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.
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.
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