The Idea of Perfection

by Paul Valéry

  Vegetal silence. A tree makes no sound of its own. Its only movement is to grow. It lets its fruit fall away. Its dead arms fall at gusts of wind.

  A cloak of silence, of horror, of fear, on your shoulders. You are being observed straight to the bone. Spied on through these leaves, awaited behind these trunks, listened to by all life, discerned by someone who envelops this forest and whose eye cuts through it to reach you. Beasts, thieves, gods, God, are all waiting for you, menacing you, watching you; even the most beautiful vision, here, would be cause for exceptional fear. Everything is in suspension, everything merely glimpsed. Light and cold shadow are distributed following the haphazard seeds and acorns fallen in another time. Huge patterns, giants sown by the handful.

  Enormous precise details change into each other at every step. An exceedingly thin and delicate plant makes bold, and traces its outline with cheer and clarity on the eye, delineated against empty space.

  A [V, 839], 1915–1916

  Morning

  Seeing these bodies as we see them, this very ancient text, the sun a verb with its conjugations of color, propositions of light and shadow …

  There are moments, in the morning, in a horizontal light, when such a presentation is sufficient, and exceeds all possible reflection. An ordinary wall is worth the Parthenon, is the desired mirror, reflects being, exists. Freshness, charm and a fear, very pure sadness—bathe everything.

  We strongly feel how the first noises take place on silence, that the colors of things and forms are laid down on shadow, that this red so pure, these things of pearl, of bluish milk, these patches of hyacinth and transparent egg-yolk yellow, are applied as a wash over night; these languors and looks, slow movements, stunned and singular thoughts, these first ideas … are still only isolated trials, painted on sleep/nothingness/ that is still warm and could take over again … They are no longer dreams … but the values nearest to these real values are dreams. The rising day, and the state of waking which will harden and come to dominate, seem more like the end of something—the setting of instability. We cannot say for sure yet that this day will continue, and assert itself over everything.

  This reality is still in a reversible equilibrium with nothingness.

  C [VI, 232], 1916

  Northeast Wind

  Man has not yet started his work: he is still only preparing his tools. When the time comes, he will hardly retain the name of Man …

  (The high wind crying in my chimney whispers crazed ideas in my ear.)

  —What an acquisition is memory! …

  When man recognizes that he is nothing, then it can begin. The intellect will either disappear or replace everything. It will start building.

  The questions and necessary enigmas will at last have been accepted. Being born, suffering, dying, will no longer pose a problem. Energy, materials, subordinate beings, will long have been made available. Commerce and industry will no longer exist. There will be one unique science, and it will be almost entirely innate.

  The whole Earth will be a single city. Nothing will be done naturally any longer—that is to say, blindly.

  C [VI, 255], 1916

  Tide. Twice in twenty-four hours you adore yourself, and twice disdain. I am all, I am nothing, follow and cause each other, and each is only the other’s simple and necessary alternative, without importance.

  Perhaps for any given feeling we can find a period of time that contains the opposite feeling for the same object. And were life long enough, everything in the end would be both desired and hated; every opinion would be considered both true and false.

  You like tobacco, music … That’s only because you haven’t lived long enough to have the opposite taste.

  C [VI, 272], 1916

  The music that is inside me.

  The music that is in silence, in potential

  May it come and amaze me.

  D [VI, 292], 1916

  [The Old Woman]

  I am very old, and live in an intermediate world, nearly in balance with every instant and every circumstance. Though I touch you, I am very far. The same moment means quite a different thing for you and for me. My memory is a fully completed house. This magic house may disappear at a moment’s notice, as soon as nothing more can be added. All possible projects have either been brought to completion or abandoned. I have only one new act still to perform.

  I am difficult regarding the light, noise, the taste of food. Everything that happens now is already known to me, or is unknowable.

  E [VI, 491], 1917

  Morning of the Second Day of Autumn

  Waking—singular impressions—The softness of sheets, the sensation of delicate freshness—And I feel in myself a finesse, an extreme penetration, amid the psychological and tragic beauty—My Alexandria, my aging intellectual paganism, touched by winter—

  Infinitely pure mixture of thought and images.

  The idea of incest in all its nobility, its tenderness and ferocity—a little cold—Music. The trembling of hands deeply moved at being joined at last, at finding each other, and whose overexcited vibration resembles a low and deep note, as from a contralto, sung at the end of everything and at the beginning of tears—

  I get angry at these emotions. The intellect, never content, shrugs its strange shoulders and paces back and forth at the rear of the polished gallery, which does not exist and which overlooks the sea.

  Opening the window. The delicate sky.

  I play a tragedy a parte looking out in the street—where I look without seeing—

  I experience this opening of the day with all the weariness and impatience of my lucidity, which reads in these marvels a performance of autumn.

  G [VI, 738ff], 1917

  Gaze

  I sit down before these papers and assume a certain steady gaze … Ah! how well I know this gaze that sets in. I see it. It is looking at something entirely different from where it seems to be resting. It creates another world—or at least, awaits one—It finds that which exists to be strange, extraneous, an irritation, a usurpation of space. It is the gaze of one who expects everything of himself, and still sees what should not be.

