The Idea of Perfection

by Paul Valéry

  He makes me with his eyelid

  The sign of a silent prayer

  Intended for my eyes:

  —Calm, calm, stay calm,

  Feel the weight of a palm

  Holding its profusion!

  In bowing with the load

  Of such abundant goods,

  Its figure is fulfilled,

  Its ripe fruit, ties that bind.

  Admire the way it trembles,

  And like a slow, taut fiber

  Dividing the hour at hand,

  Plainly sets apart

  The downward pull of the earth

  From the heavens’ great weight!

  This graceful mediator

  Between the sun and shadow

  Takes on a sibyl’s air

  Of wisdom and her sleep.

  In one unchanging place

  The palm tree never wearies

  Of calls, nor of farewells …

  How noble and how tender,

  How worthy of depending

  On none but the gods’ hand!

  The breezy gold it murmurs

  Sounds at the air’s light touch,

  And lays a silky armor

  Over the desert’s soul.

  The long undying voice

  It gives the wind of sand

  That showers it with grit

  Is a private oracle,

  Proud of the miracle

  Misfortunes sing alone.

  For the tree, naively growing

  Between the sand and sky,

  Each day that goes on shining

  Composes a little honey.

  The measure of its sweetness

  Is the divine duration

  That keeps no count of days,

  But rather seals them away

  In sap accumulating

  All the perfumes of love.

  If at times one loses hope,

  If your most exacting gaze

  Cannot for all your tears

  Dispel the languid cloud,

  Don’t blame for being selfish

  A Wisdom that’s preparing

  Such gold and authority:

  Eternal hope is climbing

  Through solemn lines of sap

  To reach maturity!

  These days that seem so empty,

  A loss for the universe,

  Have greedy roots at work

  Beneath the desert sands.

  Elect among the shadows,

  The bearded growth can never

  Leave off its long pursuit

  In search of the deep water

  The summit calls for, even

  To the bowels of the earth.

  Patience, one must have patience,

  Patience in the azure!

  Each particle of silence

  Is the chance for ripened fruit!

  The happy stroke will come:

  A dove or a fresh breeze,

  The gentlest shake, a woman

  Leaning against the trunk,

  Will send the blessed showers

  That bring us to our knees!

  Let a whole people fall,

  Palm … irresistibly!

  Let them scramble in the dust

  To gather the heavens’ fruit!

  These hours will not be lost

  If you emerge grown lighter

  From your sublime surrender;

  Like someone deep in thought,

  Whose soul expends itself

  In increase of its gifts!

  From the Notebooks 1922–1945

  Nocturnes          Difficilis descensus Averno

  1/20–21/22

  O alone. O most alone. All things are close around me, but do not touch me. I look and I breathe. I am and I am not. There is no longer a place for me in the arrangement of things. I am ill at ease in this flesh. My own well-being is become a stranger. I have broken with what exists. Everything is strange to me. I have suffered too much in my soul to recognize anything. Why is there no God? Why, from the summits of distress and the pit of abandonment, do no sure messengers come? No sign, no indication. No one can hear my inner voice. There is no one to speak with me directly, to understand my tears and hold the confidence of my heart.

  So is there no “world” touching this one inside the mind, one which is the substance our roots delve into and from which they draw the tree of the visible universe?—

  Tranquility would be found there, and the very soft breast where the sufferer can yield and melt away.

  —The world where our springs, stretched to breaking, could at last relax. Where our vengeance drinks deeply, to the drop where our pains will receive the price they paid.

  —There is nothing of the kind. Those worlds do not exist. We derive them from their very nonexistence. God is made of our impotence, our abandonment, our imperfections, our distress, inverted. But if he existed, we ourselves would not.

  —Who will sound the depths of my folly, who will weigh my ignorance?—Who can see better than I the insignificance of my terrible suffering?—I suffer from the vanity of my pains as much as from the indisputable bites that caused them. What is imagined bites and tears apart the real.

  Phenomena of shock.

  This is about receiving, in a few short instants, news that destroys the work of n whole years. That renders a slowly and solidly built-up expectation suddenly vain, and of enduring in just a few days that internal discharge of so many months.

  “In a few days,” which is to say, in as much time as necessary.

  Q [VIII, 466], 1921–1922

  These vast skies where so many events that are unaware of each other unite in the eye of man.

  R [VII, 547], 1922

  Matutina—Psalm

  Wretched is he who has nothing to give.

  A thousand times more wretched is he who has no one with whom to share what he has. Quis me sustenit?—Quis me audiet?

  My fountain runs dry and its waters become bitter if the dove and the thirst do not come.

  Abundance becomes unbearable pain. The water that flows from my mind and my soul returns to itself and changes to poisonous mire. Wretched is he who was ready to give, who was made to be partaken of and to give of his substance.

