A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney
Page 13
Let's raise a glass of cool water to the health of the fifth generation!
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It was doubtless a distiller who got the superstition going that it is unlucky to drink anyone's health with water. Drinking someone's health with alcohol is a contradiction in terms.
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As for 'delicious wines,' is it not better to taste them than to drink
them?
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If the wretched need their little illusions, let them have ones which will last a little longer.
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The exaggerations of drunkenness, false lyricism which perverts true values: I lament the enthusiasm, the writing, the friendship and love affairs which are born in ones cups.
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What you find in one glass you lose in the next.
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A man was drowned in a barrel of wine—but how many barrels of
wine does each man contain?
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Alcohol, the vice of the blood.
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Everyone would be a 'melancholy drunk' if they understood what
it meant.
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The gods need only themselves. In vain do mortals seek baneful, unworthy, intoxicating stimulants to take them out of themselves,
"to get back what they're missing," as the German said!
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One race may assimilate another, but no blood is strong enough
to absorb the enemy of the human race—alcohol.
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Having been born drunk I drink only water.
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Brutalizing drink invades first the mind, then the guts then the generations to come.
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Women at a dinner party become the girls they really are.... The
light of dawn is too clear a mirror and they are afraid.
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Drunk on fresh air, on night and solitude, I stretch my amorous
arms toward the dawn and go home stumbling with ideas.
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To lose one's moral health is to lose one's life, for what is a physical life worth when the mind is sick and no longer signs its own acts?
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Lovers are not the only ones who are 'love-sick,' there are others
who love their disease.
The Gods
If only original sin were original.
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Only God knows how to keep his distance.
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The big mistake was thinking God is good.
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‘The poor of heart will see God,’ and the rich will be gods.
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If only 'right-thinking' people could be replaced by thinking people.
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Not discouraged by the mediocre quality of creation, he wants to
make it eternal.
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Eternity: what a waste of time.
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I'm fond of human beings, but only one at a time.
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Prayers tire the gods out.
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It's not surprising the faithful remain adoring; they never see him.
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Renouncement: the heroism of the mediocre.
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The fact that experience costs us dear is probably its only redeeming feature.
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Humanity is like an opera choir; it always remains in the background.
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Everything serves its purpose—even goodness.
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Their assertions crush many truths.
Old Age
They say it is tragic to grow old; it seems to me it would be dreadful
not to know how to.
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It is not their youth but their age they fear to lose.
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Some women experience maturity as an incurable disease.
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Only old age is expressive.
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Upon her brow, a marvelous array of wrinkles in the shape of a lyre.
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'Staying young,' trying to arrest one's development instead of
evolving, keeping one's person free of personality. Faces, tell your
secrets, become 'human documents' worthy of our study.
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Her hair stayed too young for her face.
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Her hair has gone white.
—from grief?
—from lack of henna.
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She wears a rubber mask on her face at night!
—If only she'd wear it during the day!
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At least the aging King David had good reason to sleep with
slaves: it kept him warm.
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I like lined faces—whose lines are well-written.
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Like her old parquet flooring, she was falling to pieces from being
trampled on.
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Aged, wrinkled and scourged by the cold of too many winters.
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She criticized nature, who returned the compliment.
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Her words are so venomous they have rotted her teeth.
Theater
Sham is most easily spotted from a distance.
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Never trust the decor.
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Molière has not aged, he has just got longer.
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Theatre has already been supplanted by living photographs.
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Going into a theater I see a sign saying, "Exit," and I exit.
Literature
Novels are longer than life.
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The first novel, Adam and Eve's, has been overprinted.
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I never get to the end of an idea—it is far too far.
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...The stunted sensibility of those who need to watch to understand.
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Her hatred swarms beneath her words like wood lice beneath a stone upturned.
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All judgements are more or less invidious. Justice is manifold.
There can be no "last judgement."
