IWP Books

Lorsqu’un petit enfant crie et ne veut pas être consolé, la nourrice fait souvent les plus ingénieuses suppositions concernant ce jeune caractère et ce qui lui plaît et déplaît; appelant même l’hérédité au secours, elle reconnaît déjà le père dans le fils; ces essais de psychologie se prolongent jusqu’à ce que la nourrice ait découvert l’épingle, cause réelle de tout.

Lorsque Bucéphale, cheval illustre, fut présenté au jeune écuyer ne pouvait se maintenir sur cet animal redoutable. Sur quoi un homme vulgaire aurait dit: «Voilà un cheval méchant.» Alexandre cependant cherchait l’épingle, et la trouva bientôt, remarquant que Bucéphale avait terriblement peur de sa propre ombre; et comme la peur faisait sauter l’ombre aussi, cela n’avait point de fin. Mais il tourna le nez de Bucéphale vers le soleil, et, le maintenant dans cette direction, il put le rassurer et le fatiguer. Ainsi l’élève d’Aristote savait déjà que nous n’avons aucune puissance sur les passions tant que nous n’en connaissons pas les vraies causes. (8 Décembre 1922, Propos Sur le Bonheur, Alain)

Aug 27, 2023

Censuring Stalin at a public meeting, Khrushchev was interrupted by a voice from the audience. “You were one of Stalin’s colleagues,” shouted the heckler. “Why didn’t you stop him?”

“Who said that?” roared Khrushchev. There was an agonizing silence in the room. Nobody dared to move a muscle. Then, in a quiet voice, Khrushchev said, “Now you know why.” (The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes, ed. Clifton Fadiman)

Aug 27, 2023

During William Morris’s last visit to Paris, he spent much of his time in the restaurant of the Eiffel Tower, either eating or writing. When a friend observed that he must be very impressed by the tower to spend so much time there, Morris snorted, “Impressed! I remain here because it’s the only place in Paris where I can avoid seeing the damn thing.” (The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes, ed. Clifton Fadiman)

Aug 27, 2023

New at IWP Books: Jeremiah (1917) by Stefan Zweig.

Jul 17, 2023

Horace’s Diffugere Nives by Camões, 1595 (& 182 English Translations):

Fogem as neves frias

dos altos montes, quando reverdecem

as árvores sombrias;

as verdes ervas crescem,

e o prado ameno de mil cores tecem.

Zéfiro brando espira;

suas setas Amor afia agora;

Progne triste suspira

e Filomela chora;

o Céu da fresca terra se enamora.

Vai Vênus Citereia

com os coros das Ninas rodeada;

a linda Panopeia,

despida e delicada,

com as duas irmãs acompanhada.

Enquanto as oficinas

dos Cíclopes Vulcano está queimando,

vão colhendo boninas

as Ninfas e cantando,

a terra co ligeiro pé tocando.

Desce do duro monte

Diana, já cansada d’espessura,

buscando a clara fonte

onde, por sorte dura,

perdeu Actéon a natural figura.

Assim se vai passando

a verde Primavera e seco Estio;

trás ele vem chegando

depois o Inverno frio,

que também passará por certo fio.

Ir-se-á embranquecendo

com a frígida neve o seco monte;

e Júpiter, chovendo,

turbará a clara fonte;

temerá o marinheiro a Orionte.

Porque, enfim, tudo passa;

não sabe o tempo ter firmeza em nada;

e nossa vida escassa

foge tão apressada

que, quando se começa, é acabada.

Que foram dos Troianos

Hector temido, Eneias piadoso?

Consumiram-te os anos,

Ó Cresso tão famoso,

sem te valer teu ouro precioso.

Todo o contentamento

crias que estava no tesouro ufano?

Ó falso pensamento

que, à custa de teu dano,

do douto Sólon creste o desengano!

O bem que aqui se alcança

não dura, por possante, nem por forte;

que a bem-aventurança

durável de outra sorte

se há-de alcançar, na vida, para a morte.

Porque, enfim, nada basta

contra o terrível fim da noite eterna;

nem pode a deusa casta

tornar à luz supernal?

Hipólito, da escura noite averna.

Nem Teseu esforçado,

com manha nem com força rigorosa,

livrar pode o ousado

Piritoo da espantosa

prisão leteia, escura e tenebrosa.

Jul 13, 2023

From 2007, Arthur Krystal on Jacques Barzun:

Next month, Barzun, the eminent historian and cultural critic, will turn one hundred. His idea of celebrating his centenary is to put the finishing touches on his thirty-eighth book (not counting translations). Among his areas of expertise are French and German literature, music, education, ghost stories, detective fiction, language, and etymology. Barzun has examined Poe as proofreader, Abraham Lincoln as stylist, Diderot as satirist, and Liszt as reader; he has burnished the reputations of Thomas Beddoes, James Agate, and John Jay Chapman; and he has written so many reviews and essays that his official biographer is loath to put a number on them. There’s nothing hasty or haphazard about these evaluations. Barzun’s breadth of erudition has been a byword among friends and colleagues for six decades. Yet, in spite of his degrees and awards (he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur and has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom), Barzun regards himself in many respects as an “amateur” (the Latin root, amator, means “lover”), someone who takes genuine pleasure in what he learns about. More than any other historian of the past four generations, Barzun has stood for the seemingly contradictory ideas of scholarly rigor and unaffected enthusiasm.

