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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock :: T. S. Eliot

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]

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Refusing to make any simplifying theoretical statements :: Philosophy and/as/of Literature

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]

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Into an immensity rich with unutterable expectation

And as so often, he set out to follow him.

— Thomas Mann, Death in Venice [translated by David Luke]

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Ménalque’s Wildean Nietzscheanism

‘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.

‘I can’t expect others to share my virtues,’ he said. ‘It’s good enough for me if they share my vices.’

‘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]

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Culture, which is born of life, ends up killing it.

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

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Kiss me, Reggy!

A warm human plumpness settled down on his brain. His brain yielded. Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.

(Ulysses, 8.637-39)

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Without music life would be a mistake

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

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Paulus Potter :: Marcel Proust

As crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance and the water-pot lose their meanness when hung as signs in the zodiac, so I can see my own vices without heat in . . . distant persons.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Somber grief of skies uniformly gray,
Sadder for being blue during rare bright intervals,
And which allow the warm tears of a misunderstood sun
To filter down upon the paralyzed plains;
Potter, melancholy mood of the somber plains,
Which stretch out, endless, joyless, colorless;
The trees, the hamlet cast no shadows,
The tiny, meager gardens have no flowers.
A plowman lugs buckets home, and his puny mare
Resigned, anxious, and dreamy,
Uneasily listening to her passive brain,
Inhales in small gulps the strong breath of the wind.

— Marcel Proust, Pleasures and Days

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Now, it is enough just to die

Blood pools in the temples; reddened rocks
soaked in slaughter. Age is no help:
no shame in hastening an old man’s dying day
nor in cutting off a babe on the brink of life.
For what crime could these young deserve death?
Now, it is enough just to die. Bloodlust carries them away:
a man shows himself weak if he inquires about guilt.
Many die to stack the numbers; a bloody winner
snatches a head severed from unknown neck, ashamed
to walk empty handed. . . .

— Lucan (2.103-13), translated by Braund and Hooley

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Dissolve the engines of the broken world

So when this world’s compounded union breaks,
Time ends and to old Chaos all things turn;
Confused stars shall meet, celestial fire
Fleet on the the floods, the earth shoulder the sea,
Affording it no shore, and Phoebe’s wain
Chase Phoebus and enraged affect his place,
And strive to shine by day, and full of strife
Dissolve the engines of the broken world.

— Marlowe’s version of Lucan (I.72-80)

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Whatever abysses nature leads

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
— Thomas Huxley

Above all things we must beware of what I will call “inert ideas” — that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.
— Alfred North Whitehead

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Derrida’s Platonic Phiction

After closing the pharmacy, Plato went to retire, to get out of the sun. He took a few steps in the darkness toward the back of his reserves, found himself leaning over the pharmakon, decided to analyze.

Within the thick, cloudy liquid, trembling deep inside the drug, the whole pharmacy stood reflected, repeating the abyss of the Platonic phantasm.

The analyst cocks his ears, tries to distinguish between two repetitions.

He would like to isolate the good from the bad, the true from the false.

He leans over further: they repeat each other.

Holding the pharmakon in one hand, the calamus in the other, Plato mutters as he transcribes the play of formulas. In the enclosed space of the pharmacy, the reverberations of the monologue are immeasurably amplified. The walled-in voice strikes against the rafters, the words come apart, bits and pieces of sentences are separated, disarticulated parts begin to circulate through the corridors, become fixed for a round or two, translate each other, become rejoined, bounce off each other, contradict each other, make trouble, tell on each other, come back like answers, organize their exchanges, protect each other, institute an internal commerce, take themselves for a dialogue. Full of meaning. A whole story. An entire history. All of philosophy.

“. . . . the sound of these arguments rings so loudly in my head that I cannot hear the other side.”

— Jacques Derrida, from “Plato’s Pharmacy,” from Dissemination [translated by Barbara Johnson]

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Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks :: Saddy Halloween

There is a delicate form of the empirical which identifies itself so intimately with the object that it thereby becomes theory.

— Goethe

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

I have lost some friends by death … others through the sheer inability to cross the street.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

. . . the louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life, “Worship”

The artist is always involved in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.

— Wyndham Lewis

…the image is the drawbridge which allows unconscious energies to be scattered on the surrounding meadows.

— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Pictures of perfection as you know make me sick and wicked.

— Jane Austen, Letter to Fanny Knight, 22-25 March (1817)

Architecture in general is frozen music.

— Friedrich von Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please: they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.

— Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

I can resist everything except temptation.

— Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan

Note how democratic is the earth. Today a respectable married couple sleeps on the same bit of ground that yesterday suffered a couple living in sin. Tomorrow a priest may sleep there, then a murderer, then a blacksmith, then a poet; and, like shipwrecked persons whose lifeboat has delivered them safely to shore, they will bless this bit of ground, for it gives them the illusion of security.

— Machado de Assis, Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas

The more intense an individual’s concern with power over things, the more will things dominate him, the more will he lack any genuine individual traits, and the more will his mind be transformed into an automaton of formalized reason.

— Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason

Therefore I have undertaken this work … not for the sake of speaking with authority about what I know but rather to know these subjects by speaking of them with reverence.

— St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei [City of God]

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

— Groucho Marx

Sit Jessica. See how the floor of heaven
Is inlaid with patines of bright gold.

— William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice

Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.

— Archimedes

There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

— Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners

Power especially proves itself to itself by the singular abuse which consists in crowning some absurdity with the laurels of success, thereby insulting genius, the only strength which power can never attain. The promotion of Caligula’s horse, that imperial farce, has enjoyed an almost unbroken run.

— Honoré de Balzac, Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes [A Harlot High and Low]

One man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that they are subjects because he is king.

— Karl Marx, Capital