Selections from Valery

An Anthology 

by Paul Valéry

“Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.”   ― Paul Valéry

This anthology, in addition to a selection of poems, includes essays, two dialogues, and two selections from Monsieur Teste. The essays are perhaps the most accessible of all the selections. But all of Valery's prose and poetry is stunning and warrants rereading to approach a basic level of understanding.

I was most fascinated with his essay on "The Method of Leonardo". As he put it, he attempted to "go beyond indiscriminate admiration", but it would seem at least in part a form of hubris to be too critical in the case of Leonardo. He struggles to encompass the mind of Leonardo and determine the balance between art and science. 

In "The Crisis of the Mind", written in 1919 in response to the Great War we find Valery saying, "And we now see that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all. We are aware that a civilization has the same fragility as a life." (p 94) With observations of equal profundity and sufficient poetry to tantalize the reader, this is a volume to be recommended.

Neither a King nor a God

The Man Who Would Be King 

by Rudyard Kipling

“I have been fellow to a beggar again and again under circumstances which prevented either of us finding out whether the other was worthy.”  ― Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King

This fantastic short tale is narrated by an Indian journalist in 19th century India who meets two British adventurers, Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan. Intrigued by their stories, he agrees to help them in a minor errand, but later he regrets this and informs the authorities about them—preventing them from blackmailing a minor rajah. A few months later they reappear at his newspaper office in Lahore, telling him of a plan they have hatched. After years of trying their hands at all manner of things, they have decided that "India is not big enough for them". They plan to go to Kafiristan and set themselves up as kings. Dravot will pass as a native and, armed with twenty rifles, they plan to find a king or chief to help him defeat enemies. Once that is done, they will take over for themselves. They ask the narrator for the use of reference books and maps of the area—as a favor, because they are fellow Freemasons, and because he spoiled their blackmail scheme. They also show him a contract they have made between themselves which swears loyalty between the pair and total abstinence from women and alcohol (that last part is hardly believable).

Two years later, on a scorching hot summer night, Carnehan returns to the narrator's office, a broken man, a crippled beggar clad in rags, but he tells an amazing story. He and Dravot had succeeded in becoming kings: traversing treacherous mountains, finding the Kafirs, mustering an army, taking over villages, and dreaming of building a unified nation and even an empire. The Kafirs (pagans, not Muslims) were impressed by the rifles and Dravot's lack of fear of their idols, and acclaimed him as a god, the reincarnation of Alexander the Great. They show a whiter complexion than others of the area ("so hairy and white and fair it was just shaking hands with old friends") implying their ancient lineage to Alexander himself. The Kafirs practiced a form of Masonic ritual, and Dravot's reputation was further enhanced when he showed knowledge of Masonic secrets that only the oldest priest remembered.

Their schemes were foiled, however, when Dravot (against the advice of Carnehan) decided to marry a Kafir girl. Kingship going to his head, he decided he needed a Queen and then royal children. Terrified at marrying a god, the girl bit Dravot when he tried to kiss her during the wedding ceremony. Seeing him bleed, the priests cried you're "Neither God nor Devil but a man!" Most of the Kafirs turned against Dravot and Carnehan. A few of his men remained loyal, but the army defected and the two kings were captured.

For the denouement of this fantastic tale you must read the story yourself, just don't expect a happy ending.

Renaissance Man

Leonardo da Vinci 

by Walter Isaacson

“Above all, Leonardo’s relentless curiosity and experimentation should remind us of the importance of instilling, in both ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it—to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.”  ― Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci





The thought and curiosity of Leonardo da Vinci is on display on every page in Walter Isaacson's masterful biography. Leading the reader like a tour guide through the many places and phases of Leonardo's life, Isaacson provides both details of the art but also context through capturing the background of the history, persons, and achievements that were experienced and made by Leonardo throughout his lengthy career.

I was impressed with Leonardo's constant creativity noted as much, if not more, in his notebooks and in his completed works; which included drawings, sculpture, paintings, and more. Present are the differences that made Leonardo unique -- his  left-handedness, his holistic views, his curiosity, and a relentless desire to know that made possible his improbable life as an artist, scientist, thinker, dreamer, and mathematician. The list of his interests is almost endless just as his curiosity was boundless. In the tradition of thinkers going back to Aristotle he revered man's desire for knowledge as seen in his statement:  "The desire to know is natural to good men."

Born out of wedlock in 1452 in the town of Vinci, he spent most of his life in Florence, Milan, and Rome, ending his days in France as a guest of the King. It was a peripatetic life premised on the primacy of sight and mind applied to the world around him in ways that seem phenomenal in retrospect and which, in spite of his successes and honors, were mitigated by his inability to finish projects. This too, impressed me as the wonders of his sketches and notes match and in some ways exceed the art he produced; art that includes "The Last Supper", the "Mona Lisa", and much more. 

Isaacson captures much of the wonder, but leaves the reader perplexed at times by his inability to truly penetrate the mind of Leonardo. The length of the text suggests a completeness that is not quite enough; perhaps no biographer could capture the totality of the magnificence of Leonardo. If ever there was an exemplar of the Renaissance Man it would be this polymath personnage from the small Italian village of Vinci.

A Faustian Bargain

"

The Picture of Dorian Gray 

by Oscar Wilde

"Was it really true that one could never change? He felt a wild longing for the unstained purity of his boyhood-- his rose-white boyhood, as Lord Henry had once called it. He knew that he had tarnished himself, filled his mind with corruption and given horror to his fancy; that he had been an evil influence to others, and had experienced a terrible joy in being so; and that of the lives that had crossed his own, it had been the fairest and the most full of promise that he had brought to shame. But was it all irretrievable? Was there no hope for him?

