O co-eternal with me in death, faultless friend, and diamond of sincerity, hear then: It served no purpose, I fear, to seek this God, whom I have tried all my life to discover, by pursuing him through the realm of thought alone; by demanding of him that most veritable and most ignoble sense of the just and the unjust, and by urging him to surrender to the solicitings of the most refined dialectic. The God that one so finds is but a word born of words, and returns to the word. For the reply we make to ourselves is assuredly never anything other than the question itself; and every question put by the mind to the mind is only, and can only be, a piece of simplicity. But on the contrary, it is in acts, and in the combination of acts that we ought to find the most immediate feeling of the presence of the divine, and the best use for the part of our strength that is unnecessary for living, ad seems to ne reserved for the pursuits of an indefinable object that infinitely transcends us. If, then, the universe is the effect of some act; that act itself, the effect of a being, and of a need, a thought, a knowledge and a power which belongs to that Being, it is then only by an act that you can rejoin the grand design, and undertake the imitation of that which has made all things. And that is to put oneself in the most natural way in the very place of the God. Now, of all acts the most complete is that of constructing. A work demands love, meditation, obedience to your finest thought, the invention of laws by the soul, and many other things that it draws miraculously from your own self, which did not suspect that it possessed them. This work proceeds from the most intimate center of your existence, and yet it is distinct from your self. If it were endowed with thought, it woulf divine your existence, which yet it would never succeed in probing, nor in conceiving clearly. You would be for it a God…. -Paul Valery
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 20:36:02 +0000
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