'A Taste for Terseness'

“When I think of all the books still left to read, I am certain of continuing happiness.” 

I might amend that to “reread.” Trollope wrote forty-seven novels, I’ve read three or four, and the only one I want to (re-)read is The Way We Live Now. This is perverse, even lazy.

 

“I am intimately acquainted with my laziness. I could write a treatise on the subject, were it not such a monumental bore.”

 

Who are the bores? The humorless, earnest, reductive-minded. Those who have figured things out. They have all the answers. Questioners make better company.

 

“You do not understand life any more at 40 than you did at 20, but you are aware of the fact, and you admit it. And to admit it is to remain young.”

 

I know a young man less than one third my age who is older than me. He is tired, not so much bored as indifferent, which may amount to the same thing. His talk is formulaic. He never seems surprised or pleased.

 

“I spend my days like an old man. I read the papers a little, read a passage from this or that book, set down a few thoughts, keep warm – and, much of the time, doze.”

 

Me too, except for the part about dozing. And the part about reading the newspapers.

 

“It is fine writing, ‘beautiful’ descriptions, that give me a taste for terseness, for three words in a row.”

 

Beware of loquacity.

 

“At the end of the evening I could not find my hat, because it was already on my head, so I calmly walked off with someone else’s hat in my hand.”

 

[All the quoted passages are from Jules Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, riverrun, 2020). That final passage recalls a Laurel and Hardy routine. Or a bit in Godot. In a January 1, 1957, letter to Richard Roud, Beckett writes: “Glad you like the Renard. For me it’s as inexhaustible as Boswell.” (The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Vol. III: 1957-1965, Cambridge University Press, 2014).]