Without Lifting A Finger

Rue Servandoni, right by the Luxembourg Gardens. One of my favorite Parisian streets, or rather side streets; quiet, almost always empty. One building bears a plaque informing us that the Marquis Nicolas de Condorcet spent the last months of his life in hiding here; he’d been sentenced to death by the Revolution. In the end, he left his hiding place, was recognized, denounced, arrested, and shortly afterward died in prison under uncertain circumstances. In the months preceding his arrest he worked on his final project, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain. The Revolution’s thugs were out to get him, and he writes on progress! He listened for footsteps echoing in the quiet side street, but retained his faith in progress. He kept one ear open for his persecutors’ footsteps, while the other heard the ever-advancing music of the future. He witnessed the terror unleashed by the Jacobins, but never lost his faith in human perfectibility. I don’t know what to admi...

Systems have turned us into slaves, dwarfs. The disinterested contemplation of life is a different matter, as for example in Paul Claudel’s “Second Ode,” where the author exclaims, “Oh Credo full of things seen and unseen.” That’s finally all that counts: disinterested contemplation of the world, brimming with admiration or revulsion, or both together. Systems don’t permit disinterested contemplation: they’re sieves, they sift, segregate, eliminate, smooth, simplify, diminish. Systems are like mnemonic devices, ideal for accelerated evening courses … A person who masters any one of them—it demands just a few months of intensive cramming—will be liberated from true knowledge, from authentic, free, gleeful erudition open to reality, but open as well to dozens of varied traditions, hundreds of different painters, composers, writers, united by nothing, almost, except perhaps their unconditional refusal to be tidied within a single system. Each sought truth at first hand, painfully, in j...

I walked through the Planty Gardens; a little girl zipped past me on a scooter and at that moment I grasped the essence of motion. But I can’t explain it.

In the monumental four-volume anthology of French poetry edited by Jerzy Lisowski and completed after his death, I find a poem whose history is somehow near to me; its author is Gilbert Lely, and the title is “Word and Cold.” Gilbert Lely. Gilbert Lely was a writer linked to surrealism, known—as I read in the encyclopedia—for his erotic poems as well as for a highly regarded biography of Sade. But I know just the one poem, and that’s all I’ll mention here. A Polish version of this poem turned up in the anthology of French poetry, as translated by Konstanty Jelenski. I remember that Jelenski found this poem in yet another anthology, Une anthologie de la poésie française, published by Jean-François Revel in December 1985. The poem struck him, and he gave his translation to the Polish journal Literary Notebooks. I’ll give an excerpt from this—truly beautiful—poem, in which the author (speaker) visits his own grave as he strolls through autumnal Paris.  It’s still empty, waiting ...