
–Henri de Régnier: Sites, Poem 8 (1887)
No other place is more deeply imbued with my mother, so thoroughly has it been permeated with her presence, and even more so her absence. To a person who loves, is not absence the most certain, the most effective the most durable, the most indestructible, the most faithful of presences?
–Marcel Proust, Pleasures and Days
And the furious wind of concupiscence
Makes your flesh flap like an old flag.
–Charles Baudelaire
The Floating Library 