Reflection by Anne Goodwin Winslow

When my poor beauty passes to its doom,
I will not let it go through any room
With mirrors nor by any hall
With burnished metal things along the wall,
Nor linger in the forest ways alone
Without some one to throw a stone
In all the pools, and watch them break, and swear
There was no lady leaning there.
I will have done with shining surfaces,
And I will fare
In peace without this cloud of witnesses.

I think if this can be arranged
I will not realize that things have changed;
The ghosts that go
Unchallenged need not ever know
That they are ghosts; and if I never pass
Except by ways made temperate and wise,
With nothing like a looking-glass
To stare and stab, and never gaze too deep
In forest pools where the brown autumn lies
With its lost leaves sleep….
But then what will I do about your eyes?

From Blues for a Melodeon by Phyllis McGinley

This is the house that I knew by heart.
 Everything here seemed sound, immortal.
When did this delicate ruin start?
 How did the moth come?

Naked by daylight, the paint is airing
 Its rags and tatters. There’s dust on the mantel.
And who is that gray-haired stranger staring
 Out of my mirror?

New at IWP Books: Anne Goodwin Winslow, 1925, The Long Gallery.

O sweet slow tempo of those happier years
That left men leisure for so many things; —
Leisure for music and for madness too,
For “adorations and for fertile tears”!
Who listens now when comes the Fool who sings?
Who cries Olivia the whole night through,
Or makes a willow cabin at the gate
Of his desire and stands importunate
Till air and earth give heed?

We have no time for anything but speed,
And scarcely know what we pursue
Or whither tend,
Nor what far lovers’ meeting may await
The reckless journey’s end!

New at IWP Books: Anne Goodwin Winslow, 1945, A Winter in Geneva and Other Stories.

“These were strange thoughts to be going with her about this familiar place, where she believed they had never been before. Was it only inanimate things that stayed with us long enough to be really familiar, really ours, as our thoughts and feelings could not be because we were always having new ones? We had a perfect mania for replacing them — even the ones we liked the best. Any poet who imagined he had written something more enduring than bronze had better publish it right away, or lose it — or at any rate stop thinking about it; for if he kept it in mind, as people say, he was absolutely sure to change it, that being apparently what one’s mind was for. One could hold a beloved object in one’s hands, at least for a while, without doing anything to it; one could even imagine holding it so until it and the hands had both grown old; but the mind was not respectful like that — not even of beauty, and less than anything of love.”

Admirers of Winslow include Jacques Barzun and Albert Jay Nock.

“As Joubert says, ‘we only know just what we meant to say, after we have said it.’ And as M. V. Egger remarks, ‘before speaking, one barely knows what one intends to say, but afterwards one is filled with admiration and surprise at having said and thought it so well.'” (William James, The Principles of Psychology)

A second selection from Joubert’s thought, translated by Katharine Littleton and published in 1898, now at IWP Books. “To perform the smallest actions from the greatest motives, and to see in the smallest things the widest relations, is the best way of perfecting within us our feeling self and our thinking self.”

“A pair of moralists who expressed themselves in maxims, Chamfort and Joubert, are not well enough known to be widely enjoyed and appreciated, regrettably. The former, who committed suicide in prison to foil the guillotine, had been a good republican and patriot before his arrest and was known for his sayings in the astringent vein. Even more persistently than Swift or La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort views men acting en masse as hateful or contemptible. As in Swift, it is affection for individuals that prompts the revulsion. As for Joubert, who survived the Terror to become one of the most sought-after conversationalists of the ensuing two decades, he is less biting than Chamfort but an equally keen observer. His epigrams do not attack but explain and advise. Needless to say, both aphorists are masters of the art of condensing thought and are proportionably difficult to translate.” (Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence)

Translations of both at IWP Books.

New at IWP Articles: Joubert by Matthew Arnold, 1865.

“The new men of the new generations… will say of him: ‘He lived in the Philistine’s day, in a place and time when almost every idea current in literature had the mark of Dagon upon it, and not the mark of the children of light. Nay, the children of light were as yet hardly so much as heard of: the Canaanite was then in the land. Still, there were even then a few, who, nourished on some secret tradition, or illumined, perhaps, by a divine inspiration, kept aloof from the reigning superstitions, never bowed the knee to the gods of Canaan; and one of these few was called Joubert.'”

New at IWP Books: Pensées and Letters of Joseph Joubert, Translated by H. P. Collins, 1928.

“Few thoughts and infinite apprehensions; much sensibility and little feeling — if you prefer to put it so, few fixed ideas and many floating ideas; emotions acute but never constant; disbelief in moral obligation and faith in novelty; positive minds and wavering opinions; the assertiveness of doubt; self-assurance and contempt for others; attention to every fanatical doctrine and indifference to cultured thought: these are the faults of our age.”

The Whispers of Joseph Joubert by Mark LaFlaur.

New at IWP Books: Maxims and Considerations of Chamfort, Translated by E. Powys Mathers, 1926

The translation by Powys Mathers was originally published in two volumes, and only 550 copies were printed. The second volume is available on the Internet Archive, but not the first, and I could not find the first elsewhere on the Internet either. There is one copy of the two volumes on AbeBooks for $375. Luckily the National Library of Australia has a copy, which is the one I used to produce the IWP edition of the book (two volumes in one).

New at IWP Books: The Characters of Jean De La Bruyère, Translated by Helen Stott, 1890.

Jacques Barzun on La Bruyère: “La Bruyère’s exercise of free speech is remarkable. The chapter on the nobility is more daring than Molière’s ridicule of the marquis, because the author speaking in his own voice discusses the ways of an entire class. His targets are named in his chapter headings; the list covers all of society: the Great, the Wealthy, the Town, the Court, the Sovereign, Man and the Morals of Our Time, Fashion, Preachers, Freethinkers, Journalists, and a few more who appear scattered among the rest. By the end of this procession one has the feeling that one has read a novel — or more exactly, a novelist’s notes for one, with the fullness Henry James adopted when describing his projected works.” (From Dawn to Decadence)