Those big words, the Infinite, the Absolute, Nature, are the papier-mâché weights that the literary Hercules lifts, waves in the air, puts down again.
Les grands mots: l'infini, l'absolu, la Nature... Ce sont les poids en carton que soulève, brandit et repose l'Hercule littéraire.
"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
▼
Saturday, September 29, 2018
Big Words
Paul Valéry (1871-1945), Collected Works, Vol. 14: Analects, tr. Stuart Gilbert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 606: