Modern History Sourcebook:
Paul Valéry:
On European Civilization and the European Mind, c. 1919, 1922
On European Civilization
"We modern
civilizations have learned to recognize that we are mortal like
the others.
"We had heard
tell of whole worlds vanished, of empires foundered with all
their men and all their engines, sunk to the inexplorable depths
of the centuries with their gods and laws, their academies and
their pure and applied sciences, their grammars, dictionaries,
classics, romantics, symbolists, their critics and the critics
of their critics. We knew that all the apparent earth is made
of ashes, and that ashes have a meaning. We perceived, through
the misty bulk of history, the phantoms of huge vessels once
laden with riches and learning. We could not count them. But
these wrecks, after all, were no concern of ours.
"Edam, Nineveh,
Babylon were vague and splendid names; the total ruin of these
worlds, for us, meant as little as did their existence. But
France, England, Russia,these names, too, are splendid. And
now we see that the abyss of history is deep enough to bury
all the world. We feel that a civilization is fragile as a life.
The circumstances which will send the works of [John] Keats
and the works of [Charles] Baudelaire to join those of Menander
(an ancient Greek poet whose works were lost until the 19th
century) are not at all inconceivable; they are found in the
daily papers." (1919)
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On the European Mind
"The storm
has died away, and still we are restless, uneasy, as if the
storm were about to break. Almost all the affairs of men remain
in a terrible uncertainty. We think of what has disappeared,
we are almost destroyed by what has been destroyed; we do not
know what will be born, and we fear the future, not without
reason. We hope vaguely, we dread precisely; our fears are infinitely
more precise than our hopes; we confess that the charm of life
is behind us, abundance is behind us, but doubt and disorder
are in us and with us. There is no thinking man, however shrewd
or learned he may be, who can hope to dominate this anxiety,
to escape from this impression of darkness, to measure the probable
duration of this period when the virtual relations of humanity
are disturbed profoundly.
"We are a very
unfortunate generation, whose lot has been to see the moment
of our passage through life coincide with the arrival of great
and terrifying events, the echo of which will resound through
all our lives.
One can say
that all the fundamentals of the world have been affected by
the war, or more exactly, by the circumstances of the war; something
deeper has been worn away than the renewable parts of the machine.
You know how greatly the general economic situation has been
disturbed, and the polity of states, and the very life of the
individual; you are familiar with the universal discomfort,
hesitation, apprehension. But among all these injured things
is the Mind. The Mind has indeed been cruelly wounded; its complaint
is heard in the hearts of intellectual man; it passes a mournful
judgment on itself. It doubts itself profoundly." (1922)
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