The Idea of Perfection by Paul Valéry

Author:Paul Valéry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

[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

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