  G [VI, 771], 1917

  Graft. Self-graft—

  I am a grafted being.

  I have made a number of grafts on myself.

  Grafting mathematics on poetry, rigor on free images. “Clear ideas” on a superstitious trunk; the French language on Italian wood …

  I [VII, 70], 1918

  Poem (Translated from the Self-Language)

  Perhaps I was going to love you,

  O my Mind!

  But I realized

  That I already love you so much!

  Perhaps I was going to love you,

  O my mind

  But I realize, O my Mind,

  That I already love you, in an entirely different way!

  You form the memories not of days/other days/, but of you/me/,

  And you increasingly resemble none other,

  More otherwise the same, and more same than me

  O Mine—but you are not yet entirely Me.

  J [VII, 217], 1918

  Monsieur Teste’s prayer: Lord, I was in the void, infinitely serene. I was disturbed from that state and thrown into the strange carnival of life. So I was given all I needed to suffer, enjoy, understand and be mistaken, but these gifts were bestowed in unequal measure.

  I see you as master of the dark I look into when I think, and against which my last thought will be inscribed.

  Grant, O Darkness—

  I confess I have made an idol of my mind, but I found none other. I dealt with it through gifts and insults. Not like something of mine.

  J [VII, 238], 1918–1919

  As the acrobat is prey to the most unstable equilibrium, we make a wish.

  And this wish is strangely double and null; we hope he falls and we hope he holds on.

  And this wish is necessary; we are incapable of not making it, in all contradiction and sincerity.
>
  For he naively paints the state of our soul in that very moment.

  It feels he is going to fall, and it begins his fall, and protects itself from its emotion by desiring what it foresees.

  And it sees that he is still holding on, and therefore feels there must be reasons why he holds on, and invokes those reasons.

  And sometimes we see the existence of the world, and of ourselves, in the same light.

  K [VII, 396], 1920

  A fitful night, broken by spells of torpor and flashes of clarity almost too beautiful. Marvels of possession and spiritual power.

  Comparable to a night on a train—, comparable to the journey itself, with its open stretches and its tunnels.

  O altitudo

  A delicate and continuous noise can be heard, which is the silence incarnate. It covers everything.

  But hear the whistle, so lonely, so far, creator of space, like something in the depths, like something within you.

  Then nothing—the nothingness is vast in my ears.

  Another whistle, simple, eternal, its equal, an eternal thread of time lost in the universe, in space. But here are the birds at last—little clackings of scissors, little sounds of scissors in the calm—But what a silence to be unstitched!

  What a feeling of happiness in exhaustion. Infinite extension. Ends of the world. What gentle heat of a bed am I. My eyes roll with impossible sleep.

  Rumble of the first wheels.

  K [VII, 409], 1920

  High seas on the Mer Sauvage. Cap Breton. Never saw waves so high, so massive, so pounded and pounding, so foaming. On the shore, at a corresponding distance from the water, a persistent wall of solid foam from which the wind tears off pieces as big as a cat and sends them running along the slope of hard-packed sand and rolls them toward the dunes. They resemble animals. This puffy jelly is yellowish and slimy—composed of silica and salt water.

  Crushing effect of this endless buffeting without respite. The apparent climax, prolonged and inexhaustible. Weariness, sleep, provoked by this sublime non-living action, this display of anger, this uprising and clash of dead things, this revolt of the inert.

  K [VII, 428], 1920

  I saw a fly caught in a spider’s web, struggling desperately. But the spider was dead and nothing approached on the abandoned web. The fly, unable to free itself, cried: Come, O Spider, come! It preferred the spider’s bite to this long and inextricable/struggling/ death in silk.

  L [VII, 545], 1920

  A slave was singing unseen, with a sad voice, to accompany his sad labors

  (here, song of the mind—O my mind)

  That spiritual lament was washing tiles or scrubbing a floor, for there were sounds of water, sloshes and pouring of water.

  Life seemed eternal, the task endless and futile, the time he’d been allotted had to be drunk, the mind absent and deaf.

  M [VII, 670], 1920

  Dawn. This isn’t dawn—But the setting of the moon, worn-away pearl, melting ice—and a dying glow that is little by little replaced by the day being born. I love this moment, so pure, final, beginning. A mixture of calm, renunciation, religion, negation. Abandonment. The night is respectfully closed. It is folded and tucked away. Now is the lying down, the sinking into sleep, of the loneliest self. Sleep is going to rest. Dreams cede to the dream of the real. Agitation and movement are about to be born. Muscles, machines will invade the land of being. The real still seems to hesitate. The Zaimph unfurls and at the blast of a whistle will be raised to the tops of poles, of trees, of roofs—to fill the sky.

