Le Bilan de l'intelligence

by Paul Valéry

Paul Valery felt a deep interest in politics and developed an active involvement in international affairs. A spokesperson for the League of Nations, he was the French representative to the Committee on Intellectual Co-operation and the Permanent Committee on Arts and Letters, both organs of the League. This volume includes twelve essays illustrating his political concerns.

Genres: Philosophy, Essays, Nonfiction, Literature, France

64 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1935

About the author

Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath. In addition to his fiction (poetry, drama and dialogues), he also wrote many essays and aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events.

Valéry is best known as a poet, and is sometimes considered to be the last of the French Symbolists. But he published fewer than a hundred poems, and none that drew much attention. On the night of 4 October 1892, during a heavy storm, Paul Valéry entered an existential crisis, which made a big impact on his writing career. Around 1898, his writing activity even came to a near-standstill, due partly to the death of his mentor Stéphane Mallarmé and for nearly twenty years from that time on, Valery did not publish a single word until 1917, when he finally broke this 'Great Silence' with the publication of La Jeune Parque at forty-six years of age. This obscure but superbly musical masterpiece, of 512 alexandrine lines in rhyming pairs, had taken him four years to complete, and immediately secured his fame. It is esteemed by many in France as the greatest French poem of the 20th century.

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short book won’t take you long to read.

Actually, it’s only a rather metaphysical - in the broader, ruminative sense - essay.

But as a record of the fin-de-siècle rêveries of a noble - again in the broader sense - clear, and disinterested French writer of the muddled entre-deux-guerres thirties on what mankind’s future might hold, it is wonderful.

Just look at the quotation below!

Society, says this scientifically, mathematically and theoretically minded man Valéry, exists for the isolated and rare blossoms it produces.

And that’s from a largely ineffectual but intellectually great writer who wrote only for the delight of a select few who might enjoy his meditations.

An intellectual titan, but in practice, just a weary old man with a perpetually quizzical appearance - an old man who NEVER lost his sense of wonder at the infinite varieties and mysteries of literature and science.

And saw as sacrosanct his wide-ranging intellectual freedom. As I did, and still do.

Back when I first read him, in 1968, I was a uni freshman...

In the first semester of college, football (and drinking!) remained the choice autumn diversions of most uni newbies. And, to a certain small extent, I went along with the routine.

My prep work for this game - the Canadian championship for which our boys were competing - was to buy a pint of Lemon Gin; and to borrow a copy of Valéry’s Meditations on a Seashell from our central library.

My planned inebriation went badly awry, thankfully, when - during the first quarter of the game - I passed my gin to Big Paul, my travelling companion, for a snort... and he dropped it.

Yikes: back then all Mickies were made of glass.

So, quite ruefully, I turned my attention to the game, after tossing some murderously choice words in the direction of my inept seat mate in those Toronto bleachers.

The game was quite good.

We clobbered the team from Western Canada. The Jubilation was universal among my fellow bus passengers. And of course, most of them passed out on the bus during the return trip to our campus...

We had won the Vanier Cup!

But I, sober as a judge, was led ever onwards through the densely worded landscape of a Valérian paysage moralisé of dreams, recollections and ever-unattainable conclusions about the oneiric and symbolic value of seashells to the cultivated imagination.

And, you know what?

In the end I was glad Big Paul dropped that bottle.

For, clear-headed as I now was, I had found a new fave author:

A writer whose wonderful dreamscapes seemed inexhaustible to my youthful mind!

[Szplug · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jaysus, but can Valéry ever string together one polished and pearly sentence after another. The words—lovingly translated by the duo of Mathews and Folliot—glide across the mind like a silk streamer, producing a velvet mental tickling and leaving the heady literary scent of a seven o'clock brandy when their final syllables slide down the cerebral funnel towards the frictionless and labyrinthine depths that comprise the storehouse of one's soul. I like the cut of his jib—such as his opening remark in the foreword he penned back in that inclement period of 1931:

This little collection is dedicated above all to those persons who have no system and belong to no party and are therefore still free to doubt whatever is doubtful and to maintain what is not.

