A Remembrance of Andres on His Birthday

On my birthday last November, I had turned off my audible phone notifications to attend to those more private anniversary moments with my dear. After pastry and a chai at the Black Walnut Café and just before our walk at Lake of the Isles, I felt a vibration next to my heart and pulled my phone from the breast pocket of my jacket. A call from my friend Andres in Vancouver. Curious. We were not in the habit of talking on the phone. Just occasional texts and other sorts of brief electronic messaging. The soft buzzing ceased. Probably a quick birthday greeting, though we were not in the habit of birthday greetings either other than a Facebook emoji. Maybe an additional comment. An exchange of erudite literary witticisms. All was well with our friendship. All was always well. I would touch base with him later. While the phone was still in my hand, it buzzed again signaling that a voicemail message had been received, a transcripted portion of which I could read in the little window on my iphone, “I am leaving this world in about seven hours.”

I called back. Terminal cancer, assisted suicide. We talked for fifteen minutes, of mutual love and excruciating heartbreak. He was one of those kindred spirits for me, an instant friend, a long-lost brother. We did not enact friendship or brotherhood the way it is spoken of in popular culture or even in the more serious, philosophical treatments of that subject. Our bond was largely unspoken, but felt and appreciated all the more, perhaps, for its mute power over certain difficult circumstances, some distance, and almost twenty years. Few, if any women, I’ve known understand this very particular kind of masculine vibe. They might even deny that it’s friendship. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s something else entirely, something that remains nameless in any language I know. All I know is that if there is an afterlife worth a damn, I’ll see him in it, and we’ll live all the lives of that “friendship”—for there will be more than one—in their fullness, fullnesses simply unachievable in what we understand as real life. Until then, my friend. 

Tweet Selection Trois

Volume III of Monsieur’s memoirs accounts for his years in Restoration politics and diplomacy. Of diplomacy he could claim some insight and success, less of politics. His disillusionment was pretty complete; his times as much of a political mess as our own. History went on in spite of, or because of, people’s stupidity and lack of virtue. There is a Volume IV after all, as yet unavailable.

Religion is the wellspring of freedom.

What is base does not have the power to debase; honor alone can inflict dishonor.

Duty is therefore a most positive fact, since it gives human society the only lasting existence it can enjoy.

Whoever fulfills his duties wins esteem; whoever yields to his interests is esteemed very little.

Men love a spectacle, and especially a death, when it is that of a great man.

Sleep devours existence, which is what’s wonderful about it: “The hours are short and life is long,” as Fénelon says.

Happy are they on whom age works like wine, and who lose their memory when they’ve drunk their fill of days!

Every lie repeated becomes a truth: it would be impossible to have too much contempt for human opinions.

All the English are mad, either by nature or by dint of following fashion.

A man must simply go on living if he wishes to find the debris of one century cast by time’s waves upon the shore of another.

Events separate us from the world; politics produces solitaries as religion does anchorites.

Man is as much deceived by the granting of his wishes as by their disappointment.

We don’t like a man to despise what we worship or think himself entitled to insult our mediocre lives.

An honest man is always sure of being understood by an honest man.

One might say they were pouring money on the arts in order to extinguish them, as they do on our freedoms to stifle them…

I am unfortunately fashioned; the injuries inflicted on me never heal.

When all is said and done, is there anything for which it is worth the bother of getting out of bed nowadays?

It would be better to be more humble, more prostrate, more Christian. Unfortunately, I am subject to weakness; I am nowhere near the Gospels’ perfection. If a man struck me on the cheek, I should not turn to him the other. [A triple]

At the end of your life, it is all time lost.

Once liberty has vanished, a man may still have a country, but the homeland is nowhere to be found.

We do not breathe our last where and when we please.

These men of triumph could never accustom themselves to reversals.

Prosperity does not recognize his sister Adversity.

Death does not care one jot what we have been.

I visited a beautiful cemetery: I never forget the dead.

We always win more by our faults than our good qualities.

Nothing is so sad as rereading, as your days draw to a close, what you wrote in your youth: all that was in the present is now in the past.

The only thing I want in this world is to return to my solitude and wash my hands of politics.

There is nothing good save retirement, and nothing real save a friendship like yours.

Indifference, I admit, is one of the qualities of statesmen, but of statesmen without conscience.

Love, according to Socrates, is the desire to be reborn by means of beauty.

A revolution is a jubilee; it absolves everyone from every crime, licensing greater ones.

There was a chance of success: there is always a chance of success when men act with courage.

Nothing is great today because nothing is lofty.

It is better to lose one’s life than to beg for it.

A representative republic is, without doubt, the future state of the world, but its time has not yet come.

I think, in the final analysis, the old society is finished.

More Tweets from Beyond the Grave

These tweets survive from Chateaubriand’s Napoleonic period, vol. II of the New York Review of Books’ late edition. I share them not because I consider them nuggets of imperishable geezerly wisdom—he was not yet an old man—but because they fit the form and communicate in brief something of François-René’s thought and style; and they prompt, on occasion, a reflective and critical huh? and hmm. Such leisurely effort keeps me out of mischief.

