Gray Haskins

La plus courte façon 

d’arriver à la gloire,

ce serait

de faire pour la conscience

ce que nous faisons pour la gloire. 

*

[The shortest way 

of attaining glory

would be to do for our conscience

what we do for glory.]

*

Le prix de âme

ne consiste pas 

à aller haut,

mais

d’un pas ordonné. 

Ce n’est pas 

dans la grandeur

que s’exerce

la grandeur d’âme :

c’est dans

la médiocrité.

*

[The price of the soul

isn’t paid in going high, 

but going with a well-ordered step.

Greatness of soul isn’t exercised in greatness

but in mediocrity.]

C’est une vie d’exception

que celle 

qui se maintient en ordre

jusqu’en son privé.

Chacun peut bien

prendre rôle

parmi les bateleurs, [acrobate forain ; ‘tumbler’, ‘juggler’, ‘buffoon’]

et représenter un honnête personnage 

sur le théâtre :

mais au-dedans

et dans sa poitrine,

là où tout nous est loisible, [permis]

où tout est caché,

d’y être réglé,

c’est là le point. 

*

[It’s a life of exception,

the one that keeps itself in order

even in private.

Everyone can easily

take a role

among the jugglers,

and play an honest character

in the theater:

but inwardly,

inside of yourself,

where anything goes,

and where everything’s hidden,

to be regulated

and well,

that’s the point.]

*

Le degré voisin, 

c’est de l’être en sa maison,

en ses actions ordinaires,

dont nous n’avons à rendre raison à personne :

où il n’y a point d’étude,

point d’artifice.

*

[The neighboring degree

is to be so in your home, 

in your ordinary actions,

which we don’t have to explain to anyone:

where there’s no study at all, 

no artifice.]

Le devoir, 

dans le sens plein du mot, 

suppose une délibération à part soi,

dont tout dépend,

sans aucune contrainte. [Alain]

*

[Duty,

in the full sense of the word,

supposes a deliberation apart from oneself,

on which everything depends,

without any compulsion.]

*

You are free to do or not do 

what your deepest instincts tell you. 

Failure is inevitable; 

but it’s a choice to still believe, 

and to try again, 

and to give again where it’s difficult to give, 

to risk a smile, or a word, 

to put yourself where you fear to go,

to dare

and to refuse to think,

but only to act what you feel. 

To look closely at the skin of your hand or at the texture of the wallpaper or at the small pieces of dust on the keyboard of your computer: an essential resistance to the age, to the implicit imperative of speed and performance; to slow your pace and the movement of your eyes, to take your time on something, to deliberately stop where you feel forces on all sides telling you to move on: to say no without a word, and linger, not looking for anything, not wanting anything, or expecting anything, but content, satisfied enough by being and seeing where you are. 

Passage du Poète de Ramuz, un extrait et sa traduction (la mienne):

    De nouveau, les mots lui viennent :

    — C’est de faire pour rien qui est beau. Même si le travail ne paie pas, parce que c’est de faire qui compte. Quand même je serais tout seul, et quand même je n’ai pas été gâté, quand même je sais bien ce que c’est, allez ! et on n’est pas toujours payé et c’est dur et c’est ingrat, et c’est toujours la même chose, mais je dis : « C’est ça qui est beau !… »

    Il a pris son racloir, il donne un coup de racloir. 

    On a déjà raclé une fois ; on va racler une deuxième fois, une troisième, une quatrième :

    — Et, je dis, c’est justement ça, c’est ce manque de variété. C’est justement parce qu’on a une plus grande peine, parce qu’on risque davantage, parce qu’on a misé sur une chose, et une seule, toujours la même ; et ça c’est l’honneur… On ne se paie pas en argent, nous autres. On ne gagnerait pas un sou qu’on ferait ses vignes quand même. 

    Il racle. 

