What drives a man, for more than fifty years, to rise very early (between four and five in the morning) and write for three or four hours about the most diverse subjects? At dawn, a man thinks, writes, draws. The notes criticize, propose, challenge. And, sometimes, celebrate. What drives Paul Valéry to such a practice of writing is a persistent, obsessive will to knowledge. Every day, "between the lamp and the sun," Valéry seemed to answer perhaps the most essential question of all those he posed: "What can a man do?" The admirable "intellectual diary" that the Notebooks comprise is, in effect, a long answer to that question. It is not for nothing that T. S. Eliot confessed that Valéry was the intellectual figure of his time who most interested him. And Octavio Paz was right when he said: “I find that the truly great French philosopher of our time is not Sartre: it is Valéry, as is re...read more
