Tag: Writing

Posted on

The Monumental and Human Poetry of Paul Valéry

by Mark Scroggins August 8, 2020

Paul Valéry (1871-1945) had the dubious fate of becoming a monument in his own lifetime, the personification of the quintessential “homme des lettres.” A member of the Académie française, he was France’s cultural representative to the League of Nations and an indefatigable lecturer and commentator. He held enough academic positions to overwhelm a half-dozen ordinary professors. He published over 20 books in various genres; his poetry, on which much of his reputation rests, is a very small share of the whole….

The Monumental and Human Poetry of Paul Valéry
Posted on

On Boredom

When hit by boredom, go for it. Let Yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is the sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface. The idea here, to paraphrase another great poet of the English language, is to exact full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves scrutiny is that it represents pure undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.

– Joseph Brodsky in On Grief and Reason.

Posted on

Fernando Pessoa — The Vale of Soul-Making

And amid all this confusion I, what’s truly I, am the centre that exists only in the geometry of the abyss: I’m the nothing around which everything spins, existing only so that it can spin, being a centre only because every circle has one. I, what’s truly I, am a well without walls but with the walls’ viscosity, the centre of everything with nothing around it.

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet. (Penguin Classics; New Ed edition, December 31, 2002) Originally published 1982.

Fernando Pessoa — The Vale of Soul-Making