1794. The Good Enough Elegy
The name of a son who died young, a name that comes and goes through the consciousness of his more or less surviving father, without warning, and without much apparent effect (as if all the force of loss were dissipated into the background noise of that word from our sponsor to which we pay as little heed as possible).
Until it’s the only word in the room.
Note: “Rudy” (Joyce, Ulysses).
1818. “may be translated thus”
Barbara K. Lewalski & Andrew J. Sabel, eds.,
Major Poets of the Earlier Seventeenth Century
The phrase that forms the title of this note I extract from the record of the labor undertaken to translate an epigraph from Hesiod. A reader who cares for the apprehension of amplitudes may find this formulation more than narrowly indicative. The coming together here of punctilious, almost tremulous caution (although we cannot know for certain, Hesiod’s lines may be translated thus), with an operational self-confidence (Hesiod’s lines may indeed be translated thus—for surely, here is a rendering close enough to the original): the wary and sturdy forward motion of the careful textual scholar: it may be translated (a “person-to-person” call) thus: the problem of another mind as distant from me as the most distant planet, and as dear to me as the most outlandish promise of happiness—I can’t figure it out anything like fully; I can’t transmit it, or to it, beyond the shadow of the valley of doubt. I can only sound out a reading of it that will express at once my hope that I may draw near it, and my knowing that I will never know for sure that I have.
Note: “The epigraph, a quotation from Hesiod’s Theogony, II, 21–28, may be translated thus: ‘We know how to tell many false things true-seeming, but we know how to speak the real truth when we will’ ” (Lewalski & Sabel).
1824. “A written French that was at once rapid and cursive, quick to evoke images, and just as quick to revoke them”
Alain Badiou on Michel Foucault
What is amazing about a style of writing marked by the speed with which it proposes and rescinds an image? Maybe it’s a sense of self-possession that transcends any anxiety to possess: a writing so fluent with figures of vision that it can afford to enjoy them without a pressing need to attach itself to any one of them. Like a friend who knows that she will see you again, when she needs to see you.
No need to be held “captive to a picture” (Wittgenstein), out of fear that if you don’t hold on to it, you’ll lose all pictures; no need to fear that the loss of this or that vision leads to the loss of all the visible world. No need for that.