    — On ne peut pas être payé en argent pour un travail de ce genre-là ; on est payé seulement d’y croire, on est payé dès qu’on y croit… Nous, on est comme le soldat, le soldat se bat pour se battre. On est comme une mère, on est comme une mère avec son enfant : ça ne lui fait rien qu’il soit mal fait ; plus il est mal fait, plus elle se donne de peine pour lui, plus elle l’aime ; elle lui donne tout, sans rien demander. Parce qu’elle est payée de l’aimer.

    Il racle. 

    — Je dis que c’est comme ça ; l’honneur et l’amour. Et point d’argent du tout, s’il faut, parce qu’il resterait l’honneur, l’honneur et l’amour.

    Il racle. 

    — Et, quoi qu’il arrive, on garde ses vignes, et on crèvera dessus, nous autres, mais on ne les reniera pas. 

    Raclant à grands coups pour le bien montrer, raclant et c’est un travail d’homme une fois les pousses sorties, parce que si les femmes venaient elles risqueraient de les abîmer avec leurs jupes : 

    — Nous qu’on est de la vieille espèce, de la bonne espèce, de la vieille bonne espèce, et on est quelques-uns encore de cette espèce, alors hardi ! 

    Il racle. 

[    Again, the words came to him:

— It’s to do for nothing that’s beautiful. Even if the work doesn’t pay, because it’s to do it that counts. Even if I’d be all alone, and even if I wasn’t spoiled, even then I know what it means, ah, I know! And you’re not always payed and it’s hard and it’s mean, and it’s always the same thing, but I say: “It’s that that’s beautiful!…”

   He took his scraper and gave a strike.

   A strike had already been given once; a second would be given, a third, a fourth:

    — And I say it’s just that, it’s this lack of variety. It’s exactly because there’s a greater pain, because there’s more risk, because something is counted on, and one thing alone, always the same; and that, that’s honor… We over here aren’t paid in money. Not gaining a penny we’d still work our vineyards.

    He scrapes. 

    — You can’t be paid in money for work of that kind; you’re paid only in believing in it, you’re paid as soon as you believe in it… We, we’re like the soldier, the soldier fights to fight. We’re like a mother, we’re like a mother with her child; it does nothing to her if he’s not well; the more he’s unwell, the more pains she takes for him, the more she loves him; she gives him everything, asking for nothing. Because she’s paid in loving him.

    He scrapes. 

    — I say it’s like that; honor and love. And no money at all, if necessary, because honor would remain, honor and love.

    He scrapes. 

    — And whatever happens, we keep our vineyards, and we’ll die on them, but we won’t renounce them.

    Scraping in big strikes to show it well, scraping and it’s a man’s work once the shoots have sprouted, because if the women came they would risk damaging them with their skirts:

    — We we’re of the old kind, of the good kind, of the old good kind, and we’re a few still of this kind, so courage then!

    He scrapes.]

Alain :

« Le travail est la meilleure et la pire des choses ; la meilleure, s’il est libre, la pire, s’il est serf. J’appelle libre au premier degré le travail réglé par le travailleur lui-même, d’après son savoir propre et selon l’expérience, comme d’un menuisier qui fait une porte. Mais il y a de la différence si la porte qu’il fait est pour son propre usage, car c’est alors une expérience qui a de l’avenir ; il pourra voir le bois à l’épreuve, et son œil se réjouira d’une fente qu’il avait prévue. Il ne faut point oublier cette fonction d’intelligence, qui fait des passions si elle ne fait des portes. »

[Work is the best and the worst of things; the best if it’s free, the worst if it’s suffered. I call free in the first degree the work regulated by the worker himself, after his own knowledge and according to experience, like that of a carpenter who makes a door. But there is a difference if the door he makes is for his own use, because it is then an experience that has a future; he will be able to see the wood put to the test, and his eye will rejoice at a split that he predicted. This function of the intelligence can’t be forgotten, which makes passions if it doesn’t make doors.]

*

My eye landed on this propos of Alain’s this morning, as I was sitting down for breakfast. That last line struck me the most and I tried to memorize it before making my breakfast. 

