Paul Valery: Cahiers (Notebooks)

Has anyone read some of them? Tell me more if you have...

Nous autres, civilisations, savons maintenant que nous sommes mortelles.

:-(

Sorry, about ten years ago I was obsessed with that stuff- Monsieur Teste was my hero- but I can't remember too much.

I have also recently finished Pessoa, so Valery sounds just like the ticket. Although the Cahiers makes Proust look like a walk in the park, in terms of volume...

I read some of the Greek-styled dialogues after Wallace Stevens wrote a glowing introduction to them. Some interesting ideas, but I wonder if their impact is strictly...local.

There was a four volume series organized by theme I think. I mainly concentrated on the one called The Outlook For Intelligence. The notebooks are not one big novel, you don't have to read them from beginning to end, just look for stuff that interests you. One essay that stands out for me is called something like "Passage of Verlaine," where he contrasts the personal style of the poet Paul Verlaine and that of the mathematician Henri Poincaré. He regrets that lives in an age where he has to choose between one or the other as a mentor, he would like to follow both. I think I came to this essay through the Argentine novelist Ernesto Sabato who wrote about it, since he had to make a similar choice between the Curie Lab and the Surrealists.