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.

From Montaigne et la philosophie by Marcel Conche:

Montaigne is ironic about the words of Protagoras: “Truly Protagoras was telling us some good ones, making man the measure of all things, who never even knew his own…. he being in himself so contradictory, and one judgment incessantly subverting another, that favorable proposition was just a joke which led us necessarily to conclude the nullity of the compass and the compasser.” How can man be the measure of all things? There is no such thing as man in the abstract, there are only men whose contrary judgments are mutually subversive. How can we talk, then, about a “standard man,” for measuring all others? There is neither standard measure nor absolute measurer… There is not, even, an immutable self, but only the scattering of multiple selves: “We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.” There is no way of seeing the world that would be that of the “standard man,” nor that would be “mine,” for the moment is all-important…. things are seen, here and there, in different ways; if particular perspectives are taken as absolute “truth,” they destroy each other. So we must not do so. Values must be related to their sphere of validity, they must not be reified into dogmas, principles, truths, “objective” good or evil, all of which would claim to be universally valid.

Translation: Montaigne quotes by Donald Frame, the rest by me.

From The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1: An Experiment in Literary Investigation by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn:

A district Party conference was under way in Moscow Province. It was presided over by a new secretary of the District Party Committee, replacing one recently arrested. At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). The small hall echoed with “stormy applause, rising to an ovation.” For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the “stormy applause, rising to an ovation,” continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin. However, who would dare be the first to stop? The secretary of the District Party Committee could have done it. He was standing on the platform, and it was he who had just called for the ovation. But he was a newcomer. He had taken the place of a man who’d been arrested. He was afraid! After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who quit first! And in that obscure, small hall, unknown to the Leader, the applause went on — six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks!

At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly — but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them? The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! And even then those who were left would not falter…. Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel.

That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him:

“Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”

(And just what are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to stop?)

Now that’s what Darwin’s natural selection is. And that’s also how to grind people down with stupidity.

Pierre Villey on Grace Norton, Foreword to Lexique De La Langue Des Essais:

One day in 1913, I was informed that a package had arrived for me from America, and was waiting for pick up in the port. Why were our customs officers so worried about a product of New World industry? Never before was anyone asked to clear such a product from Caen – or any other port. From the other side of the Atlantic I received a lexicon of the language of Montaigne, three large folio volumes, skillfully typed, beautifully bound.

The lexicon was the work of an octogenarian. I have often spoken of Miss Grace Norton to the friends of Montaigne. They know her studies to be of solid and sober erudition. That a foreigner could feel such love for the Essays – three centuries after their publication, more than six thousand kilometers from Gascony – is this not a striking testimony to the universality of Montaigne’s thought? She discovered them around fifty. Since then, not a single day went by without her reading a few pages of her bedside book. She was over seventy when she decided to study Montaigne more thoroughly, which led her to undertake a complete inventory of his language.

She worked alone. She was not a philologist, and, all her life, English was the only language she ever spoke. She had no ambition to publish, but asked me to revise her work. She gave me complete freedom, too, to rework, transform, modify as I saw fit, and to publish the work if I judged that its publication could be useful. For twenty years, during my courses, my students and I have greatly appreciated the services that such an instrument is capable of rendering to us sixteenth-centuryists. A few months before her death, I had the satisfaction of being able to tell Miss Grace Norton that the Municipal Edition would welcome the lexicon, which was an immense joy for her. She was ninety-two years old.

Entry on Grace Norton, Dictionnaire Montaigne, ed. Philippe Desan, 2018

NORTON, GRACE Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1834–1926

A member of a family of Harvard professors and administrators, Grace Norton appears to have had no formal education. Like most women of her generation, she was educated by tutors at the family home, Shady Hill, near the campus of Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During the 1860s, she travelled to Europe with her brother, Charles Eliot Norton (well known for introducing Dante to Americans of the time), and his family, and developed an interest in French and French literature, a passion she kept throughout her life.

Forty years later, Grace Norton became a specialist on Montaigne, publishing five books on the essayist between 1904 and 1908 (Early Writings of Montaigne, 1904; Studies in Montaigne, 1904; Le Plutarch de Montaigne, 1906; The Influence of Montaigne, 1908; and The Spirit of Montaigne, 1908). From 1905, she maintained a correspondence with Pierre Villey, extracts of which she kept, and are preserved in the Houghton Library at Harvard (even though she asked them to be destroyed). Villey wrote very favorable reviews of Norton’s first two books in 1905 (RHLF), as well as her book on Montaigne and Plutarch (RHLF, 1907), and he cited her works several times in his own works on Montaigne, notably in his two books of 1908, and in his Montaigne and François Bacon (1913). Norton reported on Villey’s theses in the Nation (1909), and worked on a Lexicon of the Essays which she sent to Villey in 1913. He published her Lexicon as an appendix to the Édition Municipale des Essais in 1933, seven years after Norton’s death. In the foreword, Villey describes his astonishment on receiving the package, at the port of Caen, twenty years earlier: “That a foreigner could feel such love for the Essays – three centuries after their publication, more than six thousand kilometers from Gascony – is this not a striking testimony to the universality of Montaigne’s thought?"

During the last years of her long life, Norton collaborated on an American translation of the Essays with George B. Ives. Her “Notes” appeared as “Handbook to the Essays” in 1925, as a companion volume to the translation. By the time she died in 1926, Grace Norton had introduced Montaigne to American readers of her time, and had founded American criticism of the Essays. Through her correspondence with Pierre Villey, she became known as a “friend of Montaigne” and she exercised a considerable influence on American and French Montaigne studies, especially from the point of view of the Latin sources of Montaigne, of his method of composition, and his influence on English and American writers.

C. Bauschatz

(Both translations by me.)

From The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes, ed. Clifton Fadiman:

(1) To Queen Christina Descartes tried to explain his mechanistic philosophy: the view that all animals are mechanisms. The queen countered this by remarking that she had never seen a watch give birth to baby watches.

(As a gloss on this anecdote, the General Editor offers his clerihew:

Said Descartes, “I extoll

Myself because I have a soul

And beasts do not.” Of course

He had to put Descartes before the horse.)

(2) Descartes’s coordinate system was one of his main contributions to the development of mathematics. It is said that the idea came to him during a period of idleness in his military service as he lay on his bed watching a fly hovering in the air. He realized that the fly’s position at every moment could be described by locating its distance from three intersecting lines (axes). This insight was the basis of Cartesian coordinates.

(3) Descartes once constructed a robot in the form of a girl, which he later had occasion to transport by sea. The ship’s captain, out of curiosity, looked into the chest in which the robot was packed and was horrified by the lifelike form, which moved like an animated being. Thinking that this could only be the devil in disguise, he threw the chest and its contents into the sea.

Ariel Porat, President of Tel Aviv University, September 19, 2023:

I call upon all who hold the Rule of Law dear to their hearts, whether they oppose or support the constitutional overhaul, to protest in any legal way available to them, against the attack waged by Ministers and MKs on the Rule of Law in Israel. As I have declared in the past, Tel Aviv University will not remain on the sidelines in the event that the Government does not abide by the rulings of the Supreme Court. We must never accept this disastrous phenomenon, which might threaten the very existence of the State of Israel.