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Whoever speaks "against" has nothing to say. Why demolish when
we can surpass? We limit ourselves to what we can attack.
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Even more invigorating than fighting flesh to flesh, fighting word
to word.
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Always confiding what we have to say to a piece of paper, like the
king's barber to the reeds. Does only paper have ears?
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Regular verse: a game of patience.
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Irregular verse: a game of impatience.
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Our memory often replaces the words of poets—and our replacements are better.
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He accumulated a wide vocabulary and waited all his life for an idea.
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Sacred words, short, vile and full of nonsense.
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A thought falls like a ripe fruit from the tree of idleness.
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Her strident voice seemed to stab the subtlety of her thoughts.
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Do not fornicate with the minds of others: it always gives birth to a bastard.
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Work with the ugliness life brings us, rework it in our own image.
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So many new, bold, beautiful images sting and stimulate my
imagination as I pass that instead of writing to you, I am writing
to myself.
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A good book is never exhausted; we are never exhausted by a good book.
Liking only the nocturnal side of life, he limited himself to masterpieces of obscurity.
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There are also those intangible realities which float alongside us,
formless and
wordless, those realities which no one has put into
thought, excluded for want of an interpreter.
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The difference between what is and what could be is so slight—
Do better and worse cancel each other out?
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Behind some writers lurks an unknown figure, often they do not
see it, not looking in the right direction; they attribute to themselves
everything suggested to them by this invisible presence.
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It is time for dead languages to keep quiet.
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Comma: an eyelash fallen between words, the time to make a
wish, to think of something else, and to carry on.
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When I read A. I think how much bad literature resembles good;
when I read Z I think how good literature resembles bad.
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What makes bad writers so annoying is their good passages.
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They are too eager to bite to be good critics.
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They mistake a plateau for the summit.
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He reproaches them for nit-picking, he who cannot tell nits from wits.
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They exult more than they exalt.
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Genius: that excrescence.
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Balzac: everybody; Stendahl: somebody.
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When it comes to philosophy, let us have the courage of our indifference!
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Why does he speak so loudly? He wishes to be heard from one
world to the other.
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The arts, those accomplishments which have grown so loud we
can no longer hear what it is they accomplish.
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He preferred his friend's confessions to Jean-Jacques'.
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I am not a bibliophile but a humanophile: I look for rare human beings.
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It is not easy to write poetry like F... in fact it is difficult not to
write poetry like F.
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Regular verse is like dried fruit packed in a box.
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If I blush sometimes for what I have done, it is with pure pleasure.
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I regret neither the follies I have committed nor the follies I neglected to commit; when it comes to folly I am extremely reasonable.
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Seeking revenge: what a lack of foresight.
Critical Sallies
To remain eternally true to eternally changing truths.
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One's smile, one's only sincerity.
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The romantics have appropriated all the big words, we are left
with only the little ones.
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It is harder to split hairs than steel girders.
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Those who speak according to their lights speak for themselves;
not so much that we may hear them, as to listen to themselves.
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I am able to think my thought only after I have said it.
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I always understand those who speak indistinctly, searching for
words as they search for their ideas; theatrical voices dismay my
understanding, seem to reverse the truth by their arrogant prejudice.
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I kept quiet for fear he should realize he was not speaking to himself alone.
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To those who ask if I have read their book, I reply: I have not yet read Homer.
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Those who do not wound politely are mere critics.
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Let us at least be smug about all the things we are not.
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He used to say: one must have written a book of poems—he had written one.
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Romanticism is a childhood ailment; those who had it young are the most robust.
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To be rich is to introduce the unexpected even when it is required.
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How can one fail to like the people of the Midi, they are eloquent
and they are treacherous, among so many who are merely treacherous.
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Like backward compasses, they point ever southward.
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The worst of the up and coming is that they up and come.
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Those who made it most recently: when will they give it back?
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Bayreuth—what Gargantuan music—but one may not like Gargantua.