Ah! in what a monstrous moment of pride and passion he had prayed that the portrait should bear the burden of his days, and he keep the unsullied splendor of eternal youth! All his failure had been due to that."

- Oscar Wilde (p. 164, The Picture of Dorian Gray)

The Picture of Dorian Gray,  written by Oscar Wilde, was published in April 1891. The titular Dorian Gray is a decadent dandy of the Victorian era. Concerned with little but appearances, he lives a reckless, nonproductive existence. A crucial event in his life occurs when Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton in the studio of Basil Hallward, an artist, who has painted a portrait of the breathtakingly beautiful Dorian, now in his early twenties. Lord Wotton intrigues Dorian with his talk of the New Hedonism, which is reflected in the novel by Lord Henry’s giving Dorian a copy of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours (1884; Against the Grain, 1922), a novel that articulates this philosophy, the basis of which is the achievement of a complete realization of one’s nature.

Espousing this new kind of hedonism, Lord Henry suggests that the only things worth pursuing in life are beauty and the fulfilment of the senses. And so Gray, it appears, becomes a sort of Faust, and that evening he goes to the opera with his Mephistopheles, Lord Henry. In the following days, Wotton indeed proves a “bad influence,” for Dorian begins following him in the pursuit of pleasure for the sake of pleasure. 

He is busy courting Sybil Vane, a talented young actress, who falls in love with him. Ironically, Sybil’s being in love with Dorian robs her of her ability to act. In time, the very ability that first drew Dorian to Sybil has disappeared, and he rejects her unfeelingly. Having lost Dorian and her acting ability almost simultaneously, Sybil kills herself. Lord Henry, Dorian’s Mephistopheles, convinces Dorian that, in line with the New Hedonism, Sybil’s suicide is an experience that will help him to feel life more intensely and that it can be viewed as nothing but a source of personal growth.

They continue to engage in scandalous activities which erode Dorian’s innocence. Realizing that one day his beauty will fade, Dorian cries out, expressing his desire to sell his soul to ensure that the portrait Basil has painted of him would age rather than himself. Dorian's wish is fulfilled, subsequently plunging him into a series of debauched acts. The portrait serves as a reminder of the effect each act has upon his soul, with each sin being displayed as a disfigurement of his form, or through a sign of aging.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a classic example of the Victorian novel and one of those books that can effect the reader in a powerful and unique way. The idea of selling your soul to the devil, like the Faust story as related by Marlowe, Goethe and others, is an intriguing image.  But there is in Wilde's version a focus on the purity of innocence (as seen in the passage quoted above) that is lost as one lives a life, whether filled with licentiousness or mere everyday experience. Wilde’s novel provoked considerable outrage when it was published. The tenets of the New Hedonism expressed in the book flew in the face of conventional morality to the point that readers were profoundly shocked. Despite these objections, the novel succeeded artistically and attracted many readers. Wilde gave the story his own imprimatur with the artistic twist and thus added to the evidence of his genius that includes the drama, stories, poetry and criticism that he created.

An Altered Place

Station Eleven 

by Emily St. John Mandel

“She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees.”  ― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

This is a book that best fits into the genre of "speculative fiction" as defined by Margaret Atwood in her book on that subject; however while within that genre it is a complex blend of dystopian science fiction and fantasy. 

The narrative describes a society almost eradicated by a deadly flu virus while it is focused on a group of actors and musicians who form a troupe called the "Traveling Symphony". Geographically centered on Canada and the Great Lakes area of the Midwestern United States this intricately plotted, post-apocalyptic nightmare ranges back and forth across the 60 years straddling "Year Zero," its five protagonists linked first by chance and ultimately by love: The actor, Arthur Leander, who gathers and discards friends and lovers with a casual cruelty he often mistakes for good intentions; Clark Thompson, Arthur's best friend; Miranda Carroll, his second wife; Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo, turned entertainment journalist, turned EMT; and Kirsten Raymonde (my favorite and the most fully realized character), a child actress at the start of the novel and its conscience by the end.

Although some chapters take place in Manhattan, Toronto, or British Columbia, the bulk of the action unfolds as Kirsten and the Traveling Symphony make a circuit between Traverse City, Michigan and the Ohio border, playing classical music, staging Shakespeare, scrounging for food and shelter (although the scrounging varied in intensity and sometimes contributed to the disjunct I refer to below), and, in the novel's final third, confronting  horrors I don't presume to divulge because I want you to experience this fantasy of life after death novel yourself.

This reader's experience was uneven because it was conflicted by the author's excellent prose style - offset by gaping holes in the narrative that weakened the plot while some of the primary characters were weakly portrayed. The overall way to describe the difficulty I encountered is that the core story could have been set anywhere and anytime, that what I found was a disjunct that diminished the connection between the overarching setting of the flu pandemic (the pandemic itself being one of the weak aspects of the story) and the devastation facing the main characters centered on the travails of the the Traveling Symphony. The result was a book that I wanted to like but did not enjoy reading as much as I believe I would have absent the inherent weaknesses.

Manners, Readers, and Honest Books

Books and Readers

 130

Readers' bad manners. --- A reader is doubly guilty of bad manners against the author when he praises the second book at the expense of the first ( or vice versa ) and then asks the author to be grateful for that.

137 

The worst readers. --- The worst readers are those who proceed like plundering soldiers: they pick up a few things they can use, soil and confuse the rest, and blaspheme the whole.

145

Value of honest books. --- Honest books make the reader honest, at least by luring into the open his hatred and aversion which his sly prudence otherwise knows how to conceal best. But against a book one lets oneself go, even if one is very reserved toward people.

On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale, trans. Vintage, 1989 (1887). p 175