I think of this a lot these days. How susceptible I am! And how frequently, how regularly I suffer from my imagination (or my untethered intelligence) day after day after day! I sit down at work and, what I have to do not occupying my mind at all, the work being mechanical and mindless, my mind flies and creates a thousand thousand problems out of thin air, the nightmares becoming reality and I sitting there quite still in my chair… 

I’m so used to this, it’s so everyday, so bound up in my experience of life, —it’s fair I think to say that it’s the source of most of my problems today—, that it’s a little bit embarrassing to say it at all. I’m not alone I know. 

‘We all live in our dream’, as someone’s said somewhere, or Shakespeare’s (isn’t it?) ‘we are the stuff of dreams’. [I looked it up: ‘we are such stuff as dreams are made on’, Prospero in The Tempest.] This is obviously true. 

There are many of us who believe in the news, (of course among every individual there being infinite degrees of variety in these beliefs, in intensity, in depth, in direction and variability), there are many of us who believe in sports or music or streaming shows (every individual with an absolutely unique and personal fandom, subject to change with every mood and every hour); no one believes in anything the same way; and, as it’s good to remember, we change all the time, all of us in our feeling for everything (for ourselves and for our work, for where we are and the world around us, the people and the ideas we pass our days with, etc. etc.) caught up in between ‘the being born and the passing away’ (as I recently read somewhere in French, in a book on Montaigne; ask me about it if you’re curious). 

I love that phrase (I don’t have the French text near me): ‘the being born and the passing away’; we can think here simply of mood, of the objects of our attention and desire (and our feeling for them), what we feel bound to thinking about or getting done; it isn’t the same in the afternoon as it was in the morning, or at 6pm at as it was 5pm; it’s flux, or constant change, and nothing more (and for all of us the same, to the very end).

Sanity supposes patience, and a sense of limits. You can’t do everything at once. You would work and relax at the same time, but you can’t. 

Knowing when you’re tired, and seriously responding, is important. Knowing too when it’s worth surmounting, or necessary to surmount, the desire to stop working, that matters too. But it’s true that there’s no rule here but feeling. It’s in you or it’s not. Sometimes there’s a push from you don’t know where; sometimes there’s not. 

Life drags. And then suddenly speeds up. Flux and no more; back and forth, again and again; in infinite degrees. 

Il faut vouloir

que la vie soit bonne ; 

et d’abord 

il faut vouloir

qu’on puisse le vouloir. 

*

[You have to want

life to be good;

and first of all

you have to want

to be able to want it.]

*

L’optimisme n’est point de fait ;

il est de volonté. 

*

[Optimism isn’t a reality;

it’s all in the will.]

*

L’orgueil qui méprise 

n’est que vanité. 

*

[Pride that scorns 

is only vanity.]

*

S’observer,

c’est se changer,

se remettre en bon ordre, 

chercher ce qu’on veut, 

le trouver,

l’approuver,

le faire. 

*

[To observe oneself

is to change oneself, 

is to put oneself back in good order,

is to look for what you want,

find it,

approve it

and do it.]

Even a perfect effort —does such a thing exist? Let’s just say, our best effort— leaves something to be hoped for, could be better. 

What’s bad is losing oneself in the imagination.

Perhaps we could ‘lose ourself in our imagination’ responsibly — I think of great artists, poets and writers —, but this supposes presence, a strict barring-off of the superfluous…

What I mean when I say ‘lose oneself in the imagination’ is what I know from experience every day of my life: the roaming mind, in spite of ourselves running away… 

What’s my problem? The tragic view (“it’s just this way”); self-pity; resentment of myself and (inevitably in consequence, the two going together necessarily, born of the same mistake) others, what I see in the mirror and around me. 

I am trying and I do some good work. There are small wins. In the midst of them, of course, there are little failures too, little defects and ugly spots; but, if we are wise, we overlook these things and go on (we try to at least).

