From Alain on Happiness (1973), Translated by Robert D. and Jane E. Cottrell:

Elms

“The leaves are coming out. Soon the Galerucidae, which are small green beetles, will settle down on the leaves of the elms and devour them. The trees will be deprived of their lungs. You will see how they will resist asphyxiation by growing new leaves and reliving their spring. But the effort will exhaust them. One year you will see that they cannot manage to put out new leaves, and they will die.”

So a lover of trees bemoaned as we were strolling through the grounds of his estate. He showed me century-old elms and announced their imminent demise. I said to him: “We must put up a fight. That little beetle is helpless. If you can kill one of them, you can kill a hundred, or a thousand.”

“What are a thousand beetles?” he answered. “There are millions of them. I prefer not to think about them.”

“But you have money,” I told him. “With money one can buy days of work. Ten workers working ten days will kill more than a thousand beetles. Wouldn’t you sacrifice a few hundred francs to preserve these beautiful trees?”

“I have too many of them,” he said, “and I have too few workers. How would they get up to the top branches? It would take tree surgeons. I know of only two in this area.”

“Two,” I told him, “that’s already something. They’ll take care of the top branches. Others, who are less experienced, will use ladders. And even if you don’t save all your trees, at least you’ll save two or three.”

“I don’t have enough energy for all that,” he finally said. “I know what I’ll do. I’ll go away for a while so as not to see the invasion of the beetles.”

“Oh the power of the imagination,” I answered. “Here you are already routed before you’ve even begun to fight. Don’t look beyond the task at hand. We would never do anything if we considered the immense weight of things and the weakness of man. That is why we must act, and think in terms of action. Look at that mason; he turns the crank calmly; the huge stone just barely moves. However, the house will get finished, and children will play on the stairs. I once felt admiration for a worker who was getting ready to bore a hole, with his brace and bit, in a wall of steel that was six inches thick. He whistled while turning the handle; fine flakes of steel fell like snow. I marveled at the man’s courage. That was ten years ago. You may be sure that he got that hole drilled, and many others too. The beetles themselves can teach you a lesson. What’s a beetle compared to an elm? But all those tiny nibbling mouths can devour a forest. We must have faith in our little efforts and use the tactics of an insect to fight against an insect. There are hundreds of things in your favor; otherwise there wouldn’t be any elms. Destiny is not constant; a snap of the fingers, and a new world is created. The smallest effort produces incalculable results. The person who planted these elms did not reflect on the brevity of life. Like him, throw yourself into action and don’t look beyond tomorrow, and you will save your elms.”

5 May 1909

From Alain on Happiness (1973), Translated by Robert D. and Jane E. Cottrell:

The Dagger Dance

Everyone knows about the strength of character of the Stoics. They reasoned on the passions – hate, jealousy, fear, despair – and thus managed to keep a tight rein on them, just as a good coachman controls his horses.

One of their arguments which I have always found good, and which has been useful to me more than once, is their concept of the past and of the future. “We have only the present to bear,” they said. “Neither the past nor the future can harm us, since the one no longer exists and the other does not yet exist.”

That is quite true. The past and the future exist only when we think about them; they are impressions, not realities. We go to a great deal of trouble to fabricate our regrets and our fears. I once saw a juggler pile up daggers one on top of the other so as to make a kind of monstrous tree which he balanced on his forehead. That is just the way we pile up and carry around our regrets and fears, like foolhardy performers. Instead of carrying a minute around with us, we carry around an hour; instead of carrying around an hour, we carry around a day, ten days, months, years. A person who has a pain in his leg thinks how he suffered from it yesterday, how he suffered from it before that, how he will suffer tomorrow; he bemoans his entire life. It is clear that in such a case wisdom cannot do much, for the actual suffering is still very much there. But if it is a question of moral suffering, what would remain of it if one could be cured of regretting the past and of worrying about the future?

A rejected lover, who tosses and tums in bed instead of sleeping and who plots a dreadful, Corsican revenge, what would remain of his distress if he did not think about the past or the future? The ambitious man, stung to the quick by a failure, where can he get his misery except from a past that he dredges up and from a future that he invents? One is reminded of the legendary Sisyphus who rolls his stone up the hill and thus renews his torment.

