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

Everyone knows about the strength of character of the Stoics. They reasoned on the passions – hate, jealousy, fear, despair – and thus managed to keep a tight rein on them, just as a good coachman controls his horses.

One of their arguments which I have always found good, and which has been useful to me more than once, is their concept of the past and of the future. “We have only the present to bear,” they said. “Neither the past nor the future can harm us, since the one no longer exists and the other does not yet exist.”

That is quite true. The past and the future exist only when we think about them; they are impressions, not realities. We go to a great deal of trouble to fabricate our regrets and our fears. I once saw a juggler pile up daggers one on top of the other so as to make a kind of monstrous tree which he balanced on his forehead. That is just the way we pile up and carry around our regrets and fears, like foolhardy performers. Instead of carrying a minute around with us, we carry around an hour; instead of carrying around an hour, we carry around a day, ten days, months, years. A person who has a pain in his leg thinks how he suffered from it yesterday, how he suffered from it before that, how he will suffer tomorrow; he bemoans his entire life. It is clear that in such a case wisdom cannot do much, for the actual suffering is still very much there. But if it is a question of moral suffering, what would remain of it if one could be cured of regretting the past and of worrying about the future?

A rejected lover, who tosses and tums in bed instead of sleeping and who plots a dreadful, Corsican revenge, what would remain of his distress if he did not think about the past or the future? The ambitious man, stung to the quick by a failure, where can he get his misery except from a past that he dredges up and from a future that he invents? One is reminded of the legendary Sisyphus who rolls his stone up the hill and thus renews his torment.

I would say to all those who torture themselves in this manner: keep your mind on the present; keep your mind on your life, which moves onward from minute to minute; one minute follows another; it is therefore possible to live as you are living, since you are alive. But the future terrifies me, you say. That is something you know nothing about. What happens is never what we expected; and as for your present suffering, you may be sure that it will diminish precisely because it is so intense. Everything changes, everything passes away. This maxim has often saddened us; the very least it can do is console us once in a while.

17 April 1908

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

I know someone who showed his palm to a fortuneteller in order to know his future. He told me he did it just for fun, and didn’t really believe in it. Even so, I would have advised him against it, if he had asked me, because it is a dangerous way to have fun. It is very easy not to believe, as long as nothing has yet been said; for then there is nothing for you or anyone else to believe. Disbelief is easy at the outset, but soon becomes difficult; fortunetellers know this very well. “If you don’t believe in it,” they say, “what are you afraid of?” And thus the trap is set. As for me, I am afraid of believing, for who knows what they will tell me.

I suppose there are fortunetellers who believe in themselves. Those who only mean to joke might predict ordinary and likely events in ambiguous terms: “You will have troubles and a few little failures, but you will succeed in the end”; “You have enemies, but they will eventually come around to your point of view, and meanwhile, the constancy of your friends will console you”; “You will soon receive a letter concerning your present problems.” … This list could be extended almost indefinitely, and such predictions are perfectly harmless. However, if a fortuneteller thinks of himself as a real fortuneteller, then he might very well predict dreadful misfortunes for you; and you, levelheaded person that you are, you would laugh. It is no less true, however, that his words would stick in your memory and come back unexpectedly in your musings and dreams, troubling you just a bit, until the day when events seem to bear them out.

A girl I knew had her palm read one day by a fortuneteller who told her: “You will get married; you will have a child; you will lose it.” Such a prediction is not too heavy a burden to carry in the early stages. But time passed. The girl got married, and just recently had a child; the prediction now weighs more heavily on her mind. If the child should get sick, the fatal words will resound deafeningly in the ears of the mother. Perhaps she had laughed at the fortuneteller. He will be avenged.

All sorts of things happen in this world, fortuitous occurrences that can shatter the most steadfast belief. You laugh when something sinister and unlikely is predicted; you will laugh less if part of this prediction comes true; then, even the most courageous man will wait for the rest to occur. We all know that our fears cause us as much suffering as the catastrophe themselves. It is possible for two prophets who do not know each other to predict the same thing. If this concordance does not upset you more than your intelligence tells you it should, then I admire you.

As far as I am concerned, I prefer not to think about the future, but to look ahead only to what lies directly before me. Not only will I not go showing the inside of my hand to a fortuneteller, but more importantly, I will not try to read the future by attempting to penetrate the nature of things; for I do not believe that our sight extends very far, no matter how great our knowledge. I have noticed that anything important that happens to anyone is unforeseen and unforeseeable. Once you have cured yourself of curiosity, you will no doubt then have to cure yourself of prudence.

14 April 1908

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)