'Not Impressed by Bombast or Lofty Tone'

“One of the keenest pleasures of reading derives from being in the close company of someone more thoughtful than you but whose thoughts, owing to the courtesy of clarity, are handsomely accessible to you.”

I’m reading in a leisurely fashion the notebooks of Paul Valéry again, the beautiful five-volume set translated by various hands and published by Peter Lang between 2000 and 2010. For half a century, Valéry started his days by writing in notebooks, eventually filling more than 28,000 pages before his death in 1945. Though best known as a poet, Valéry judged his prose notebooks his “true oeuvre.”

The passage at the top, which I wish I had written, is from “The Intimate Abstraction of Paul Valéry,” Joseph Epstein’s 2003 review of the Cahiers/Notebooks. It’s his review’s penultimate sentence. Epstein identifies one of my principal reasons for reading and, by extension, what I look for in literature. Naturally, I seek the company of people, in books as in life, more intelligent, articulate and perspicacious than I. Plenty of writers, even some good ones, don’t meet those standards, which is never sufficient reason to not read them.

Epstein tempers his quest for thoughtfulness with a lovely phrase, “the courtesy of clarity.” Confused writing suggests confused thinking. If the sense is tangled, so is the thought. To write that way is discourteous, a show of contempt for the reader. The chief source of the pleasure we take in Valéry’s prose is its concision coupled with precision. Sometimes the level of abstraction at which he writes makes understanding difficult and prompts rereading several times. But his prose is never sloppy or confused.

From the second volume of Notebooks/Cahiers, a passage from 1917:

“Write for the ‘intelligent’ reader –

“For someone who is not impressed by bombast or lofty tone.

“For someone who will: either live your idea or destroy it or reject it – for someone to whom you give supreme power over your idea; and who has the power to skip over it , go beyond it, let it drop; and to think the opposite, and not believe it --, not go along with your intention.”

[Epstein’s review is collected in In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage (2007).]