I would say to all those who torture themselves in this manner: keep your mind on the present; keep your mind on your life, which moves onward from minute to minute; one minute follows another; it is therefore possible to live as you are living, since you are alive. But the future terrifies me, you say. That is something you know nothing about. What happens is never what we expected; and as for your present suffering, you may be sure that it will diminish precisely because it is so intense. Everything changes, everything passes away. This maxim has often saddened us; the very least it can do is console us once in a while.

17 April 1908

From Alain on Happiness (1973), Translated by Robert D. and Jane E. Cottrell:

Predictions

I know someone who showed his palm to a fortuneteller in order to know his future. He told me he did it just for fun, and didn’t really believe in it. Even so, I would have advised him against it, if he had asked me, because it is a dangerous way to have fun. It is very easy not to believe, as long as nothing has yet been said; for then there is nothing for you or anyone else to believe. Disbelief is easy at the outset, but soon becomes difficult; fortunetellers know this very well. “If you don’t believe in it,” they say, “what are you afraid of?” And thus the trap is set. As for me, I am afraid of believing, for who knows what they will tell me.

I suppose there are fortunetellers who believe in themselves. Those who only mean to joke might predict ordinary and likely events in ambiguous terms: “You will have troubles and a few little failures, but you will succeed in the end”; “You have enemies, but they will eventually come around to your point of view, and meanwhile, the constancy of your friends will console you”; “You will soon receive a letter concerning your present problems.” … This list could be extended almost indefinitely, and such predictions are perfectly harmless. However, if a fortuneteller thinks of himself as a real fortuneteller, then he might very well predict dreadful misfortunes for you; and you, levelheaded person that you are, you would laugh. It is no less true, however, that his words would stick in your memory and come back unexpectedly in your musings and dreams, troubling you just a bit, until the day when events seem to bear them out.

A girl I knew had her palm read one day by a fortuneteller who told her: “You will get married; you will have a child; you will lose it.” Such a prediction is not too heavy a burden to carry in the early stages. But time passed. The girl got married, and just recently had a child; the prediction now weighs more heavily on her mind. If the child should get sick, the fatal words will resound deafeningly in the ears of the mother. Perhaps she had laughed at the fortuneteller. He will be avenged.

All sorts of things happen in this world, fortuitous occurrences that can shatter the most steadfast belief. You laugh when something sinister and unlikely is predicted; you will laugh less if part of this prediction comes true; then, even the most courageous man will wait for the rest to occur. We all know that our fears cause us as much suffering as the catastrophe themselves. It is possible for two prophets who do not know each other to predict the same thing. If this concordance does not upset you more than your intelligence tells you it should, then I admire you.

As far as I am concerned, I prefer not to think about the future, but to look ahead only to what lies directly before me. Not only will I not go showing the inside of my hand to a fortuneteller, but more importantly, I will not try to read the future by attempting to penetrate the nature of things; for I do not believe that our sight extends very far, no matter how great our knowledge. I have noticed that anything important that happens to anyone is unforeseen and unforeseeable. Once you have cured yourself of curiosity, you will no doubt then have to cure yourself of prudence.

14 April 1908

Patrick Kurp on Alain.

From Alain on Happiness (1973), Translated by Robert D. and Jane E. Cottrell:

Bucephalus

When a baby cries and refuses to be consoled, his nurse often makes the most ingenious suppositions about his character and his likes and dislikes. She even resorts to heredity for explanations, and can already recognize the father in his son. These attempts at psychology continue until the nurse discovers the pin, the real cause of the trouble.

When Bucephalus, the famous horse, was presented to young Alexander, not a single equerry could ride the fierce animal. An ordinary man might have said: “There’s a mean horse if I ever saw one.” Alexander, however, began to look for the pin, and soon found it when he noticed that Bucephalus was terribly afraid of his own shadow. Since his fear also made his shadow buck, it was a vicious circle. But Alexander turned Bucephalus’ head toward the sun and, keeping him turned that way, managed to calm him and then to break him in. Thus Aristotle’s pupil already realized that we have no power at all over our passions as long as we do not know their true causes.

