“Influence does not create; it awakens,” I said back in 1900, in my first lecture—-and I am satisfied if my books have been able to help young people to ascertain and liberate whatever heroic was sleeping in them. To raise man above himself, to deliver him from his weight, to help him go beyond himself, by exalting him, reassuring him, warning him, tempering him, is not that the secret aim of literature?
Archive for March 16th, 2008
16
Mar
Andre Gide
16
Mar
Thomas Mann
Humanism… is scholarly in nothing and has, directly, nothing to do with erudition. Humanism is rather a spirit, an intellectual disposition, a state of human mind that implies justice, liberty, knowledge and tolerance, amenity and serenity; doubt also, not as an end in itself, but as a search for the truth from the presumptions of those who put that truth under a bushel. He said first: “Would not the best and simplest be to look on humanism as the contrary of fanaticism?”
The youth of today do not know culture in its most elevated and deepest sense. They know nothing of the work on oneself. They no longer know anything about individual responsibility, and find all their comforts in collective life. Collective life, compared to individual life, is the sphere of ease. Ease which goes to the worst of relinquishments. This generation wants only to say farewell forever to its own personality. What it wants, what it loves, is intoxication. It will find its final end in a new war where our civilization will perish.
16
Mar
Paul Valery
From his youth a secret ambition activates him, of such a nature that I cannot imagine a more noble one; in comparison with it, Balzac’s heroes make us smile. On the secular or worldly plane, where the game is played for the latter, Valery will succeed moreover and, furthermore, better than any of them; he knows how honors are obtained, what they are worth, and what they costs in peace of mind. He will accept the price, if it should only be to show others and to prove conclusively to himself that there is nothing there he cannot attain; a matter of earning the right to scorn all that. For he has a tendency to despise everything; that is his strength. The domination he wishes is something entirely different; it is that of the mind. The rest appears laughable to him. To dominate not the mind of others but his own; to get acquainted with its functioning, make himself master of it in order to dispose of it at his will, it is to that he continuously applies his effort. Curious Narcissus; to dominate the mind by the mind. From then on the result hardly matters to him; the product, no, but the means to obtain it; when he wishes, as he wishes, to be capable of…. “My nature is potential,” he said.
“Remember to distrust yourself.” Distrust which he applied to everything, to beings, to things, to convictions, to profession of faith, above all to words, those atoms, and one knows what latent energy the decomposition of the latter sets in motion.
“How does it happen,” he said to me, “that men take to their rest so quickly? Why are they content with so little?”
Andre Gide (1950)