An atheist’s life is a horrible lightning strike that serves only to show him the abyss.

The profits of fame are charged to the soul.

By what miracle does a man consent to do all he does on earth, he who is destined to die?

A sickening of the soul is not a permanent or natural state.

I am the one who provoked the young century to admire the old temples.

So-called admiration was no recompense for the horrors that attend a man whose name is retained by the crowd.

They pretended to have no need of God, and that is why they had need of a tyrant.

Oh, reconciled Christian, do not forget me in your prayers when I am gone.

Time rejuvenates cities—exactly the opposite of men.

Nowadays, everything is worn down—even misery.

It is not the same thing to be above crimes as to be beneath them.

Such is the danger of literature: our desire to make a splash gets the better of our generous feelings.

Oh, may the voice of friendship betrayed never be raised against our tomb!

Sorrow finally came to fill my days: it is a resource on which one can always rely.

Sorrow is my element: I am only myself when I’m unhappy.

One should show the world only what is beautiful.

What a gift from God is death!

Of the many actors of that epoch, only one remains: Bonaparte.

Man stumbles from one mistake to the next.

Our life is a perpetual blush, for it is a neverending blunder.

Given the joy I always feel whenever I am leaving palaces, it is evident I was not made to enter them.

Yes, I noticed it: a superior mind does not bring forth evil painlessly, for it is not its natural fruit, and it should not bear it.

Prudent people find that anyone who cedes to honor imprudent.

There are times when loftiness of soul is a veritable infirmity.

Exceptional men should be careful of their tears, which put them under the yoke of the vulgar.

Obscure men, what are we compared to these famous men?

Hearts have different secrets, incomprehensible to other hearts. Let us not deny anyone his suffering. Sorrows are like countries: each man has his own. [A triple tweet!]

Oh, blessed are ye who passed noiselessly through this world, not even turning your heads in passing!

Let us be mild if we wish to be mourned. Only angels weep for lofty genius and superior qualities. [Double tweet.]

I fear that the only way I will be able to leave this world is by crossing over the corpses of my dreams.

These days I offer my arm only to Time: she is very heavy!

Shine a light on the days of your life, and they will no longer be what they are.

I am a republican who serves the monarchy and a philosopher who honors religion.

Thousands of youngsters are obsessed with the idea of suicide, which they believe to be proof of their superiority.

Every one of us reaps the fruit of forgotten lives squandered so that we might live.

Heaven punishes the violation of human rights.

Women, in general, hated Bonaparte as mothers.

Man digs the grave, and God fills it.

When a man is ready to die, he is invincible.

What noble sentiments remained had withdrawn into the hearts of women.

Napoleon’s greatness was not of a kind that makes friends with calamity. Prosperity alone left him with his faculties intact. He was not fashioned for misfortune. [Another triple.]

It is not possible to subjugate a nation whose last stronghold is the North Pole.

When you have committed a reproachable act, Heaven imposes on you the sanction of witnesses.

Old Kutuzov, for his part, was disdainful of disdain.

Anyone can turn to evil, anyone can kill a people or a king; but to come back from it is difficult.

When a man clears a path to injustice, at the same time he clears a path to perdition.

Posterity is not as fair in its judgments as people tend to think.

Fear is a bad counselor, especially for those without a conscience. In adversity, as in good fortune, there is measure only in morality. [A double.]

Poets are birds: every noise makes them sing.

God, in his patient eternity, sooner or later brings justice to bear.

There are some men who have had life thrown around their neck like a chain.

There are men who are very good at ascending and very bad at descending.

Napoleon was, in one person, all things great and miserable in man.

More traitors are made by events than by opinions.

It is not enough for a great man to be born: he must die.

One is never entitled to say all is lost if he has attempted nothing.

Only the French know how to dine methodically, just as only they know how to compose a book.

And the people shouted at him. “You must die!”—as time shouts at us all.

Most men err in rating themselves too highly; I err in rating myself not highly enough.

What is dishonorable is fatal. A slap in the face does no harm to you physically, yet it kills you. [A double tweet.]

Like most despots he was on good terms with his servants, but deep down he cared for no one.

The life of Bonaparte was an incontestable truth, which imposture had taken upon itself to write.

The great men, who form a very small family on earth, unfortunately find no one to imitate but one another.

What a pity for those who have perished!

As for honor, it eludes tyranny: it is the soul of martyrdom.

Every man feels his life his own way, and he who gives the world a great spectacle is not so moved or so instructed as the spectator.

The more serious the countenance, the more beautiful the smile.

It was a long book. 

In the Afterword of vol. II, Monsieur Julien Gracq remarked in passing of “that drop of bitterness essential to aging well” that is lacking in Chateaubriand’s immediate literary heirs. I hope this requisite bitterness is exclusive to the French, like dining methodically and composing books, and not universal. Bittersweet, I can do, but not pure bitter. With the possible exception of hemlock, when the time comes.

“an old man is but a shadow wandering in the light of the day”

When asked how I occupy my time, I often respond “by doing as little as possible.” Which is not entirely true. Reading is doing. Writing, too . . . just doesn’t much look like it. But when you think about it, occupying time, doesn’t seem to call for overtly heroic activity: presence and a minimal consciousness should suffice; and reading and writing actually require much more than a minimum of consciousness.

