markson notes

Leopardi came from a noble family and was educated by a private tutor. By the time Leopardi reached the age of twelve, his tutor resigned his position because he realized the boy’s learning was already greater than his own.

Nearly every morning of his life Paul Valéry wrote in a notebook—totaling 261 notebooks in the end. “Having dedicated those hours to the life of the mind, I earn the right to be stupid for the rest of the day.”

Delmore Schwartz stated that Moby Dick was not noticed at all for the first seventy years after it was published.

[After David Markson's not novels]

god-given line

Graciously the gods give us the first line for nothing, but it is up to us to furnish a second that harmonizes with it and not be unworthy of its supernatural elder brother. All the resources of experience and of intelligence are hardly enough to make it comparable to the verse which came to us as a gift.

—Paul Valéry, Au sujet d’Adonis (1920), translation by Louise Varèse.

poet second

Paul Valéry, a poet known almost entirely for his poetics and aesthetic thought.

shaping music

As do the poets, Heraclitus follows language where it leads him, where he is receptive to its inward and autonomous authority, with somnambular yet acutely lucid trust. Hence his recurrent attempts to characterize, to make us party to the twilight zone between sleeping and waking. Day melts into night, night begetting day in subversion of the trenchant Mediterranean light. There is here no distinction between philosophic or scientific finding and poetic form. The springs of thought are identical in both (poiesis). Poetry betrays its daimon when it is too lazy or self-complacent to think deeply (Valéry’s astreindre). In turn, intellection falsifies the shaping music within itself when it forgets that it is poetry.

—George Steiner, The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan (New Directions, 2011)

no word for that

[Valéry’s] horror of philosophic jargon is so convincing, so contagious, that one shares it forever after, so that one can no longer read a serious philosopher except with suspicion or distaste, henceforth rejecting any falsely mysterious or learned term. Most philosophy boils down to a crime of lèse-langage, a crime against the Word. Any professional expression—any profession of the schools—must be proscribed and identified with a misdemeanor. Anyone who, in order to settle a difficulty or solve a problem, invents a high-sounding, pretentious word, indeed a word at all, is unconsciously dishonest. In a letter to F. Brunot, Valéry once wrote, “It takes more intelligence to do without a word than to introduce one.”

—E.M. Cioran,“Valéry Facing His Idols,” Anathemas and Admirations (Quartet Books, Ltd, 1992), translated by Richard Howard.

no ambition at all

I shall never forget one autumn evening in the tiny office of T.S. Eliot at Faber and Faber’s the voice of the poet of the Quartets ending our conversation about Valéry: “He was so intelligent that he had no ambition at all.”

—George Seferis, in his preface to Igor Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music (Harvard Univ. Press, 1942)

utilitarian artist

To a certain extent, the artist can be considered the most utilitarian of persons, for he uses even unusable things, he is the one who uses insignificant perceptions and arbitrary acts to invent, outside of a practical interest, a background interest, a secondary necessity. The unique quality of artistic invention is to lend these useless impressions such a value that not only do they become as indispensable as any direct perception, but as they are given to us we feel even more the need to find them again and to enjoy them. This is what Paul Valéry calls the “aesthetic infinite.”

—Maurice Blanchot, “Poetics,” Faux Pas, translated by Charlotte Mandell, Stanford Univ. Press, 2001