  His richness wakes him. His inner light pierces the night of his body; it dissipates his sleep. His fruits triumph over his roots. His powers triumph over his weaknesses, and long before daybreak he is filled with sun. He rises, armed with his life, and as questions and things reappear around him, he greets them with the bright and joyful defiance of his thought. But no one is there. He falls back among his strength.

  Maybe this is the curse of God, and why he resents us so much. Just as we cry out: Lord, Lord—, He cries out with an unintelligible voice: Humans, Beings! … hear me, understand me!—eat of me, here is my son, here is my blood. But no one wants him, and everyone is right.

  R [VIII, 577], 1922

  How did this night pass?

  At 4 o’clock, I was watching the palm tree crowned with a star.

  The infinitely gentle calm, the motionless wellspring of day,

  Was infinitely close to the wellspring of tears,

  And day arrived, slowly shedding light

  On so many ruins.

  It comes, slowly infusing things which in my eyes are all ruins.

  And how about the day?

  Lovely, golden, absent, a goddess we no longer believe in.

  Despair is a normal, reasonable state of mind: in fact, the only one that is.

  It is the rejection of all that does not yet exist.

  R [VIII, 588], 1922

  B. There was something strange about these lovers, and about their love, in that each of them felt it not as a particular affair between themselves, as a love of one person for another, but as the necessary and perfect concord between two living systems, for they both took seriously, tragically,—what men reduce to the state of opinion, of speculation—that is, their very condition as men—events of tho
ught. Each desired what was “universal” about the other—that is, as opposed to all that takes place in successive time,—and therefore each one needed to be an infinitely particular being.

  For them, pleasure was not the end of all their tenderness, but a means of losing as much as they could together of their difference; for body with body sometimes come to understand, and respond to, and divinely discover each other; and there remains of that instant a kind of sensorial presence of each in the other, a memory of silent understanding, which can serve as type or model for the intercourse of minds, and therefore, in the end, of Self with Self. The body, through pleasure, makes itself like an intellect and seems to search for the precise moment of its transformation into a god, by a series of attempts and efforts, of groping forward, of trying its hand. The mind, first troubled, then overexcited, founding a new religion, crossing a thousand superstitions that it takes on, creating languages, calculating its advantage, which has played an increasingly active and subordinate role,—here expires and yields to the pure feeling of being.—To be reborn in a strange peace …

  R [VIII, 593ff.], 1922

  The views from this house were admirable, its stones purely set;—a precise and perfectly beautiful abode.

  There must have been living there, to harmonize with such a masterpiece, at least the Word and Spirit of Happiness, if not Happiness itself—At least the living possibility of Happiness. And Happiness would sometimes descend there like the dove and ray of light it is—like some eternal thing which can be glimpsed only in brief flashes. For surely it must not be permanent, if it is to be eternal …

  S [VIII, 713], 1922

  B.

  My life was a house whose every corner I knew so well. So well, that I hardly saw it anymore—Its regular forms, its advantages, its inconveniences, seemed part of my very body and of my time.

  I could not conceive of another abode. My soul was there, and was so accustomed to being there that in the end it was nowhere at all.

  One day I touched by chance a certain spring, and a secret door swung open. I entered strange and infinite apartments. I was overcome at every step by my discoveries. As I moved through those unknown and mysterious rooms, I felt they were the true abode of my soul.

  T [VIII, 778], 1922

  Psalm M

  Here is the man of questions and combinations before his idols. But sometimes they are lifeless dolls in his eyes, the dead and wooden pawns of an abandoned game, just as on other days they were winged and luminous powers.

  Empty and vain are the same words that were living and deadly weapons, organs of knowledge, grasp and enjoyment, instruments and acts of possession, treasures and keys to treasures, fine vessels and the extraordinary brews they contain, lights and also eyes …

  Who will recount the variations of my faith in my thoughts?

  U [IX, 56], 1922

  The bird that pierces the ending night with quiet and shrill cries, reminds me of something … And that something becomes a certain sky blue with two or 3 stars that will soon disappear. I translate this by the memory of my time in the army. I think of the melancholy and the Oracle that those same cries and those stars were to me in the yard of the barracks. They were heavy with an indecipherable meaning—and with the future … That future has become the past. I know now what those impressions held.

  V [IX, 198], 1923

  The exquisite pleasure

                                      of being the first man

                                                                         to perceive a “truth”

  (and who would either call the others over—or instead, keep quiet and keep the discovery for himself—, content to smile—as his only profit—) to set foot on the expected and unexpected America …

  V [IX, 201], 1923

  Morning on the balcony, the earsplitting din of shutters being opened, I create myself, I take my place in the day and I look out over all things. All—the unfolding of it all. The word and movement of Greetings!—Salve, natura, come to mind.

  The birds speak and carve out their cries from untold silence.