 

Among the many pleasantries of my February visit to Arizona was a reintroduction to Chateaubriand’s Memoirs From Beyond The Grave, from which the title of this post is filched, itself a quote from Aeschylus. My brother Neil and a friend of his are a kind of two-person book club, and three volumes (of four) of François-René Chateaubriand’s memoirs lay on his kitchen table, next up, apparently, for clubbing. Having already read the first, I picked up the second and refreshed my interest. There is something about multi-volume French œuvres—Proust, Montaigne, Chateaubriand—which I find addictive. Though I do not speak or read French, somehow the music of its voicing comes through in translation, something of its communication of attitude and nuance. Or if it doesn’t, or can’t, I find the attempted translation of it, in all its failure, somewhat spell-binding. Thus, I began volume II in Tempe, returned home and ordered it from Powell’s, and reread volume I while I awaited its arrival. Volume II came last week.

So, I’ve been reading. And underlining. I underline. In pencil. With a straight-edged bookmark. Grad school habit. Seneca, whom I refinished a couple of weeks ago, did not approve of such a practice. Considered it childish, and even “disgraceful for an old man or one in sight of old age to be wise by book.” I should be producing bon mots, he asserted, not remembering them. Sigh. But my memory has never been all that great, and whatever wisdom I do claim, I don’t claim in bon mots. A lower echelon thinker, I am not averse to sharing others’ wisdom, curating my reading, as it were, in my own humble way. What follows are Chateaubriand’s Tweets from Beyond the Grave, 1768-1800, vol. I.

In those days, old age was a dignity; today it is a burden.

Dogs, like men, are punished for their loyalty.

True happiness is cheap; if costly, it is not the real thing at all.

Our vanity sets too much importance on the role that we play in the world.

If happiness ever took me in its arms, I would suffocate. 

Children are brothers of one great family and lose their common features only when they lose their innocence.

Our childhood leaves something of itself in the places it has embellished, as a flower lends its fragrance to the objects it has touched.

He who could have killed my so-called talent, without robbing me of my mind, would have been my truest friend.

I have in me a deep inability to obey.

A few brief years from eternity’s hands will do justice to all this noise with endless silence.

There is nothing more for me to learn.

Oh Goddess, still friendly to my sadness, pour your cold quietude into my heart.

For I was suffering, and suffering is prayer.

I shall never succeed in this world precisely because I am lacking in one passion, ambition, and one vice, hypocrisy.

Man has not one and the same life; he has several lives laid end to end, and that is the cause of his misery.

Another man has appeared in me, a political man: I do not much care for him.

In the end it matters little what part we have played in life.

I am not aware of any kind of fame in history that would tempt me.

How am I to understand my brother’s ambitions, when all I wanted was to live forgotten?

Death laughs at those who summon it and confuse it with nothingness.

My companions were the dead, a few birds, and the setting sun.

I have never cheered for speeches or bullets.

In these great social transformations, individual resistance, however honorable for those who resist, is powerless against the facts.

The barbarians of old were enormous children of nature; the new ones are monstrous abortions of nature depraved.

Heaven, to punish us for talents employed, makes us repent of our success.

Moments of crisis redouble the life of man.

Come back, you lovely days of indigence and solitude!

It was a slave who welcomed me to the land of liberty.

There is virtue in the gaze of a great man.

This reminds me to take advantage of being alive.

Not all souls have an equal aptitude for happiness, just as not all lands bear an equal harvest.

I would tire of glory and genius, work and leisure, prosperity and misfortune alike.

As it almost always is in politics, the result was contrary to the predictions.

It seems no one learns how to die by killing others.

Catastrophe comes and everyone takes shelter, abandoning me to grapple with the misfortune I alone had foreseen.

Not even the most extraordinary fame is safe from the most ordinary destiny.

How many men walk down a staircase never to walk up again?

Women have a heavenly instinct to help the unfortunate.

Sufferings are no less vain than joys.

Bacon, Newton, and Milton are as deeply buried and as fully passed as the most obscure of their contemporaries.

Cicero was right to recommend the camaraderie of letters as a balm for the sorrows of this life.

Something melancholy enters into relationships not formed until the middle of our lives.

Will my ideas, my feelings, my very style not seem boring and old-fashioned to a sneering posterity?

As I believe in nothing, outside of religion, I am leery of everything.

As I am fond of the color blue, I was quite charmed.

Some were young and some were old: there is no legal age for misfortune.

Almost everyone I mention in these Memoirs has vanished; it is a Registry of Deaths.

Subtract my writings from my century, and would there have been any difference in the events or the spirit of the century.

Style, and there are a thousand kinds, is not to be learned; it is a gift from heaven; it is talent itself.

No one, in a living literature, can be a competent judge except of works written in his own language.

Style is not, like thought, cosmopolitan: it has a native soil, sky, and sun of its own.

The pleasures of youth reproduced by memory are like ruins seen by torchlight.

Having arrived at the close of my first career, the career of a writer is opening before me.

 Photo credit: zkd