  M [VII, 732], 1920–1921

  Morning

  Nothing touches me more than a summer morning. The peace of fresh blue painted on gold. Gold and night. This modesty that the sun starts drawing out of rest. There’s a moment when it seems that night is revealed in the light, as the mind on waking reveals birth/naiveté/, inexistence/its blankness/, and dreams, in the first lucidity. Nakedness of the night still undressed. The sky’s substance is strangely tender. We feel intimately the divine freshness that will soon be heat.

  We feel weariness before work, sadness at taking up the self/a body/ one day older, and hope, the simplicity of living, promise and the emptiness of promise—All this painted as in a naive picture, where a character’s various acts are gathered and grouped together in calm and purity … All of poor life in a crystal.

  There is also the melancholy languor that precedes great acts, and the power of those acts. Fear at entering day, a shiver before the sea. Golden sadness, as of a god. Peaceful despair at no longer believing in dawn, in hope.

  Before all things. Mute prayer to what will be, what can be.

  * * *

  The angel’s greeting, announcing that we have conceived—pregnant with a new day. Division.

  We acknowledge approaching activity with a yawn—The body stretches, turns over and back, seeks the twist and the tension that will make it rediscover its place in itself, its state of readiness, and chase away such sleep as is still lying in wait. It is a question of restoring the whole, of dissipating local inertia and resistance.

  The mind, too, leafs through itself, its problems and worries, its appointments of every kind. Little by little, God disappears into business, behind memories, among … realities.

  O [VIII, 151], 1921

  Swimming

  I seem to find myself again when I enter this universal water. I have nothing to do with harvests, with labors; there is nothing for me in the Georgics.

  But moving in movement, in action down to my toes, turning in a pure and deep mass, drinking and expelling the bitter water, fresh and wild on the surface, calm in its depths! is for me the divine game, full of signs and forces, where my whole body abandons and understands and tries to exhaust itself. I embrace the water with open arms, I love it, possess it, engender with it a thousand strange ideas. Now/In it/, I am the man I want to be. Through it, my body becomes the direct instrument of the mind and creates my mind. I illuminate myself. I understand so clearly what love might have been for me, had the gods willed it. Excess of reality. My caresses are knowledge. My acts—I can never possess enough.

  So swim, turn on your back, throw your head into this wave that rolls over you and breaks with you and breaks you.—

  Then I walk on the vast beach, drinking in the wind. It’s a southwest wind that blows across the breakers, ruffles and covers them with scales, with tiles, with secondary systems and networks of little waves that they carry and roll from the horizon to the breaking line—of foam … —

  What barefoot happiness, I walk on the mirror endlessly polished by the thin sheet of water that once again contracts. I am myself and my system! The enormous sky whooshes inside me. I am drunk on my senses.

  O [VIII, 212], 1921

  Morning—rain of a windblown dawn.

  By means of the clouds, in two or three minutes the wind’s fancy changes the face of the field of the sea. The colors of sun and night are mixed together, succeed each other. Part of the coast is sharp and dark, the other is melted and vaguely crushed in the moist substance of vision to rosy forms, all soft and indistinct.

  These rapid transformations bring to mind those of a very impressionable soul, still smiling at an idea while the obdurate will and sudden sadness are already masters of nearly all of it.

  This view portrays for me the fluctuations, the nearly instantaneous invasions of the soul by the lights and darks of ideas.

  The speed of these visible changes is of the same order of magnitude as that of my soul. The movement of a musical development could follow it very precisely …

  P [VIII, 259], 1921

  The sea, the most intact and ancient thing on the globe.

  Everything it touches is a ruin; everything it abandons is new.

  P [VIII, 259], 1921

  The beginnings of Orpheus—I was born, without knowing it, without wishing it, in those times which have become mythical and are so old they pass for never having been. That is how time gro
ws old:

  not only does it no longer exist, but it’s no longer conceivable, and it seems impossible that it ever was. But in those times, stones had not yet grown insensitive to words, nor tigers to song. Death allowed itself to be taken or its prey taken back, and could be overcome.

  Q [VIII, 371], 1921

  _____________

  The Old Woman: title that Valéry added when he included this piece in Autres Rhumbs; the subject is perhaps Valéry’s mother, eighty-six years old at the time and blind.

  Cap Breton: a small town north of Biarritz in Southwest France. The sea off the mouth of the Adour River was known by local sailors as the Mer Sauvage, that is, the “wild sea,” for its mobile sandbanks and violent storms.

  Zaimph: a name coined by Gustave Flaubert for the sacred veil of the Phoenician goddess Tanit, in his novel Salammbô, from the Hebrew word for “veil.”

  Charmes

  Charms

  Deducere carmen.

  (1921)

  _____________

  Deducere carmen: Spinning out a song or charm, from the first lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

  AURORE

  À PAUL POUJAUD

  La confusion morose

  Qui me servait de sommeil,

  Se dissipe dès la rose

  Apparence du soleil.

  Dans mon âme je m’avance,

  Tout ailé de confiance :

  C’est la première oraison!

  À peine sorti des sables,

  Je fais des pas admirables

  Dans les pas de ma raison.