Jul 4, 2023

“Before 1914 the critics and scholars of Central Europe were particularly free of national bias. They wrote about past and present art with such zeal and sympathy as to diffuse an atmosphere akin to that of the cosmopolitan 18C. It contributed to the mood of joy in creation and appreciation that made later comers look back on those years as a belle époque. Artists traveled freely – no passports or visas – many to Paris, where they might stay for a time, because the excitement there was the hottest; and, when back in Berlin, Vienna, Prague, or St. Petersburg, they merged their newfound inspirations with local influences and independent innovations. [The book to read is The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig.]” (Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence)

Jul 4, 2023

From Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human (tr. Hollingdale):

More respect for those who know! – Given the present competitive nature of selling, the public is necessarily the judge of the product of work: but the public has no particular specialist knowledge and judges according to the appearance of quality. As a consequence, the art of producing an appearance (and perhaps that of developing taste) is bound to be enhanced, and the quality of the product to decline, under the dominance of the competitive market. Consequently, if we are to continue to be reasonable we shall at some time have to put an end to this competitive market and replace it with a different principle. Only the skilled producer of the product ought to be the judge of the product, and the public ought to rely on their faith in him and his integrity. Therefore, no anonymous work! At the very least a knowledgeable expert in the product would have to be at hand as guarantor and place his name upon it if the name of its originator was unavailable or without significance. The cheapness of a product is another way of deceiving the layman, inasmuch as it is only durability that can determine whether or not a thing is cheap; but that is hard to assess, and for the layman impossible. – From all of which it follows that what is attractive to the eye and costs little now commands the market – and that can, of course, only be the product of the machine. For its part, again, the machine – that is to say, the means of great rapidity and facility of production – also favours the most saleable type of product; otherwise there is no great gain to be made from it; it would be too little used and too often silent. But what is most saleable is, as aforesaid, decided by the public: it will be the most deceptive product, that is to say that which appears to be of good quality and also appears to be cheap. Thus in this domain of work too our watchword must be: “More respect for those who know!”

Jul 3, 2023

Fin-De-Siècle Vienna Reading List:

Fin-De-Siècle Vienna by Carl E. Schorske
Thinking with History by Carl E. Schorske
The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig
Wittgenstein’s Vienna by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin
Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter
Indian Summer by Adalbert Stifter
For Browsing: Ver Sacrum

Jul 2, 2023

From Thinking with History by Carl E. Schorske:

I avoided a history major, which I felt would tie me down. Instead, I enrolled in Columbia’s two-year humanities Colloquium, which allowed one to construct one’s own program. Colloquium was centered in great books seminars conceived in a more classical spirit than usual in the university’s prevailing pragmatist culture. The seminars were team-taught by truly outstanding young faculty members, such as Moses Hadas and Theodoric Westbrook, Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun. Watching their play of minds on the texts awoke in me for the first time a sense of the sheer intellectual delight of ideas.

The thought of an academic vocation, however, was slow in coming. Actually, I aspired to a career in singing, which I had studied since high-school days. By my junior year, the sad truth grew upon me that my voice simply had not the quality to support a career in Lieder and the kind of Mozart roles I dreamt of. In the same year, I enrolled in young Jacques Barzun’s course in nineteenth-century intellectual history. Barzun simply overwhelmed his few students with the range of the subject and the brilliance of his exploration of it. At work on his biography of Hector Berlioz, Barzun injected much musical material into his course. While I shared with my classmates the exciting experience that this course turned out to be, I drew one rather personal conclusion from it: intellectual history was a field in which my two principal extra-academic interests – music and politics – could be studied not in their usual isolation, but in their relationship under the ordinance of time. I was ready to pursue it.

Jul 2, 2023

From Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture by Carl E. Schorske:

The Jewish state as he conceived it in his pamphlet of the same name had no trace of Jewish character. There would be no common language – certainly not Hebrew. “After all, we can’t speak Hebrew with each other. Who among us knows enough Hebrew to ask for a railway ticket in that language? That word doesn’t exist.” The new state would have a “linguistic federalism,” in which each would speak the language he still loves, that of “our fatherlands, from which we were forced out.” Only Yiddish, “the crippled and repressed ghetto language,” “the purloined tongue of prisoners,” would be abandoned. The hallmark of indignity must not survive in a cultivated cosmopolitan’s paradise. Religion, too, would be kept in its place. “Theocratic archaisms [Velleitäten]” of the clergy would not arise. “Faith holds us together, science makes us free.” The clergy, while honored, would be confined to their temples like the army to the barracks, lest they cause trouble to a state committed to free thought. In all its features, Herzl’s promised land was in fact not a Jewish utopia but a liberal one. The dreams of assimilation which could not be realized in Europe would be realized in Zion, where Jews would have the nobility and honor of which Herzl had dreamed since his youth.

Jul 2, 2023

New at IWP Books: Times and Tendencies (1931) by Agnes Repplier.