…if we take an active part in politics, we must avoid the intellectual’s temptation to be dogmatic. Knowing that the world is always changing, that the truth today becomes the falsehood tomorrow and that the finest constitution we can devise may, in a hundred years, become an engine of tyranny, we must regard all political structures, theories and parties as provisional. But at the same time, we must not turn this into an excuse for doing nothing. We may not know very much, but we do know something, and while we must always be prepared to change our minds, we must act as best we can in the light of what we do know. (W. H. Auden, “Effective Democracy,” May 1939)

New at IWP Books: Eight Decades (1937) by Agnes Repplier.

New at IWP Books: In the Dozy Hours (1894) by Agnes Repplier.

New at IWP Articles: Sympathy (1894) by Agnes Repplier.

Jacques Barzun on Reading the Dictionary:

As a man grows older it is likely that the new books to which he forms a permanent attachment are reference books. An encyclopedic reader such as Shaw observed this in himself and on this point, I know, my friends Auden and Trilling report the same experience as I. Hand over to one of us a new Dictionary, “Companion,” or Guide, and our eyes first light up and then turn dreamy: we have seized the volume and are off, arm in arm with the guide or companion; the addictionary weakness prevails: we have dropped out of the conversation and fallen into the deep trance of following alphabetized definitions, row on row, the army of unalterable law. (Review of Eric Partridge’s Origins, in A Company of Readers, ed. Arthur Krystal, 2001)

Patrick Kurp on Reading the Dictionary.

A Path Forward by Alan Jacobs.

How do the waves along the level shore
 Follow and fly in hurrying sheets of foam,
For ever doing what they did before,
 For ever climbing what is never clomb!
Is there an end to their perpetual haste,
 Their iterated round of low and high,
Or is it one monotony of waste
 Under the vision of the vacant sky?
And thou, who on the ocean of thy days
 Dost like a swimmer patiently contend,
And though thou steerest with a shoreward gaze
 Misdoubtest of a harbour or an end,
What would the threat, or what the promise be,
 Could I but read the riddle of the sea!
G. Lowes Dickinson

Ordered: Henry James: Travel Writings Vol. 1 (LOA #64) and Henry James: Travel Writings Vol. 2 (LOA #65) 📚

Agnes Repplier at IWP Books:

  • In the Dozy Hours (1894)
  • Compromises (1904)
  • Americans and Others (1912)
  • A Happy Half-Century (1908)
  • Counter-Currents (1916)
  • Points of Friction (1920)
  • Under Dispute (1924)
  • Times and Tendencies (1931)
  • Eight Decades (1937)

New at IWP Books: Americans and Others (1912) by Agnes Repplier.

Tel Aviv, September 30, 2023.

New at IWP Books: Compromises (1904) by Agnes Repplier.

Arion Press is looking for a Sales & Marketing Manager.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer that does not discriminate on the basis of actual or perceived race, color, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, sex or gender (including pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions), gender identity or expression (including transgender status), sexual orientation, marital status, military service and veteran status, physical or mental disability, protected medical condition as defined by applicable state or local law (such as cancer), reproductive health decision making, genetic information , or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local laws and ordinances. Lyra Corporation’s management team is dedicated to this policy with respect to recruitment, hiring, placement, promotion, transfer, training, compensation, benefits, employee activities, access to facilities and programs, and general treatment during employment.

I am not so sure about its “Equal Opportunity” policy (“actual or perceived” national origin? ancestry? citizenship status? age? marital status? military status?), but its books are beautiful (for instance).

Horace Howard Furness:

From Propers Studies (1927) by Aldous Huxley:

Sociologists and historians are inclined to talk altogether too glibly about the ‘causes’ of events, thoughts, and actions in the human universe. Now the human universe is so enormously complicated that to speak of the cause of any event is an absurdity. The causes of even the simplest event are very numerous, and any one who would discover even a few of them must take into consideration, among other things, the race to which the men and women participating in it belonged, the physiological state of the principal actors, their innate psychological peculiarities, and the tradition, the education, the environment which modified, restrained, and gave direction to their instincts, impulses, and thoughts. After having exhausted all the strictly human origins of events, the enthusiast for causes would have to consider the share taken by its non-human antecedents and accompaniments in bringing it about — the share taken by matter on the one hand and by such spiritual or metaphysical entities on the other as the seeker for causes may care to postulate. The facts of history have been explained in terms of the will of God, of the class war, of moral law, of climate, of the caprices and physiological peculiarities of those in power, of economic struggle, of race, of pure reason making judicious choice of the pleasurable, of blind animal instinct. You pay your money and you take your choice of a social and historical philosophy. Now it is obvious that the quality of the event changes completely according to the cause you choose to give it. Historical facts are qualitatively functions of the causes to which they are attributed. For example, a revolution caused by economic forces is not identical with the same revolution caused by the chronic indigestion of a king, or the will of a revengeful and outraged deity. An outburst of artistic activity caused (as the Freudians would have us believe) by a sudden happy efflorescence of sexual perversity is not identical with the same renascence caused by the stimulating and liberating action on the spirit of a multiplicity of inventions, discoveries, economic changes and political upheavals. Historians and sociologists who set out with preconceived ideas about the causes of events distort the facts by attributing them to causes of one particular kind, to the exclusion of all others. Now it is obvious that, in the nature of things, no human being can possibly know all the causes of any event. (And anyhow, as the Americans would say, what is a cause?) The best that any observer can do is to present the facts, and with them a few of the most humanly significant antecedents and accompaniments which seem to be invariably connected with facts of that particular class. He will make it clear that the antecedents and accompaniments he has chosen for exposition are not the sole and exclusive causes of the facts, which he will describe, so to say, neutrally and without prejudging them, so that it will always be possible, without changing the quality of the facts, to add fresh causes to the list of determining correlations as they are discovered. I do not pretend to have achieved this difficult and perhaps humanly impossible neutrality. I have attributed causes with too much facility, and as though they were the exclusive determinants of the facts in question. In doing this I have prejudged the quality of the facts, and thereby, no doubt, distorted the total picture of them. The process is doubtless inevitable. For the powers of every mind are strictly limited; we have our inborn idiosyncrasies, our acquired sentiments, prejudices, scales of value; it is impossible for any man to transcend himself. Being what I am, I attribute one kind of causes to facts, and thereby distort them in one direction; another man with a different mind and different upbringing would attribute other causes, and so distort the same facts in another way. The best I can do is to warn the reader against my distortion of the facts, and invite him to correct it by means of his own.

New at IWP Books: Proper Studies (1927) by Aldous Huxley.

Patrick Kurp on David Myers.

Michael Dirda on American Austen: The Forgotten Writing of Agnes Repplier (ed. John Lukacs).

Yom Kippur in a Small Israeli Town, 2023.

Yom Kippur in a Small Israeli Town, 2023.

Yom Kippur in a Small Israeli Town, 2023.

Soon at IWP Books: Proper Studies (1927) by Aldous Huxley; Compromises (1904) by Agnes Repplier.

Theodore Dalrymple on Faded Prestige.

From “Memoirs, Conversations, and Diaries,” by Elizabeth Hardwick (Collected Essays, NYRB, 2017):

Alain, the philosopher and writer, arrives first, Valéry two or three minutes later. “Les deux illustres,” meeting for the first time, introduced by Henri Mondor, sit down and begin to order luncheon. Valéry, refusing the duck in favor of the meat, remarks, “Without meat, you would have with you only M. Néant.” Alain professes himself able to eat anything, adds that because of his teaching at the Normale he drinks very little, except sometimes milk. Valéry also likes milk, he explains, but goes to excess only with coffee. And then Alain, unable to restrain himself another moment: “Avez-vous travaillé, ce matin, Orphée?” (Italics mine.) Yes, Valéry works in the morning and at eleven o’clock his work for the day is finished.”

…

The information above on the first meeting of Alain and Valéry is taken from a current copy of the recently revived La Nouvelle NRF. At the beginning, M. Mondor informs us that this same event, this “déjeuner chez Lapérouse,” was committed to print by Alain himself and appeared in the old NRF in 1939. M. Mondor, robust meeter and recorder, has also written on the first meeting of Valéry and Claudel and even the great “premier entretien” of Mallarmé and Valéry. His document on the latter begins with the information gleaned from the Alain conference: “Paul Valéry, almost every day, after eleven o’clock in the morning liked to rest from his work.” It is by repetition and excess that a national eccentricity is recognized.

From “Simone Weil,” by Elizabeth Hardwick (Collected Essays, NYRB, 2017):

Simone Weil was a student of the philosopher Alain (Émile Chartier). Alain was a special figure as a writer and teacher in Paris in the 1920s – one of those arresting French academic stars who throw the light of their ideas and the style of their thinking over young intellectuals and have a dramatic fame quite unusual here. His Propos, essays on many aspects of culture, very likely confirmed Simone Weil’s own genius as a philosopher working in the form of passionate essays rather than in theoretical explication of positions and arguments.

Alain’s attention was given to morality, good deeds, the exercise of will by which one becomes free, to pacifism and to suspicion of the need to exercise power over others. In many ways these thoughts pre-figure the great themes of Simone Weil’s writings. Her own nature was, of course, much more extreme; that is, she was determined to live out truth, not as an example which would have involved the vanities and impositions of leadership, but as a dedication marked by obsessive discipline.