When "it's not going right," I walk up and down in my room, then, somewhat through impatience, I seize almost at random a book from my shelf (not one of those books lying on my table which I am "in the course" of reading, but one of those old constant companions, which are always there, to which everything brings me back) and open it really at random. This "random chance" would make me believe in the devil or in providence, for I fall at once, almost every time, on the page, on the sentence, on the words I just happen to need to start off again.
Quand «ça ne vient pas», je marche de long en large dans la chambre, puis, par impatience un peu, je saisis presque au hasard un livre de ma bibliothèque (non point un de ces livres qui gisent sur ma table et que je suis «en train» de lire, mais un de ces vieux compagnon constants, qui sont toujours là, que je retrouve à travers tout) et je l'ouvre vraiment au hasard. Ce «hasard» me ferait croire au diable ou à la providence, car je tombe à pic, presque à coup sûr, sur la page, sur la phrase, ou les mots, dont j'ai précisément besoin pour rebondir.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Friday, October 10, 2014
Sortes Vergilianae, Sort of
André Gide, Journals (January 1936; tr. Justin O'Brien):