The Idea of Perfection

by Paul Valéry

  D 10 [IV, 463ff.], 1910

  Genoa, city of cats. Dark corners.

  We are witness to its continuous construction—From the 13th to the 20th.

  This entirely visible city—continuously present to itself, familiar with its sea, its rock, its slate, its brick, its marble; perpetually working against its mountain—American since Columbus.

  The prodigious boredom of Works of Art—less in Genoa.

  Conical hills, topped off with sanctuaries—dark green.

  Pink baby-rattles, small bright teeth, tiny inset houses.

  45° slopes, cones.

  Beyond, Mount Fascia, the overall pinkish color of an elephant.

  Alleys. Countless children at play around the whores. There is an elementary kind of prostitution here; analogous to the small shops. They sell their bodies as their neighbor does her chestnuts, her figs, her huge golden pies—chickpea flatbreads.

  Walking through the close, thick life of these deep lanes is like entering the sea, at the dark bottom of a strangely populated ocean.

  A feeling of the Arabian Nights. Concentrated odors—Quick passersby over marble slabs streaked by the chisel. Toward the heights, the alleys crawl upward and deck themselves out in ribbons of brick and flat stones—Cypresses, minuscule domes, friars.

  —Odorous kitchens—Those gigantic pies, chickpea flour, unfamiliar combinations, sardines in oil, hard-boiled eggs baked in the crust, spinach pies, fried fish—A very old cuisine—

  A slate quarry.

  The tartane of Lavagna.

  The navicelli.

  D 10 [IV, 464], 1910

  One who knows he must leave sees everything with a distant eye. He touches memories. He remembers tomorrow. He feels the fragility of the present. Something has happened inside him that makes him unconsciously refuse to further adapt himself—to the place he is going to leave.

  He no longer adjusts this piece of clothing that he’s going to throw away.

  Already things have a certain “speed.”

  D 10 [IV, 468], 1910

  Caught in the rain today, I recall that couple kissing and holding each other infinitely close in the rain one dark evening under the nearly invisible trees, in the Allée de l’Observatoire. I remember speaking with Pierre Louÿs of the impression which that man and woman made on me, so unexpected, silent, clasped in their arms and so completely alone together on their dripping bench that they made me doubt the thunderous rushing downpour. For them, neither rain, nor me.

  E 10 [IV, 590], 1910

  The stars, together with train whistles; a chill and a blackness pass (despite lamp and curtains).

  E 10 [IV, 601], 1910

  O my strange characters—why would you not make a poetry?

  You, Present—and you, Forms, and you, Significations, Functions and Phases and Threads.

  You, keenness of focus and precision; and you, the formless, the tangential?

  What could this sort of re-creation not sing?

  But it takes such effort to bend oneself to one’s thought!

  To freely think this thought, these flashes, these separate moments—to think them innately.

  And after the search for pure elements, to wed them, to be them, to bring them at last to life again and again …

  E 10 [IV, 612], 1910

  As by the Edge of the Sea

  As by the edge of the sea—,

  On the dividing line

  I cast myself in the space between two waves

  This time of regret

  Finite or infinite

  What closes up, withdraws—, what does this time measure?

  Imposing powerlessness to cross over—

  The natural result of a leap is falling back

  So as not to break its integrity as a thing, to remain sea, body

  To preserve the movement’s power, it must come down again

  Grating, with regret,

  Entering itself and drawing in

  As thought falls back into feeling

  Always

  Turns back from the point

  Where its source has lifted it and where it will be nothing if it does not withdraw

  And return to the all-encompassing presence …,

  To all things minus itself

  Whatever is not itself

  Never itself for long

  Never for long,

  Never the time

  Neither to be done with everyone

  Nor to begin other times …

  More than alone by the edge of the sea

  I give myself up

  To the monotonous transformation

  Of water into water.

  G 12 [IV, 671], 1912

  Sky.

  It hides in its light. I am enclosed in a sphere of illumination.