Many men have refuted fear, and with sound arguments. But a man who is afraid does not listen to arguments; he listens to the beating of his heart and the pulsating of his blood. The pedant’s reasoning proceeds from danger to fear; the reasoning of a man who is governed by his passions proceeds from fear to danger. Both are trying to be logical, and both are mistaken. The pedant, however, is doubly mistaken; he does not know the real cause and does not understand the passionate man’s error. A man who is afraid invents a danger in order to explain his fear, which is real and quite apparent. The least surprise arouses fear even if there is no danger at all, as for example, an unexpected pistol shot nearby, or simply the presence of an unexpected person. Marshal Masséna was once frightened by a statue on a dimly lighted staircase, and ran for his life.

Impatience and ill humor sometimes result from the fact that a man has been on his feet too long. Do not try to reason him out of his ill humor; offer him a chair. When Talleyrand said that manners are everything, he said more than he realized. In the care he took to be accommodating, he was looking for the pin, and always ended up by finding it. All of today’s diplomats have a misplaced pin somewhere in their breeches; hence Europe’s problems. We all know that one squalling child makes others cry. And worse still, crying makes one cry even harder. With professional competence, a nurse turns the infant over on his stomach. Soon there are different responses and a different pattern of behavior. Now there is a down-to-earth method of persuasion. In my opinion, the evils of 1914 resulted from all the important men being surprised; consequently, they were overcome by fear. When a man is afraid, he is not very far from anger; irritation follows agitation. It is not a favorable situation when a man is brusquely called away from his leisure and repose; often he changes, and changes too much. Like a man awakened by surprise; he wakes up too much. But never say that men are wicked; never say that they are of such and such a character. Look for the pin.

8 December 1922

The Novel, Who Needs It? by Joseph Epstein.

From Alain on Happiness (1973), Translated by Robert D. and Jane E. Cottrell:

Travelling

In these vacation months, the world is full of people rushing from one sight to another, obviously hoping to see a great deal in a short time. If it is so they can talk about what they have seen, all well and good, for it is best to be able to mention the names of several places; that is one way of killing time. But if it is for themselves, if they really want to see something, I do not quite understand them. When you see things on the run, they all look alike. A waterfall is still a waterfall. Thus someone who travels around at full speed is hardly richer in memories at the end than at the outset.

The real richness of sights is in their details. Seeing means going over the details, stopping a little at each one, and then taking in the whole once again. I don’t know if other people can do that quickly and then run off to look at something else, and start all over again. As for me, I cannot. Happy are they who live in Rouen and who every day can glance at something beautiful – the old Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Ouen, for example – as if it were a painting in their own home.

However, if you visit a museum only once or stop only briefly in one of the countries on the tourist circuit, it is almost inevitable that your memories become confused and then form a kind of gray picture with indistinct lines.

To my mind, traveling means going a few feet, then stopping and looking to get a different view of the same things. Often, going to sit down a little to the right or to the left changes everything, and a lot more than going a hundred miles.

Going from waterfall to waterfall, I always find the same waterfall. But if I go from rock to rock, the same waterfall changes at every step. And if I return to something I have already seen, it strikes me more than if it were new; and in fact it is new. To avoid getting into a rut, all one has to do is contemplate something rich and varied. It should be added that as one learns to see better, one discovers inexhaustible joys in even the most common sights. Moreover, the sky with its stars can be seen from anywhere; now there is a marvelous precipice.

