From Alain on Happiness (1973), Translated by Robert D. and Jane E. Cottrell:

In these vacation months, the world is full of people rushing from one sight to another, obviously hoping to see a great deal in a short time. If it is so they can talk about what they have seen, all well and good, for it is best to be able to mention the names of several places; that is one way of killing time. But if it is for themselves, if they really want to see something, I do not quite understand them. When you see things on the run, they all look alike. A waterfall is still a waterfall. Thus someone who travels around at full speed is hardly richer in memories at the end than at the outset.

The real richness of sights is in their details. Seeing means going over the details, stopping a little at each one, and then taking in the whole once again. I don’t know if other people can do that quickly and then run off to look at something else, and start all over again. As for me, I cannot. Happy are they who live in Rouen and who every day can glance at something beautiful – the old Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Ouen, for example – as if it were a painting in their own home.

However, if you visit a museum only once or stop only briefly in one of the countries on the tourist circuit, it is almost inevitable that your memories become confused and then form a kind of gray picture with indistinct lines.

To my mind, traveling means going a few feet, then stopping and looking to get a different view of the same things. Often, going to sit down a little to the right or to the left changes everything, and a lot more than going a hundred miles.

Going from waterfall to waterfall, I always find the same waterfall. But if I go from rock to rock, the same waterfall changes at every step. And if I return to something I have already seen, it strikes me more than if it were new; and in fact it is new. To avoid getting into a rut, all one has to do is contemplate something rich and varied. It should be added that as one learns to see better, one discovers inexhaustible joys in even the most common sights. Moreover, the sky with its stars can be seen from anywhere; now there is a marvelous precipice.

29 August 1906

From Alain on Happiness (1973), Translated by Robert D. and Jane E. Cottrell:

When a baby cries and refuses to be consoled, his nurse often makes the most ingenious suppositions about his character and his likes and dislikes. She even resorts to heredity for explanations, and can already recognize the father in his son. These attempts at psychology continue until the nurse discovers the pin, the real cause of the trouble.

When Bucephalus, the famous horse, was presented to young Alexander, not a single equerry could ride the fierce animal. An ordinary man might have said: “There’s a mean horse if I ever saw one.” Alexander, however, began to look for the pin, and soon found it when he noticed that Bucephalus was terribly afraid of his own shadow. Since his fear also made his shadow buck, it was a vicious circle. But Alexander turned Bucephalus’ head toward the sun and, keeping him turned that way, managed to calm him and then to break him in. Thus Aristotle’s pupil already realized that we have no power at all over our passions as long as we do not know their true causes.

Many men have refuted fear, and with sound arguments. But a man who is afraid does not listen to arguments; he listens to the beating of his heart and the pulsating of his blood. The pedant’s reasoning proceeds from danger to fear; the reasoning of a man who is governed by his passions proceeds from fear to danger. Both are trying to be logical, and both are mistaken. The pedant, however, is doubly mistaken; he does not know the real cause and does not understand the passionate man’s error. A man who is afraid invents a danger in order to explain his fear, which is real and quite apparent. The least surprise arouses fear even if there is no danger at all, as for example, an unexpected pistol shot nearby, or simply the presence of an unexpected person. Marshal Masséna was once frightened by a statue on a dimly lighted staircase, and ran for his life.

Impatience and ill humor sometimes result from the fact that a man has been on his feet too long. Do not try to reason him out of his ill humor; offer him a chair. When Talleyrand said that manners are everything, he said more than he realized. In the care he took to be accommodating, he was looking for the pin, and always ended up by finding it. All of today’s diplomats have a misplaced pin somewhere in their breeches; hence Europe’s problems. We all know that one squalling child makes others cry. And worse still, crying makes one cry even harder. With professional competence, a nurse turns the infant over on his stomach. Soon there are different responses and a different pattern of behavior. Now there is a down-to-earth method of persuasion. In my opinion, the evils of 1914 resulted from all the important men being surprised; consequently, they were overcome by fear. When a man is afraid, he is not very far from anger; irritation follows agitation. It is not a favorable situation when a man is brusquely called away from his leisure and repose; often he changes, and changes too much. Like a man awakened by surprise; he wakes up too much. But never say that men are wicked; never say that they are of such and such a character. Look for the pin.

8 December 1922

New at IWP Articles: If My Library Burned Tonight (1947) by Aldous Huxley.

If my library burned down… fortunately for me, it never has. But I have moved house sufficiently often and I have had enough book-borrowing friends to be able to form a pretty good idea of the nature of the catastrophe. To enter the shell of a well-loved room and to find it empty, except for a thick carpet of ashes that were once one’s favorite literature — the very thought of it is depressing. But happily books are replaceable — at any rate the kind of books that fill the shelves of my library. For I lack the collector’s spirit and have never been interested in first editions and rare antiquities. It is only about the contents of a book that I care, not its shape, its date, or the number on its flyleaves. Fire, friends, and changes of residence can never rob one of anything that cannot, like Job’s children, camels, and she-asses, be restored in fullest measure.