The European events he refers to are, of course, quite dated, but his skeptical, pragmatic, and searching intelligence is such that each elegant essay is bursting at the seams with a fulgid thought that never gets old. One of the shorter pieces—A Fond Note on Myth—is crammed to the brim with the kind of prose that ripples and refreshes like an eventide wind:

She is worried about my attitude toward God and love, whether I have faith in both; she would like to know if pure poetry is fatal to feeling, and asks me if I practice analyzing my dreams as is done in Central Europe, where no right-thinking person fails to fish up out of his own depths every morning some abysmal enormity, some obscenely shaped octopus he is proud to have fostered...Myth is the name of everything that exists and abides with speech as its only cause...Myths decompose in the light within us made up of the combined presence of our body and the utmost degree of consciousness...What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken notions, abstractions, beliefs, and monsters, hypotheses and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people with beings and objectless images our natural depths and darkness. Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot act without moving toward a phantom. We can love only what we can create.

A fitting example of the man's natural genius is The Conquest of Method, a piece he whipped off for a British magazine in the waning years of the nineteenth century—Valéry, far from an expert on the subject, applied his acute powers of observation and reasoning to the subject of the German Empire, laying out for his British—and French—readers the manner in which the Germans had methodically and carefully and thoroughly set out to vault their energetic and populous nation, one only recently united under a common purpose and government, into the highest echelon of the first tier of nations. Their methodology consisted of studying what had worked for their Age of Empire competitors, giving the results the typical and required German refinements, and then setting out to implement their vision in a manner that detailedly configured the requisite support networks, educational institutions, government participation and oversight, bureaucratic organization, economic infrastructure, etc. An off-the-cuff article from the brilliant Frenchman presaged the entirety of the imposing and disciplined structure the Germans would bring to their military, an all-around competency that came close to spelling disaster for the French in the opening weeks of the First World War. Now I want his entire lengthy—and goddamn expensive—collected works.

[Henri Pech de Pluvinel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Effrayant.

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a remarkable collection of essay that speak or in conversation with our current moment. Valéry intuited these massive changes that occured from the transition of early-mid Modernity to what we can call late-Modernity. His writing is absolutely beautiful as well.

One of the essays in this collection inspired this piece on - Napoleon, Mad Max, DODGE, and Trump.

https://medium.com/@WeWillNotBeFlatte...

[Barak · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first encountered this thinker when reading "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), by Walter Benjamin, where at the top was placed a quotation by Valéry. I "wrote" back then a mental note to read him one day. Luckily, I ended up acting on it, if many years later.

I was highly impressed by the prescience of Valéry on many topics, predicting trends that took decades to materialize, while at the same time claiming that if he learned anything looking back 50 years, is that there is no way to predict the next 50 years. Well, he did manage to predict the deterioration of culture, the reduction in book reading and in attention spans, and even, to a large extent, the invention of Audio books. But don't take my word for it; rather, read his essays for yourselves.

[Ellyrah · Rating 2 out of 5]

C'est un râleur ce Paul Valéry. Tout le livre n'est qu'une longue plainte. Tout est critiqué, absolument tout : le langage, les hobbies, l'avancée scientifique, l'architecture, l'éducation... Mais jamais il ne propose une solution ou évoque les bons côtés. Il diabolise la cible de ses critiques incessantes et complexifie ses propos avec des tournures de phrases qui n'ont ni queue ni tête pour aucune raison valable. Il fait comme tant d'autres ont fait, font et feront après lui : il critique le monde moderne et les futures générations qui ne sont encore que des enfants et des ados.

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 3 out of 5]

The selection is a bit repetitive but interesting bits crop up in each one.

[Assia · Rating 3 out of 5]

(1935)

[Isabelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ceci est un livre à lire ou à relire parce que nous y trouvons les traces de ce que nous sommes, indubitablement ce que nous avons été, et de ce que nous pourrions cesser d'être

[Tarbuckle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Il n'y a que les montagnes qui ne se rencontrent pas. C'est le monde moderne comme on le voit par les yeux de l'homme presque parfait. N'atermoye pas de suite ni ne réfléchis à l'épreuve, mais lis.