29 August 1906

From Whatever Happened to Culture by Joseph Epstein:

Where once university English, History and other departments featured classic works – “the best that is thought and said” – they now prefer gender and other exotic studies. If Shakespeare is taught, there is a good chance the emphasis will be on whether he was pansexual or on his role as a running dog of capitalism. Here are some titles of courses on offer for the coming year in the English Department of Northwestern University: “Lesbian Representation in Popular Culture,” “Frankenstein’s Hideous Progeny,” “Madwomen in the Attic – Insanity, Gender, and Authorship in British Fiction,” “Intro to Disability Studies in Literature,” “Medicine, Race, and Gender,” “Black Feminist Theory,” “LGBTQ Art and Activism in the United States.” Not, near as one can make out, a great book in sight. If one is in search of culture in the Arnoldian sense, one is unlikely to find much of it in the contemporary university.

New at IWP Articles: If My Library Burned Tonight (1947) by Aldous Huxley.

If my library burned down… fortunately for me, it never has. But I have moved house sufficiently often and I have had enough book-borrowing friends to be able to form a pretty good idea of the nature of the catastrophe. To enter the shell of a well-loved room and to find it empty, except for a thick carpet of ashes that were once one’s favorite literature – the very thought of it is depressing. But happily books are replaceable – at any rate the kind of books that fill the shelves of my library. For I lack the collector’s spirit and have never been interested in first editions and rare antiquities. It is only about the contents of a book that I care, not its shape, its date, or the number on its flyleaves. Fire, friends, and changes of residence can never rob one of anything that cannot, like Job’s children, camels, and she-asses, be restored in fullest measure.

The Encyclopedia Britannica (1911) article on Rabelais, by George Saintsbury. Other (not all) articles by Saintsbury: Balzac, Corneille, La Bruyère, La Fontaine, La Rochefoucauld, Michelet, Montaigne, Montesquieu, Pascal, Racine, Rousseau, Voltaire.

From Whatever Happened to Culture by Joseph Epstein:

As for that ruck, defined as a crowd of ordinary or undistinguished persons, at a time when everyone is lined up politically, and when it is now not permissible to be apolitical, it is difficult to point to men or women of true culture. Jacques Barzun once seemed such a person; so too, did Lionel Trilling, Ralph Ellison, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Willa Cather. One cannot think of people of their stature and general distinction today. Might it be that the current Zeitgeist has snuffed out all possibilities for such distinction, has killed the very idea of high cultural distinction, and with it the ideal of the man or woman of culture?

Amos Oz: Writer, Activist, Icon by Robert Alter.

From Do What You Will (1929) by Aldous Huxley:

Swift’s prodigious powers were marshalled on the side of death, not life. How instructive, in this context, is the comparison with Rabelais! Both men were scatological writers. Mass for mass, there is probably more dung and offal piled up in Rabelais' work than in Swift’s. But how pleasant is the dung through which Gargantua wades, how almost delectable the offal! The muck is transfigured by love; for Rabelais loved the bowels which Swift so malignantly hated. His was the true amor fati: he accepted reality in its entirety, accepted with gratitude and delight this amazingly improbable world, where flowers spring from manure, and reverent Fathers of the Church, as in Harington’s Metamorphosis of Ajax, meditate on the divine mysteries while seated on the privy; where the singers of the most mystically spiritual love, such as Dante, Petrarch, and Cavalcanti, have wives and rows of children; and where the violences of animal passion can give birth to sentiments of the most exquisite tenderness and refinement.

From Alain by André Maurois:

His third secret: reading. There was never such a reader as Alain. He read and re-read. Not a great number of authors. He cared nothing for the tyranny of fashion, but remained steadfastly attached to the few spirits that had never failed him. Philosophers: Plato, Spinoza, Descartes, Hegel, Auguste Comte. A few poets: Homer, Hugo, Claudel, Valéry. A few novelists: Stendhal, Balzac, Tolstoy, Kipling and – coming nearer our own times – Proust. A few memoir-writers: Retz, Saint-Simon, Chateaubriand, Napoleon. And then Montaigne, Rousseau, Voltaire. The thing is that he always remained a man of few books, but that he had explored his favourites to the very depths.

From Alain by André Maurois:

When I told him I was hoping to become a writer, he advised me to copy, from beginning to end, the eight hundred pages of Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme: “The art of learning,” he would say, “as musicians and painters know, boils down to a long apprenticeship of imitating and copying….” He taught me not to despise the commonplace. “Only fools,” he would say, “think they are being original when they neglect the ideas of previous generations. True originality consists in giving commonplace ideas new shape.”