Amos Oz: Writer, Activist, Icon by Robert Alter.

From Whatever Happened to Culture? by Joseph Epstein:

As for that ruck, defined as a crowd of ordinary or undistinguished persons, at a time when everyone is lined up politically, and when it is now not permissible to be apolitical, it is difficult to point to men or women of true culture. Jacques Barzun once seemed such a person; so too, did Lionel Trilling, Ralph Ellison, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Willa Cather. One cannot think of people of their stature and general distinction today. Might it be that the current Zeitgeist has snuffed out all possibilities for such distinction, has killed the very idea of high cultural distinction, and with it the ideal of the man or woman of culture?

From Do What You Will (1929) by Aldous Huxley:

Swift’s prodigious powers were marshalled on the side of death, not life. How instructive, in this context, is the comparison with Rabelais! Both men were scatological writers. Mass for mass, there is probably more dung and offal piled up in Rabelais’ work than in Swift’s. But how pleasant is the dung through which Gargantua wades, how almost delectable the offal! The muck is transfigured by love; for Rabelais loved the bowels which Swift so malignantly hated. His was the true amor fati: he accepted reality in its entirety, accepted with gratitude and delight this amazingly improbable world, where flowers spring from manure, and reverent Fathers of the Church, as in Harington’s Metamorphosis of Ajax, meditate on the divine mysteries while seated on the privy; where the singers of the most mystically spiritual love, such as Dante, Petrarch, and Cavalcanti, have wives and rows of children; and where the violences of animal passion can give birth to sentiments of the most exquisite tenderness and refinement.

New at IWP Books: The Buried Candelabrum (1937) by Stefan Zweig.

New at IWP Books: The Right to Heresy: Castellio against Calvin (1936) by Stefan Zweig. (Review by Brad Bigelow, at Neglected Books)

From Erasmus of Rotterdam by Stefan Zweig:

Erasmus loved books, not merely for their contents, but also for their material selves, he being the first thoroughgoing bibliophile. He worshipped their form, he liked handling them, he admired their artistic presentation. His moments of sheerest happiness were those passed at Aldus’s printing-house in Venice, or with Frobenius in Basle, standing among the workers in the low-ceilinged room, receiving the galleys still damp from the press, setting up with the masters the delicate and beautiful initial letters, running to earth like an expert huntsman with swift and finely pointed quill the most elusive of printer’s errors, deftly rounding off a clumsy phrase; to be with books, dealing with them, working at them – this seemed to him the most natural form of existence. Thus Erasmus never lived among the peoples whose lands he travelled through, never shared in their life and activities; he dwelt above them, in the clear, still ether, in the ivory tower of the artist and academician. But from this tower, which was built entirely of books and labour, he gazed forth, keen of sight like another Lynceus, in order to see and to understand clearly and correctly the living life below.

Only when the impulse to violence is inspired with an idea, or is made to serve an idea, do genuine “tumulti” occur. Then come the bloody and destructive revolutions, then the bands of ragamuffins get formed into a party hastening to obey the rallying-cry, then by organization is an army created, then does a dogma help to promote a movement. All the great and vehement conflicts that have arisen among men are more rightly described as the outcome of certain ideologies than as being due to the violence and bloodthirstiness of the human animal; for an idea may let loose the will to violence and drive it to the attack. Fanaticism, the bastard begotten out of brain and power, fancies itself dictator in the realm of thought, so that only what it thinks is acceptable and must be forced upon the whole universe; it thus splits the human community into friends or foes, adherents or opponents, heroes or criminals, believers or heretics; since it recognizes no other system than its own and no other truth than its own, it needs must resort to violence in order to curb and bridle the divine multiplicity of phenomena and to bring everything under one yoke. The forcible curtailment of mental latitude, of freedom of opinions, every kind of inquisition and censorship, of scaffold and stake – these evils were not brought into the world by blind violence, but by rigidly staring fanaticism, that genius of one-sidedness, that hereditary enemy of universality, that captive of a single idea which would shut the whole world up in a cage.

But lo, like a belated swallow, someone came knocking at his window already frosted by the cold of approaching winter. A message flew in to greet him with reverence and love. “Everything that I do, all that I am, I owe to you; and, were I to fail in acknowledging my debt, I should prove the most ungrateful man alive. Salve itaque etiam atque etiam, pater amantissime, pater desusque patriae, literarum assertor, veritatis propugnator invictissime.” (Greeting and yet again greeting, dearest father and honour of the land which gave you birth, champion of the arts, invincible fighter for truth.) The name of the man who wrote these words, and one which was destined to outshine even the name of Erasmus, was Rabelais, who in the dawn of his youthful glory thus acclaimed the dying master whose sun was about to set.

New at IWP Books: Erasmus of Rotterdam (1934) by Stefan Zweig. (Review by Brad Bigelow, at Neglected Books)