Monsieur Teste by Paul Valéry

Author:Paul Valéry [Valéry, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Cultural, Fiction, France, Literary, Philosophy, Poetry
ISBN: 9780691018799
Amazon: 0691018790
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1989-07-01T23:00:00+00:00

Antirrhinum Siculum

Solanum Warscewiezii!!!

And the Sisymbriifolium, what jargon! … And the Vulgare, and the Asper, and the Palustris, and the Sinuala, and the Flexuosum, and the Praealtum!!!

” This is a garden of epithets,” he said the other day, “a dictionary and cemetery garden… .”

And after a while, he said: “Learnedly to die… . Transiit classificando.”

Please accept, kind sir, all our thanks and good wishes.

EMILIE TESTE

3 Excerpts from M. Teste’s Logbook

A prayer: Lord, I was in the void, infinitely nothing and tranquil. I was disturbed from that state, to be thrown into this strange carnival … and you took care that I should be endowed with all I needed in order to suffer, enjoy, understand, and be wrong; but incompatible, these gifts.

I consider you the master of that darkness I look into when I think, and upon which the last thought will be inscribed.

Give me, O Darkness, that supreme thought….

But in general any commonplace thought may be the “supreme thought.”

If it were otherwise, if a thought could be supreme of itself and by itself, we should be able to come on it by reflection or chance; and having found it, we should have to die. This would amount to being able to die of a certain thought, simply because there is no other to follow.

I confess that I have made of my mind an idol, but I have found no other. I have heaped upon it offerings and insults. Not like a thing of mine. But…

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