From Alain by André Maurois:

I have known few great men; few, that is, of absolutely flawless metal. They could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The philosopher Alain was one of these, and quite a few of us, his pupils or readers, are aware of it. The truth about him, already widely known, is bound to spread further; and a hundred years hence Alain will rank, among writers of our day, alongside Paul Valéry; while many who to-day naively think themselves assured of immortality will have sunk into oblivion.

New at IWP Articles: Alain (1952) by André Maurois

New at IWP Books: The Buried Candelabrum (1937) by Stefan Zweig.

Miseducating the American Mind by William Deresiewicz.

New at IWP Books: The Right to Heresy: Castellio against Calvin (1936) by Stefan Zweig.

“One must judge men, not by their opinions, but by what their opinions have made of them.” Lichtenberg

From Erasmus of Rotterdam by Stefan Zweig:

Only when the impulse to violence is inspired with an idea, or is made to serve an idea, do genuine “tumulti” occur. Then come the bloody and destructive revolutions, then the bands of ragamuffins get formed into a party hastening to obey the rallying-cry, then by organization is an army created, then does a dogma help to promote a movement. All the great and vehement conflicts that have arisen among men are more rightly described as the outcome of certain ideologies than as being due to the violence and bloodthirstiness of the human animal; for an idea may let loose the will to violence and drive it to the attack. Fanaticism, the bastard begotten out of brain and power, fancies itself dictator in the realm of thought, so that only what it thinks is acceptable and must be forced upon the whole universe; it thus splits the human community into friends or foes, adherents or opponents, heroes or criminals, believers or heretics; since it recognizes no other system than its own and no other truth than its own, it needs must resort to violence in order to curb and bridle the divine multiplicity of phenomena and to bring everything under one yoke. The forcible curtailment of mental latitude, of freedom of opinions, every kind of inquisition and censorship, of scaffold and stake – these evils were not brought into the world by blind violence, but by rigidly staring fanaticism, that genius of one-sidedness, that hereditary enemy of universality, that captive of a single idea which would shut the whole world up in a cage.

From Erasmus of Rotterdam by Stefan Zweig:

Erasmus loved books, not merely for their contents, but also for their material selves, he being the first thoroughgoing bibliophile. He worshipped their form, he liked handling them, he admired their artistic presentation. His moments of sheerest happiness were those passed at Aldus’s printing-house in Venice, or with Frobenius in Basle, standing among the workers in the low-ceilinged room, receiving the galleys still damp from the press, setting up with the masters the delicate and beautiful initial letters, running to earth like an expert huntsman with swift and finely pointed quill the most elusive of printer’s errors, deftly rounding off a clumsy phrase; to be with books, dealing with them, working at them – this seemed to him the most natural form of existence. Thus Erasmus never lived among the peoples whose lands he travelled through, never shared in their life and activities; he dwelt above them, in the clear, still ether, in the ivory tower of the artist and academician. But from this tower, which was built entirely of books and labour, he gazed forth, keen of sight like another Lynceus, in order to see and to understand clearly and correctly the living life below.

From Erasmus of Rotterdam by Stefan Zweig:

But lo, like a belated swallow, someone came knocking at his window already frosted by the cold of approaching winter. A message flew in to greet him with reverence and love. “Everything that I do, all that I am, I owe to you; and, were I to fail in acknowledging my debt, I should prove the most ungrateful man alive. Salve itaque etiam atque etiam, pater amantissime, pater desusque patriae, literarum assertor, veritatis propugnator invictissime.” (Greeting and yet again greeting, dearest father and honour of the land which gave you birth, champion of the arts, invincible fighter for truth.) The name of the man who wrote these words, and one which was destined to outshine even the name of Erasmus, was Rabelais, who in the dawn of his youthful glory thus acclaimed the dying master whose sun was about to set.

New at IWP Books: Erasmus of Rotterdam (1934) by Stefan Zweig.