A philosophy, perverse no doubt in its teachings, has led me to believe that good and evil, pleasure and pain, the beautiful and the ungainly, reason and folly, fade into one another by shades as impalpable as those in a dove's neck. To feel neither absolute love nor absolute hate becomes therefore wisdom.
Une philosophie, perverse sans doute, m'a porté à croire que le bien et le mal, le plaisir et la douleur, le beau et le laid, la raison et la folie se transforment les uns dans les autres par des nuances aussi indiscernables que celles du cou de la colombe. Ne rien aimer, ne rien haïr absolument, devient alors une sagesse.
"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).
Pages
▼
Thursday, January 14, 2016
A Kind of Wisdom
Ernest Renan (1823-1892), Recollections of My Youth, tr. C.B. Pitman (London: Chapman and Hall, 1883), p. 59: