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American Nietzsche

By Alexander Star
nytimes

In 1889, when Friedrich Nietzsche suffered the mental collapse that ended his career, he was virtually unknown. Yet by the time of his death in 1900 at the age of 55, he had become the philosophical celebrity of his age. From Russia to America, admirers echoed his estimation of himself as a titanic figure who could alter the course of history: “I am by far the most terrible human being that has existed so far; this does not preclude the possibility that I shall be the most beneficial.” His origins were humble for the role. The son of a small-town Lutheran minister, he steeped himself in classical literature while growing up in eastern Germany. When he was 24, he secured a professorship in Basel, Switzerland, and a few years later published his first book, “The Birth of Tragedy.” Against the common view of the ancient Greeks as the epitome of serene equipoise, Nietzsche emphasized the “Dionysian” excess and frenzy that complemented the “Apollonian” virtues of clarity and repose. The book’s success was limited, and its author was mocked by one leading classicist as an atavist run amok who should “gather tigers and panthers about his knees, but not the youth of Germany.”

In fact, he would gather none. Suffering from violent migraines, Nietzsche resigned his academic post when he was 34 and began the life of a little-heeded nomad-­intellectual in European resorts. With escalating intensity, he issued innovative works of philosophy that challenged every element of European civilization. He celebrated the artistic heroism of Beethoven and Goethe; denigrated the “slave morality” of Christianity, which transfigured weakness into virtue and vital strength into sin; and called on the strong in spirit to bring about a “transvaluation of all values.” The “higher man” — or as Nietzsche sometimes called him, the “overman” or “Übermensch” — did not succumb to envy or long for the afterlife; rather he willed that his life on earth repeat itself over and over exactly as it was. In later works, Nietzsche wrote with continued brilliance and growing megalomania of his disdain for the common “herd,” the dangers of nihilism and the possibility that the will to power is the “Ur-fact of all history.” He spent his last stricken decade in the care of his mother and then his sister, a fervent anti-Semite who would put him in good standing with the German nationalists he despised.

As Nietzsche faltered, his writings began to spread. Small circles of European radicals, literary aristocrats and misfits styled themselves apprentice Übermenschen, ready to fashion the new values the age demanded. The German aesthete Count Harry Kessler plotted to build a Nietzsche memorial in Weimar with a stadium, a temple and a statue; it would, he hoped, effect “the transposition of the personality of Nietzsche into a grand architectural formula” expressing “the unity of lightness, of joy and of power.” But if Nietzsche inspired rapture and devotion, he also puzzled and dismayed. A sickly recluse with impeccable manners, he praised cruelty and strength. He decried Christianity as “a crime against life” even as he claimed that it made man interesting for the first time, and he proposed that everything we know is merely a partial “perspective knowing” even as he composed some of the most categorical remarks ever made: “God is dead”; “It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified”; “There are no facts, only interpretations.”

From the start, Nietzsche’s American readers were bewitched and bedeviled. His hatred of Christian asceticism, middle-class sentimentality and democratic uplift was an assault on 19th-century America’s apparently most salient characteristics. For that very reason, he attracted young Americans who felt estranged from their culture, and has continued to do so. But today’s inescapable and perplexing Nietzsche is not necessarily the same Nietzsche who inspired readers in the past; and it’s the achievement of Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s “American Nietzsche” to show how that is the case.

Though Nietzsche loathed the left, he was loved by it. As Ratner-Rosenhagen explains, the anarchists and “romantic radicals” as well as the “literary cosmopolitans of varying political persuasions” who welcomed him to America believed they had found the perfect manifestation of Emerson’s Poet, for whom a thought is “alive, . . . like the spirit of a plant or an animal.” To read Nietzsche was to overcome an entire civilization’s inhibiting divide between thinking and feeling. Isadora Duncan said he “ravished my being,” while both Jack London and Eugene O’Neill saw him as their Christ. Emma Goldman ended her romance with the Austrian anarchist Ed Brady because he didn’t appreciate the great author who had taken her to “undreamed-of heights.” For such readers, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” with its incantatory calls for a race of overmen to establish a new morality that would “remain faithful to the earth,” was the true Nietzsche. Thrilling to its rhapsodies, they felt confirmed in their judgment that pious, stultifying America was no place for a serious thinker. Ratner-Rosenhagen nicely writes, “Many years before members of this generation were ‘lost’ in Europe, they felt at home in Nietzsche, and homeless in modern America.”

But Nietzsche’s American admirers faced a discomfiting problem: How to separate his intoxicating attacks on convention from his disgust with democracy and its herd of citizens? The editor Benjamin Tucker, whose anarchist newspaper printed America’s first serialized Nietzsche translations, welcomed the advent of “another great Egoist.” But he also worried that unfettering the ego of the overman might not be such a great idea if, as Ratner-Rosenhagen puts it, “for someone to be over, someone else must be under.” Meanwhile, others held Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarianism in his favor. The journalist Vance Thompson was bolstered in his disregard for the “monstrous fallacy that all men are born free and equal” while H. L. Mencken, Nietzsche’s most influential American interpreter, championed “the greatest individualist since Adam” for exposing an elementary truth: It is “only the underdog . . . that believes in equality.”

While Nietzsche’s early readers took him as an antidote to Americanism, that did not mean they saw him as a representative German. Believing that his ancestors were Polish aristocrats known as Niezky, some attributed his thinking to “Slavic emotionalism.” All that changed in 1914, with the start of what a British newspaper called the “Euro-Nietzschean war.” The philosopher of personal liberation was transformed into a proto-storm trooper who believed might makes right and welcomed the sinister rise of the Teutonic “blond beast.” In 1924, Nietzsche’s reputation was further damaged when Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the teenage sons of wealthy Chicago families, committed a random murder with the apparent intention of establishing their bona fides as overmen. (As Ratner-Rosenhagen shows, the case nearly confounded the great defense lawyer Clarence Darrow, who sought to blame the author of “Beyond Good and Evil” for the crime, but not too much; in his 12-hour speech to the judge, he called Nietzsche “the most original philosopher of the last century” and took pains to argue that “Nathan Leopold is not the only boy who has read Nietzsche. He may be the only one who was influenced in the way that he was influenced.”)

If Nietzsche’s image reached its nadir during the Second World War, when Hitler presented Mussolini with a bound edition of his works and the historian Crane Brinton wrote a book asserting he would have been “a good Nazi,” a resurrection was soon to come. The German émigré and Princeton professor Walter Kaufmann almost single-handedly revived his standing with his many translations and forceful reminder that Nietzsche hated anti-Semites and German nationalists as well as woolly-headed romantics. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche was a late flower of the Enlightenment, a tough-minded rationalist with the courage to face the Darwinian revelation that there is no purpose to nature or to our existence. The true task of the overman was to overcome himself, not others, and to do so by sculpturing his impulses and thoughts and inheritances into a willed unity that could be called “style.”

But did Kaufmann and others who treasured Nietzsche’s intransigent individualism as a defense against the threats of totalitarianism and mass culture lose sight of his actual writings? As Ratner-Rosenhagen shows, a later generation of American interpreters, influenced by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, esteemed Nietzsche not as the guarantor of the individual but as its dismantler. “The ‘doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed,” Nietzsche wrote in “On the Genealogy of Morals,” and the implication was clear: If God was dead, so too were equally fictitious entities like the self. There was no objective truth, only the truth-effects engendered by the workings of power and the instabilities of language. Even as this poststructuralist Nietzsche occupied the university in the 1980s, it bred a counterreaction from conservative intellectuals. In “The Closing of the American Mind,” Allan Bloom decried the “Nietzscheanization of the Left,” by which he meant the rise of a disabling relativism that supposed any belief was as good as any other. For Bloom and other students of Leo Strauss, however, Nietzsche was not just the disease, he was also the diagnostician and possibly the cure. More brilliantly than anyone, Nietzsche understood the peril of modern nihilism and the need to cultivate robust souls who would strive to achieve excellence without authoritative religious belief.

“American Nietzsche” is a sober work of intellectual history, but as Nietzsche insisted, all scholarship reflects the temperament of its creator, and it’s clear that Ratner-Rosenhagen finds neither the poststructuralist nor the conservative Nietzsche at all satisfying. At the end of her consistently insightful book, she turns to Harold Bloom and the philosopher Stanley Cavell, who emphasized Nietzsche’s affinities with the man he himself regarded as “the most fertile author” of his century — Ralph Waldo Emerson. Indeed, one can show that Emerson anticipated many of Nietzsche’s most famous utterances. There is a direct line from Emerson’s “oversoul” to the “overman.” Several decades before Nietzsche wrote, “What does not kill me makes me stronger,” Emerson wrote, “In general, every evil to which we do not succumb, is a benefactor.” More profoundly, Emerson foreshadowed Nietzsche’s concern with the ubiquity of flux and power, and the value of overcoming the past. “Life only avails,” Emerson once wrote, “not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transitions from a past to a new state.”

Ratner-Rosenhagen concludes that Cavell, Bloom and the pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty constructed “an American Nietzsche” by drawing upon “philosophical interpretations which understood that in a world without foundations, our views of truth, language and the self are not mirrors of reality but useful fictions to explore new avenues of discovery, new sources of wonder.” Stressing Nietzsche’s Emersonian and pragmatist heirs, Ratner-Rosenhagen inevitably neglects some of his other pertinences. She doesn’t take into full account how Nietzsche thought his beloved Emerson was “too much infatuated with life” or how he doubted most people could ever discover anything at all. Nor does she say much about his broader presence in the culture. In 1933, the Hays Office forced the producers of the Barbara Stanwyck film “Baby Face” to remove “The Will to Power” from the hands of a German-American cobbler whose paeans to self-fulfillment inspire the Stanwyck character to become a prostitute. Nietzsche’s more bombastic utterances would later enter popular culture without hindrance. In every generation Nietzsche finds admirers who blur his message with that of Aleister Crowley, the Nietzsche-reading occultist who wrote, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

If Nietzsche was terrible, was he also beneficial? In a 1985 book “Nietzsche: Life as Literature,” the Princeton philosopher Alexander Nehamas argued that Nietzsche’s perspectivism does not imply that all beliefs are equally valid but that “one’s beliefs are not, and need not be, true for everyone.” On this reading, to fully accept a set of beliefs is to accept the values and way of life that are bound up with it, and since there is no single way of life that is right for everyone, there may be no set of beliefs that is fit for everyone. At its best, American individualism is not about the aggrandizement of the self or the acquiescent assumption that everybody simply has a right to think what they want. Rather, it stresses that our convictions are our own, and should be held as seriously as any other possessions. Or, as Nietzsche imagined philosophers would one day say, “ ‘My judgment is my judgment’: no one else is easily entitled to it.”

 

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Ontology of the closet

opprobrium alone makes the crime . . .

A race upon which a curse is laid and which must live in falsehood and perjury because it knows that its desire, that which constitutes life’s dearest pleasure, is held to be punishable, shameful, an inadmissible thing; which must deny its God, since its members, even when Christians, when at the bar of justice they appear and are arraigned, must before Christ and in his name refute as a calumny what is their very life; sons without a mother, to whom they are obliged to lie even in the hour when they close her dying eyes; friends without friendships, despite all those which their frequently acknowledged charm inspires and their often generous hearts would gladly feel — but can we describe as friendships those relationships which flourish only by virtue of a lie and from which the first impulse of trust and sincerity to which they might be tempted to yield would cause them to be rejected with disgust . . . .

— Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (1921)

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Inwit of agenbite (incomplete)

* Urbane, to comfort them, the quaker librarian purred:

He came a step a sinkapace forward on neatsleather creaking and a step backward a sinkapace on the solemn floor.

Glittereyed his rufous skull close to his greencapped desklamp sought the face bearded amid darkgreener shadow, an ollav, holyeyed. He laughed low:

In the shadow of the glen he cooees for them. My soul’s youth I gave him, night by night. God speed. Good hunting.

Mulligan has my telegram.
Folly. Persist.

Sumptuous and stagnant exageration of murder.

Cranly, I his mute orderly, following battles from afar.

Whelps and dams of murderous foes whom none
But we had spared ….

Between the Saxon smile and the yankee yawp. The devil and the deep sea.

List! List! O list!

My flesh hears him: creeping, hears.

If thou didst ever ….

It is this hour of a day in mid June, Stephen said, begging with a swift glance their hearing. The flag is up on the playhouse by the bankside. The bear Sackerson growls from a pit near it, Paris garden. Canvas climbers who sailed with Drake chew their sausages among the groundlings.

Flow over them with your waves and with your waters, Mananaan,
Mananaan MacLir ….

How now, sirrah, that pound he lent you when you were hungry?
Marry, I wanted it.
Take thou this noble.
Go to! You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson’s bed, clergyman’s daughter. Agenbite of inwit.
Do you intend to pay it back?
O, yes.
When? Now?
Well …. No.
When, then?
I paid my way. I paid my way.
Steady on. He’s from beyant Boyne water. The northeast corner. You owe it.
Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got pound.
Buzz. Buzz.
But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under everchanging forms.
I that sinned and prayed and fasted.
A child Conmee saved from pandies.
I, I and I. I.
A. E. I. O. U.

I wept alone
John Eglinton looked in the tangled glowworm of his lamp.

Crosslegged under umbrel umbershoot he thrones an Aztec logos, functioning on astral levels, their oversoul, mahamahatma. The faithful hermetists await the light, ripe for chelaship, ringroundabout him. Lotus ladies tend them i’the eyes, their pineal glands aglow. Filled with his god, he thrones, Buddh under plantain. Gulfer of souls, engulfer. Hesouls, shesouls, shoals of souls. Engulfed with wailing creecries, whirled, whirling, they bewail.

In quintessential triviality
For years in this fleshcase a shesoul dwelt.

Anxiously  he glanced in the cone of lamplight where three faces, lighted, shone.
See this. Remember.

— Where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said, there must have been first a sundering.

— Yes.

Christfox in leather trews, hiding, a runaway in blighted treeforks, from hue and cry. Knowing no vixen, walking lonely in the chase. Women he won to him, tender people, a whore of Babylon, ladies of justices, bully tapsters’ wives. Fox and geese. And in New Place a slack dishonoured body that once was comely, once as sweet, as fresh as cinnamon, now her leaves falling, all, bare, frighted of the narrow grave and unforgiven.

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Work while ye have the light

A Proust can only be someone isolated — is that the price genius must pay? We feel we must keep such an observer, such an implacable judge, at a distance, as though he were a large, hot brazier.

— Jacques-Emile Blanche

. . . [T]he style of Remembrance of Things Past is olympian, philosophical, seamless, and all-encompassing, an ether in which all the characters revolve like well-regulated heavenly bodies.

. . . “Should I call this book a novel?” Proust asks. “It is something less, perhaps, and yet much more, the very essence of my life, with nothing extraneous added, as it developed through a long period of wretchedness. This book of mine has not been manufactured: it has been garnered.”  This idea, that life presents us with but one book to write, the story of our own existence which we must merely “translate,” was one to which Proust would remain faithful.

. . . The mammoth book began, appropriately enough, as a sort of Platonic dialogue with his mother on the subject of Sainte-Beuve, the nineteen-century literary critic, whose ideas and writing galled Proust. . . .

. . . What Proust had discovered since writing Jean Santeuil was how to take up themes, let them drop, then come back to them, though each time the theme was exposed to a different light. No longer did Proust feel that he had to say everything at once or to set in stone his opinions on every character and topic. Now the dramatic twists of the plot dictated the insights revealed to the Narrator.

. . . Proust had learned a method of presentation that falls midway between that of Dickens and that of Henry James. Dickens assigns his characters one or two memorable traits, sometimes highly comic, which they display each time they make an appearance; James, by contrast, is so quick to add nuances to every portrait that he ends up effacing them with excessive shading. Proust invented a way of showing a character such as Charlus in Dickensian bold relief at any given moment — Charlus as the enraged queen or, later, Charlus as the shattered King Lear. Yet, by building up a slow composite of images through time, Proust achieves the same complexity that James had aimed at, though far more memorably. It’s like the old dispute among painters as to the primacy of line or of shading. Dickens could draw with a firm bounding line but used so little shading  he gave no sense of perspective. James was all shading and depth, but (especially in his late novels) nothing vigorous distinguished the profile of one character from another. Proust succeeded in rendering characters with the same startling simplicity as Dickens but generated a lifelike subtlety and motion by giving us successive “takes” over hundreds of pages. In that way his style is like the magic lantern the Narrator watches at bedtime when he’s a boy. The heat of the lamp causes a band of images to turn and to project the illusion of motion on the wall. In the same way Proust’s slide show of portraits of the same character induces the illusion of duration, of development — and of psychological truth.

. . . In 1911 Proust became a subscriber to Théâtrophone, a service that held a telephone receiver up at a concert, which allowed people to stay at home and hear live music on their receivers.

. . . Proust esteemed Wagner’s way of “spitting out everything he knew about a subject, everything close or distant, easy or difficult.” This sort of fullness and explicitness he obviously preferred in literature as well, an amplitude he contrasted favorably to the pared-back reticence of the ne0-classical style, as it was practiced by Anatole France or even André Gide.

. . . The apparently meandering prologue to the whole epic, “Combray,” . . . is actually something like a strict overture to an opera, in the sense that it announces and compresses all the successive themes. . . . The heraldic weight of the Guermantes name is first touched on in “Combray,” as is the theme of illness (real and imaginary), snobbism, the difference between family love and romantic passion, the power of reading to bewitch, and so on. Developing themes and recurring characters spanning the whole long arc of the seven books give it an architectural solidity which casual readers of the first two volumes could not have suspected.

— Edmund White

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Love

Lily Briscoe said yes and no and capped his comments (for she was in love with them all, in love with this world).

Indeed, he almost knocked her easel over, coming down upon her with his hands waving shouting out, “Boldly we rode and well,” but, mercifully, he turned sharp, and rode off, to die gloriously she supposed upon the heights of Balaclava. Never was anybody at once so ridiculous and so alarming. But so long as he kept like that, waving, shouting, she was safe; he would not stand still and look at her picture. And that was what Lily Briscoe could not have endured. Even while she looked at the mass, at the line, at the colour, at Mrs. Ramsay sitting in the window with James, she kept a feeler on her surroundings lest some one should creep up, and suddenly she should find her picture looked at. But now, with all her senses quickened as they were, looking, straining, till the colour of the wall and the jacmanna beyond burnt into her eyes, she was aware of someone coming out of the house, coming towards her; but somehow divined, from the footfall, William Bankes, so that though her brush quivered, she did not, as she would have done had it been Mr. Tansley, Paul Rayley, Minta Doyle, or practically anybody else, turn her canvas upon the grass, but let it stand. William Bankes stood beside her.

— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

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Atrophy of Utterance

Do the mind’s creations come down to the transfiguration of trifles?

So many pages, so many books which afforded us feeling and which we reread to study the quality of their adverbs, their adjectival aplomb.

§

As for “verities,” who can lug them along any longer? We refuse to bear their weight, to be their accomplices or their dupes. I dream of a world in which one might die for a comma.

§

Certainties have no style: a concern for well-chosen words is the attribute of those who cannot rest easy in a faith. Lacking solid support, they cling to words — semblances of reality; while the others, strong in their convictions, despise appearances and wallow in the comfort of improvisation.

§

Default on your life and you accede to poetry — without the prop of talent.

§

Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy.

§

When we are a thousand miles away from poetry, we still participate in it by that sudden need to scream — the last stage of lyricism.

§

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

§

If only we could return to those ages when no utterance shackled existence, to the laconism of interjections, to the joyous stupor of the preverbal!

§

How easy it is to be “deep”: all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.

§

Every word affords me pain. Yet how sweet it would be if I could hear what the flowers have to say about death!

§

To cleanse literature of its greasepaint, to see its real countenance, is as dangerous as to dispossess philosophy of its jargon. Do the mind’s creations come down to the transfiguration of trifles? Is there some sort of substance only beyond words — in catalepsy or the skull’s grin?

§

Dislocated monads, here we are at the end of our prudent mopes, our well-planned anomalies: more than one sign heralds the hegemony of delirium.

§

A writer’s “sources”? His shames; failing to discover these in yourself, or dodging them when you do, you are doomed to plagiarism or reviewing.

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The nerve cell is so used to everything, to anything, that we must despair of ever conceiving an insanity which — penetrating the brain — would make it explode.

§

No one since Benjamin Constant has rediscovered the tone of disappointment.

§

With Baudelaire, physiology entered into poetry; with Nietzsche, into philosophy. By them, the troubles of the organs are raised to song, to concept. With health the one thing proscribed, it was incumbent upon them to afford disease a career.

§

Mystery — a word we use to deceive others, to convince them that we are “deeper” than they are.

§

The public hurls itself upon authors called “human”; the public knows it has nothing to fear from them: halted, like their readers, halfway down the road, these authors propose compromises with the Impossible, a coherent vision of Chaos.

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The pornographer’s verbal slovenliness frequently results from an excess of modesty, from the shame of displaying his “soul” and especially of naming it: there is no more indecent word in any language.

§

That there should be a reality hidden behind appearances is, after all, quite possible; that language might render such a thing would be an absurd hope. So why burden yourself with one opinion rather than another — why recoil from the banal or the inconceivable, from the duty of saying and of writing anything at all? A modicum of wisdom would compel us to sustain all theses at once, in an eclecticism of smiling destruction.

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The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the “meaning” of life.

§

Mind is the great profiteer of the body’s defeats. It grows rich at the expense of the flesh it pillages, exulting in its victim’s miseries; by such brigandage it lives. — Civilization owes its fortune to the exploits of a bandit.

§

“Talent” is the surest way of perverting everything, of falsifying things and fooling oneself into the bargain. Real existence belongs only to those whom nature has not overwhelmed with any gift. Hence, it would be difficult to imagine a more fallacious universe than the literary kind or a man more devoid of reality than the man of letters.

§

No salvation, save in the imitation of silence. But our loquacity is prenatal. A race of rhetoricians, of verbose spermatozoons, we are chemically linked to the Word.

§

We cannot sufficiently blame the nineteenth century for having favored that breed of glossators, those reading machines, that deformation of the mind incarnated by the Professor — symbol of a civilization’s decline, of the corruption of taste, of the supremacy of labor over whim.

To see everything from the outside, to systematize the ineffable, to consider nothing straight on, to inventory the views of others! . . . All commentary on a work is bad or futile, for whatever is not direct is null.

There was a time when the professors chose to pursue theology. At least they had the excuse then of professing the absolute, of limiting themselves to God, whereas in our century nothing escapes their lethal competence.

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What distinguishes us from our predecessors is our offhandedness with regard to Mystery. We have even renamed it: thus was born the Absurd . . .

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Fraudulence of style: to give the usual melancholies an unaccustomed turn, to decorate our minor miseries, to costume the void, to exist by the word, by the phraseology of the sarcasm or the sigh!

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Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life.

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Once you have inhaled Death, what desolation in the odors of the Word!

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Defeat being the order of the day, it is natural that God should benefit thereby. Thanks to the snobs who pity or abuse Him, He enjoys a certain vogue. Be how long will he still be interesting?

§

“He had talent; why does no one bother about him anymore? He’s been forgotten.”

“It’s only fair: he failed to take precautions to be misunderstood.”

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Nothing desiccates the mind more than its repugnance to conceive obscure ideas.

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What are the occupations of the sage? He resigns himself to seeing, to eating, etc. . . . , he accepts in spite of himself this “wound with nine openings,” which is what the Bhagavad-Gita calls the body. — Wisdom? To undergo with dignity the humiliation inflicted upon us by our holes.

§

The poet: a sly devil who can torment himself at will, unearthing perplexities, obtaining them by every possible means. And afterward, naive posterity commiserates with him . . .

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Almost all works are made with flashes of imitation, with studied shudders and stolen ecstasies.

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Prolix in essence, literature lives on the plethora of utterance, on cancer of the word.

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Before being a fundamental mistake, life is a failure of taste which neither death nor even poetry succeeds in correcting.

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In this “great dormitory,” as one Taoist text calls the universe, nightmare is the sole mode of lucidity.

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Do not apply yourself to Letters if, with an obscure soul, you are haunted by clarity. You will leave behind you nothing but intelligible sighs, wretched fragments of your refusal to be yourself.

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In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart.

Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.

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To be modern is to tinker with the Incurable.

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Tragicomedy of the Disciple: I have reduced my mind to dust, in order to improve on the moralists who had taught me only to fritter it away . . .

— E. M. Cioran, All Gall is Divided
(translated by Richard Howard)

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Act with clarity and meaning

Amid the indifferent brutality, the incessant noise, the experimental chemistry of food, the ravings of lost, hysterical men, I can act with clarity and meaning.

— ?

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Nerves

He glanced at the clock, then at his watch. Christ, stop looking at your damn watch! Think of Camilla, think of her starting her lesson, think of those aunts you didn’t spend the weekend with, think of Alwyn not looking in your bag. Think of anything but the time. Eighteen minutes to wait. “Peter, if you have the smallest reservation, you really mustn’t go ahead with it. Nothing is as important as that.” Great, so how do you spot a reservation when thirty teenage butterflies are mating in your stomach and the sweat is like a secret rain inside your shirt? Never, he swore, never had he had it this bad.

— John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

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Best watcher in the unit, Bill Roach is, I’ll bet.

“Where’s damn marble?”
“Here, sir.”
“Call out when she moves, right? North, south, whichever way she rolls. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Know which way’s north?”
“That way,” said Roach promptly, and stuck out his arm at random.
“Right. Well, you call when she rolls,” Jim repeated, and disappeared into the rain.

— John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

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Freedom

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

— David Foster Wallace
via joberholtzer