  I know nothing of what lies beyond that brightness. The transparency limits me, and every view interposes a veil.

  All that can be seen out to parallel infinity.

  G 12 [IV, 680], 1912

  S.M. In a low voice

  With a soft and quiet voice, saying tremendous things,

  Important, weighty, profound, astounding things

  With a soft and quiet voice.

  —The meaning of thunder/the world/, and cannons

  With a redbreast’s voice

  With the finesse of a flute/delicacy/.

  The whole sun

  By means of a half-smile

  And a kind of murmuring in French.

  —If you didn’t catch the words, or heard them from a distance,

  You would think he was saying little nothings.

  They were little nothings for the ear …

  —But that contrast and that music,

  That voice with scarcely a ripple, that whispered power

  Those perspectives and those intuited abysses,

  That smile dismissing the universe …

  And lastly I remember

  The very subdued sound like silk

  Of a fire that illuminates and burns all things, (that speaks to itself)/ and that speaks to me/

  Almost for itself.

  G 12 [IV, 684], 1912

  Church on the Isle of Callot

  Way at the back of this church where something unclear is taking place.

  I feel myself being filled by another, I feel me feeling a primal shiver, a breath over all my skin, and horror conjured on my whole surface, causing the separation between cold and hot to bristle.

  For I saw the women returning from taking communion at the altar, all fastened up and closed—pulled inside themselves—like that creature that turns itself inside out like a glove, putting the inside outside and the outside nowhere.

  So what is this horror and sacred intimacy the reflex of?

  Then,—simply feeling this invisible wave, which makes itself felt on my flesh as if I were the surf and the place where the swell breaks and whitens and becomes visible—simply feeling it rising, being;—without making it an idea, without opposing it or attaching it to any idea—is that refusing Grace? And was that Grace?

  Not concluding …

  G 12 [IV, 700], 1912

  Do you remember the time when you were an angel? Angel without Christ, as I recall.

  It was a matter of gaze and will, the idea of cutting through everything with my eyes. I loved fire alone. I believed that nothing in the end could resist my gaze and desire to gaze.

  Or rather, I believed someone could be like that, and that I had the clear and absolute idea of such a one.

  Everything seemed so simple that literature became impossible. No more objects.

  A little poetry, practiced in moderation, destroys or consumes all words. They lose their own force. They become the keys of other men and are no longer yours. You no longer speak with yourself except in gestures or by chance—whatever the term in question.

  I lived only to discern.

  I was overestimating the infinite distance between me and others, between all of me and all the others.

/>   H 12 [IV, 705], 1912

  These swallows move like a dying note. So high does the bird fly that the gaze climbs/is lifted/ to the source of tears.

  H 12 [IV, 713], 1912

  In this landscape one feels distinctly that we are living on rubble. Broken things and their debris, worn away. Broken coastline.

  Breakage and then wear, and sounds of wear.

  Perpetual sound of weathering, either violent or patient. But these children’s voices, these cries, these knocks in the house of granite and pine by the sea—these starts of hearing, whose bass line is the song of simmer and stir, the silky and continuous rustling—also gives one who possesses a philosophical ear the idea, under the appearance of life, its racket and surge,—of dissipation, of loss.

  M 13 [V, 36], 1913

  Waking

  On waking, the light so soft—and that blue. The word “Pure” parts my lips.

  The day that never yet was, thoughts, everything in bud, contemplated without obstacle—the All that takes form in the gold and is not yet corrupted by any particular thing.

  The all is a beginning. The highest degree of the universal in bud.

  I am born in every direction, far from myself, wherever is touched by the light, on this ledge, that flake, on the thread of this thread, in that block of clear water.

  I am the analogue of what is.

  I am still, O delight, only something equal to this combination of fire, silk, slate, mist and simultaneous raw music. I am a trick of the light. My function is fully before my eyes.

  I balance out the sum of the new day.

  Ah! To delay being me. Why, this morning, should I choose myself?—What if I left behind my name, my torments, my chains, my truths, like dreams in the night?