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I noticed how he differed from those one would call his fellows,
free of the exaggerations of style and costume of those for whom
perversity is more attitude than instinct... A little beggar boy
crossed the road, paying no attention to the traffic which was
bearing down upon him: the one I had picked out took hold of
him, saved his life, then wiped his hands with disgust.
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He had the three signs of the non-entity: a receding chin, the
Légion d'Honneur, a wedding ring.
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Happy are those who keep their own counsel, they are the only
ones to get any rest.
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Every great man has a Boswell; often Boswell is the great man.
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Your glory may depend upon one person listening to you.
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They seem to have lived through the future.
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How many times in the troubled reflection of a broken window
pane have I seen the chef d'oeuvre Whistler could have painted.
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You cut through life like a naked blade, pure and incorruptible;
you are sharpened by obstacles and filth only makes you shine out
more strongly. Generously you give the coup de grace to the dying,
and from versatile minds, your fellows, you make sparks fly.
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It is said that Mme. X... has signed her name to a painting. Why
not, since she knows how to write?
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When I first met him he still had some sensitivity, but he left that
behind him in order to make it... and they call that ambition!
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His way of being great is to be gross.
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He's made it!
What?
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Those who seek admiration seem to me to have little real complacency.
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If they were only free thinkers, but they are free speakers!
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A little man, frank enough in his frank dishonesty: well, one has
to live—to live well at others' expense!
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What low deeds to go up in the world.
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How could I wish you ill? Are you not the worst I could have wished for you?
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I wanted to get to meet her because of her work, but now I find
her work is not big enough for me to forget her in it.
Thanks to her I know that subtlety and meanness are close in
meaning; it would have been more subtle to leave me in ignorance.
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We find it hard to excuse people for showing us their true face.
And there was a time when I wanted that sincerity!
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Enthusiasm propelled me, she forced me to see clearly.
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I hesitate between disgust and pity; disgust would be more charitable.
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I should have chosen a carnival day to look at life: the more I look
at faces, the more I like masks.
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Reduce everything to its simplest expression, then to its most
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That man of fashion, from two seasons ago, with the knack of
saying the right thing, late.
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The English who pronounce the word art with a capital T.
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I do not understand those who spend hours at the theater watching
scenes between people whom they would not listen to for five
minutes in real life.
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An author I admire for the delicate order of his thoughts, laid out
and labelled like beautiful captive insects, whose death enthralls us.
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All expression, all art, is an indiscretion we commit against ourselves.
This is not an 'impoverishment' but an increase in wealth,
for it is in this way that we make the short hours of our lives live
on beyond themselves. And discretion about our pasts, our long-
gone pasts, is worthless, sterile oblivion. It is, I believe, respectful
to honor our dead with a few words in which they can live again,
and to give them an inspiring, courageous epitaph to what they
were, instead of gradual, silent nothingness. For it is perhaps a sin
to allow those prodigies to die unsung, unheard who make their
own lives into their life's work. The story of their love affairs,
piously gathered together, has been an ornament to the world;
those are the alms their wealth affords us. It is also their only
posterity.
Silence too can be indiscreet. Would it not be a sign of
irredeemable poverty to allow the dead to die?
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They say, "That is a man to watch," which means he never rises
above their line of vision. Very reassuring—for them.
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All these futurists, free versifiers, destabilizers, publicity seekers
and absurdists have one fault, only one, but a serious one amidst
so much noisy insignificance: they throw us back on the classics
with greater and greater desperation.
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Literature is becoming quite unlivable.
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"Every man has his price" (said an aristocrat who must have been
a millionaire), but some have no commercial value—their saving
grace.
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He could do more.
—If he felt more.
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If only art were as rare as good taste...
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How many painters have only seen color on the palettes of others.
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I go on... (a mistake, perhaps)
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"I never received anything except from misers," an old courtesan
once told me. Are misers the only ones with something to give?