  The angular nature of vision gathers, concentrates/the gaze manipulates/near and far. Everything in this presentation has its place, the palm trees, the smaller and smaller houses, the tops of the cypresses, the mountain, distinct, reserved, clear, tall, and the sea, a band of pure color against which the Cap d’Antibes is painted in greenish black—in geographical projection.

  βῆτα [X, 4], 1924

  There is a tall tulip tree in the little panes of my window.

  My eyes come to rest there, imploring an idea

  And a question makes its nest there among the leaves.

  Paris is more or less behind those leaves.

  This countryside crushes me—saddens me. And every countryside.

  No matter how beautiful they are, they cause me pain.

  I feel like crying out from so much solitude—and like writing.

  I clearly feel that I converse, even with myself,

  as one eats out of politeness,—being invited but having no appetite.

  Delta [X, 217], 1924

  He rises. He switches on his lamp. He feels the whole bright and bitter rising of thought, the presence of the world so sharply outlined, so clear, against sleep that has just ended, against the shadow surrounding the table.

  He will open up for day, which must be quite bright already. He blesses the day from the open window, inhales the air, implores principle, and asks the light for light. Abstraction, and love.

  Delta [X, 282], 1924

  Waking beside a sleeping woman, in the half-light, warm and fragrant, breathing in, breathing out in the silence; sitting up, pure, sad, lightened, universal, and rising above life and the misty recollection of love which is distant now across the intervening sleep and the lover’s absence wrapped deep in her unconscious form—

  She sleeps, and within her, like a seed in a crypt, the life of the previous day reposes and endures, waiting for the day that will follow. The latter will inherit from its predecessor, and through it from all the ones before. In this way, the self is passed on.—

  What a song does the spirit of night thus cast to itself on waking and

  Ἰῶτα [XI, 35], 1925

  Dawn

  Birth of the most delicate pink—I see it first on a house—For a while now the birds have been speaking all at once—the roosters begin.

  The pink is like a breath—The moon grows transparent, a wash of green—

  Nothing moves except the Earth—that is, except the light which little by little “takes form.”

  The depth that appearance makes us feel, and which is itself only appearance.

  I feel so strongly at this hour … the depth of appearance (I can’t quite express it) and that is poetry. What speechless wonder that everything is, and that I am! At this moment, what we see takes on the symbolic value of the sum of all things. An ordinary landscape is a δU—It conceals what it implies, demands.

  υ [XII, 190], 1927

  Ad Ed

  The morning is my abode.

  I find there a sober and transparent sadness. I am nearly cold and still warm from the heat of my bed. At this moment of day I am always half pierced through the heart with who knows what arrow that brings tears without a cause to my eyes—half mad with lucidity that has no object—and a cold and implacable “tension of understanding.”

  This is my mixture, my characteristic formula, which morning exposes to all my mornings and which the rest of the day muddles and puts to use. The terrible impression of “knowing everything by heart” which I felt so strongly 35 years ago and which made me what I am—

  The will to push to exhaustion, to go to the limit,

  it is strange that for me this cold rage for
extermination, for execution through rigor, is strongly connected to the painful feeling of a clenched heart, of tenderness at a point of infinite tenderness—That isn’t the word, but there is no word for something so not-common, in such opposition to the plurality of my selves.

  The morning acts and grows its thoughts in virgin time.

  Φ [XII, 352], 1927

  Tiger

  London—Tiger at the Zoo—a splendid beast, terribly serious, with that known mask which is part Mongol, a loyal strength, possibility, the closed expression of power—something beyond cruelty—an expression of inevitable fate—that mask singularly decorated with black arabesques, very elegant and fine. The head of an absolute master at rest—Bored, terrible, burdened—Impossible to be more oneself, more of what it takes to be a tiger.

  But this splendid animal crosses and uncrosses its paws, and from time to time its muscles can be seen rippling lightly under its tawny robe flecked with black—Its tail is alive—Are they aware of these distant movements?—This animal resembles a great empire—all at once it pulls together.

  The “sparking” of local reflexes—Try to decipher.

  I am unable to stay and study this beast for long—the finest tiger I have ever seen.

  I think of the possible literature on this subject. Of images one would look for, and which I will not. Rather, I would try to possess its state of life and mobile form, deformable by act, before treating it in writing.

  Pendular movement of wild beasts the length of their cages, their stripes brushing the bars.

  It opens its mouth. Yawn—Presence and absence.

  Φ [XII, 423], 1927

  London Bridge

  Always a crowded bridge—Rare is he who stops and loses himself, his gaze in the complex water—with its clouds/billows/ of mire, mother-of-pearl reflections, lusterless patches, golden islands, barges whose extremely fragile oars stick out and labor like 2 insect legs, topped by a small triangular sail—

  Complex of freighters, some in the mud. Little freighters departing, for which the roadways of Tower Bridge must nevertheless be raised.

  Φ [XII, 427], 1927

  Faust III

            Psalm—Adam’s Monologue

                      The First Man

  I am on the path that once led to paradise.