  Is that not the lesson of dreams, and the exhortation of waking? And is morning not the moment of possibility’s vain revolt?—A great wash of formlessness and beginning poured out at the start—a nakedness before we dress again? A birth? The birth of all things before someone takes place.

  P 13 [V, 163], 1914

  6 o’clock morning 4th of Sept. I come downstairs, after the night so hot with insects, with thoughts; I have left Paris besieged—I come down and walk along the icy trembling fine line of the waves, on the razor edge of the sea.

  Sitting down, I feel mute inside.

  [ … ]

  W 14 [V, 373], 1914

  _____________

  The Wonder: the sea, as in the opening section of The Young Fate.

  Cauchy: Augustin-Louis Cauchy, French mathematician, known for the rigorous and methodological proofs of his theorems. Faraday: Michael Faraday, English physicist, known for his work in electromagnetism. the art of building: cf. Valéry’s adolescent interest in architecture. boats: growing up in the port town of Sète, where the French Mediterranean fleet frequently put in, the young Valéry dreamed of attending the Naval Academy. the Opera: Valéry’s love for the Opera dates at least to his discovery of Wagner in 1891.

  Far from books: an echo of Mallarmé’s poem “Brise Marine”: “La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres” (“My flesh is sad, alas! and I have read all the books”).

  tartane: a small single-mast boat formerly used in the Mediterranean for fishing and transport. navicelli: small boats used to transport slate from the Lavagna quarries.

  S.M.: Stéphane Mallarmé. Valéry recounts hearing Mallarmé read aloud his final poem, Un Coup de dés, “with a low, even voice, without the slightest ‘effect,’ almost to himself.”

  Callot: an island off the coast of Brittany, reachable by foot at low tide.

  this landscape: the coast of Brittany, where the Valéry family frequently spent their vacations.

  4th of Sept: written in Banyuls-sur-Mer, a coastal village south of Perpignan near the Spanish border. On September 5, 1914, a counterattack by French and British troops on the Marne River stopped the German army’s advance into France, effectively lifting the threat that had hung over Paris throughout the month of August.

  La Jeune Parque

  À André Gide

  Depuis bien des années

  j’avais laissé l’art des vers :

  essayant de m’y astreindre encore,

  j’ai fait cet exercice

  que je te dédie.

  1917

  The Young Fate

  For André Gide

  Many years ago

  I abandoned the art of verse:

  setting myself to the task once more,

  I have composed this exercise

  which I dedicate to you.

  1917

  (1918)

  Le Ciel a-t-il formé cet amas de merveilles

  Pour la demeure d’un serpent?

  PIERRE CORNEILLE

  Qui pleure là, sinon le vent simple, à cette heure

  Seule, avec diamants extrêmes? … Mais qui pleure,

  Si proche de moi-même au moment de pleurer?

  Cette main, sur mes traits qu’elle rêve effleurer,

  Distraitement docile à quelque fin profonde,

  Attend de ma faiblesse une larme qui fonde,

  Et que de mes destins lentement divisé,

  Le plus pur en silence éclaire un cœur brisé.

  La houle me murmure une ombre de reproche,

  Ou retire ici-bas, dans ses gorges de roche,

  Comme chose déçue et bue amèrement,

  Une rumeur de plainte et de resserrement …

  Que fais-tu, hérissée, et cette main glacée,

  Et quel frémissement d’une feuille effacée

  Persiste parmi vous, îles de mon sein nu? …

  Je scintille, liée à ce ciel inconnu …

  L’immense grappe brille à ma soif de désastres.

  Tout-puissants étrangers, inévitables astres

  Qui daignez faire luire au lointain temporel

  Je ne sais quoi de pur et de surnaturel ;

  Vous qui dans les mortels plongez jusques aux larmes

  Ces souverains éclats, ces invincibles armes,

  Et les élancements de votre éternité,

  Je suis seule avec vous, tremblante, ayant quitté

  Ma couche ; et sur l’écueil mordu par la merveille,

  J’interroge mon cœur quelle douleur l’éveille,

  Quel crime par moi-même ou sur moi consommé? …

  … Ou si le mal me suit d’un songe refermé,

  Quand (au velours du souffle envolé l’or des lampes)

  J’ai de mes bras épais environné mes tempes,

  Et longtemps de mon âme attendu les éclairs?