It is never perfect and it never quite matches the image we have in our mind. In our mind it’s perfect; in reality it can’t be, and naturally so, humanly so; if we find it perfect it’s because we make it so, that is, we believe it so, it’s just how we feel in a certain moment; inevitably the next hour or the next day, soon enough in any case, it’s not going to be perfect when we think of it. We have a ‘perfect’, our ‘perfect’, moment to moment, but it doesn’t exist objectively, it’s only in ourselves in a particular moment or two; it’s only our own, and it’s bound to change, hour to hour.

I fall to thinking so easily. I think of that meme, the fellow with his brain, an oversized potato, too big for his head and falling out on the floor. It’s not intelligence; it’s fear; it’s a lot of my life spent in the corner, watching others act and thinking instead of joining them, not daring to act myself, because afraid: full of thoughts.

Two quotes from Alain to end this thing:

« Notre pensée n’est pas ainsi faite 

qu’elle puisse marcher la première ; 

qui pense ses actions

n’agit jamais. » 

*

[Our thinking isn’t made in such a way

that it can go first [before action];

those who think out their actions

never act.]

*

« L’imagination est peut-être

la plus redoutable ennemie 

de l’homme pensant, 

par ceci 

qu’avoir peur fait croire,

et croire qu’on a vu. »

*

[The imagination is perhaps

the most fearful enemy

of the thinking person, 

in that

having fear makes you believe,

and makes you believe you have seen.]

When I despair, when I resent myself for what I am, or someone else for what they are, or where I am and what I do, or where I was and what I did, for what it is or for what it was, I am duped: I am falling for a trick, a lie. 

My past, the decisions I made and the consquences of them, is a matter of indifference. It is that, or it is a matter for reflection: specifically, how can it help me enjoy today, or live better today, —there’s little difference between the two, or there should be at least—, where I am and what I’m doing right now?

Every moment, at all times, I have the capacity to be well. If not physically, morally at least; all it takes is honesty, or lucidity. What depends on me? What’s in my control? and what is not?

It’s true that, if I’m overwhelmed by stress or anxiety, it’s less likely that I’ll be capable of giving myself an honest account of what matters (what depends on me and what doesn’t, what I owe and what I don’t, etc.), of recentering, or retaking myself, of finding in myself a sort of moral balance, a sense of myself as I am (without hate or fear; simply, honestly; in good faith). Sometimes it’s just a matter of patience or endurance, of acquiescence: accepting the discomfort or pain or awkwardness of where you are and supporting it, knowing it will pass soon enough.

Nothing is ever pure in us: happiness, contentment, satisfaction; unhappiness, discontent, dissatisfaction; contradictions are always there, contradictory feelings. We are happy but a little sad too; sad but not completely sad; disappointed but a little hopeful, at least in a vague and hard-to-explain way. It’s always like that. 

We can’t control the result of our actions; all we have is our will. Why do something if it may fail? (Or be awkward, imperfect?) Because action is better than doing nothing (it certainly, if only in the end, feels better), and waiting for perfection or conditions that don’t exist and will never come is a perfect waste; we are born to act.

I write and I see that what I write is not perfect. I see that, when I think of my favorite writers and what they write, my own just doesn’t compare. But this is not good: my own has the advantage, and it’s a serious one, of being my own and no one else’s, of giving me a satisfaction (or, of course, a dissatisfaction) that no other writing can give me. It depends on me; it’s born of my unique experience, of my own mind (and body, and heart).

You see sometimes that, when you’re starting to suffer in yourself, when you realize that you’re falling in a certain direction in yourself, when your worst thoughts become loud and irresistible: sometimes you see that you have a choice: that, if you want (and you really want), you can resist them; you can conquer them, you can refuse them, you can deny them, you can say no. They may stick around and make noise, but if you decide that they are not yours, not your own, not your thoughts, but traitors, liars, cowards, cheats, it is only a matter of time and patience before they leave.

Hearing the bad thoughts blabbing on in your head and choosing to go on anyway, better than them, not them, stronger. Choosing to act on the good ones, even if they’re quiet, even if they’re apparently far, choosing to remember in act, trying to see, however imperfect, one effort after another.

Like that.