  Toute? Mais toute à moi, maîtresse de mes chairs,

  Durcissant d’un frisson leur étrange étendue,

  Et dans mes doux liens, à mon sang suspendue,

  Je me voyais me voir, sinueuse, et dorais

  De regards en regards, mes profondes forêts.

  J’y suivais un serpent qui venait de me mordre.

  * * *

  Quel repli de désirs, sa traîne! … Quel désordre

  De trésors s’arrachant à mon avidité,

  Et quelle sombre soif de la limpidité!

  Ô ruse! … À la lueur de la douleur laissée

  Je me sentis connue encor plus que blessée …

  Au plus traître de l’âme, une pointe me naît ;

  Le poison, mon poison, m’éclaire et se connaît :

  Il colore une vierge à soi-même enlacée,

  Jalouse … Mais de qui, jalouse et menacée?

  Et quel silence parle à mon seul possesseur?

  Dieux! Dans ma lourde plaie une secrète sœur

  Brûle, qui se préfère à l’extrême attentive.

  * * *

  « Va! je n’ai plus besoin de ta race naïve,

  Cher Serpent … Je m’enlace, être vertigineux!

  Cesse de me prêter ce mélange de nœuds

  Ni ta fidélité qui me fuit et devine …

  Mon âme y peut suffire, ornement de ruine!<
br />
  Elle sait, sur mon ombre égarant ses tourments,

  De mon sein, dans les nuits, mordre les rocs charmants ;

  Elle y suce longtemps le lait des rêveries …

  Laisse donc défaillir ce bras de pierreries

  Qui menace d’amour mon sort spirituel …

  Tu ne peux rien sur moi qui ne soit moins cruel,

  Moins désirable … Apaise alors, calme ces ondes,

  Rappelle ces remous, ces promesses immondes …

  Ma surprise s’abrège, et mes yeux sont ouverts.

  Je n’attendais pas moins de mes riches déserts

  Qu’un tel enfantement de fureur et de tresse :

  Leurs fonds passionnés brillent de sécheresse

  Si loin que je m’avance et m’altère pour voir

  De mes enfers pensifs les confins sans espoir …

  Je sais … Ma lassitude est parfois un théâtre.

  L’esprit n’est pas si pur que jamais idolâtre

  Sa fougue solitaire aux élans de flambeau

  Ne fasse fuir les murs de son morne tombeau.

  Tout peut naître ici-bas d’une attente infinie.

  L’ombre même le cède à certaine agonie,

  L’âme avare s’entr’ouvre, et du monstre s’émeut

  Qui se tord sur les pas d’une porte de feu …

  Mais, pour capricieux et prompt que tu paraisses,

  Reptile, ô vifs détours tout courus de caresses,

  Si proche impatience et si lourde langueur,

  Qu’es-tu, près de ma nuit d’éternelle longueur?

  Tu regardais dormir ma belle négligence …

  Mais avec mes périls, je suis d’intelligence,

  Plus versatile, ô Thyrse, et plus perfide qu’eux.

  Fuis-moi! du noir retour reprends le fil visqueux!

  Va chercher des yeux clos pour tes danses massives.

  Coule vers d’autres lits tes robes successives,

  Couve sur d’autres cœurs les germes de leur mal,

  Et que dans les anneaux de ton rêve animal

  Halète jusqu’au jour l’innocence anxieuse! …

  Moi, je veille. Je sors, pâle et prodigieuse,

  Toute humide des pleurs que je n’ai point versés,

  D’une absence aux contours de mortelle bercés

  Par soi seule … Et brisant une tombe sereine,