Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715-47), died at the age of thirty-one after a life spent mostly as a soldier, though he lived for some time in Paris and was befriended by Voltaire. His health was never good. No longer in the army, Vauvenargues died of complications from the frostbite he suffered during the War of the Austrian Succession. Not as well-known as fellow French moralist-aphorists La Bruyère, Chamfort and La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues’ thinking is informed by a soldier’s experience and is rooted in a pragmatic view of life:  “It is not bringing hunger and misery to foreigners that is glorious in a hero’s eyes, but enduring them for his country’s sake; not inflicting death, but courting it.”   The Reflections and Maxims of Vauvenargues (Oxford University Press, 1940) is translated from the French by F.G. Stevens. I’m using the copy borrowed from the Fondren Library. It is yet another volume previously owned by Edgar Odell Lovett, president of Rice University from 1908 to 1946. Again, one can hardly imagine an American university president today buying and reading such a book. In 1746, Vauvenargues anonymously published his only book, Introduction à la connaissance de l'esprit humain, which included Reflexions and Maximes. Here is a sampler:    “People don't say much that is sensible when they are trying to be unusual.” “We condemn strongly the least offences of the unfortunate, and show little sympathy for their greatest troubles.”   “There would be few happy people if others could determine our occupations and amusements.”   “We should expect the best and the worst from mankind, as from the weather.”   “Those whose only asset is cleverness never occupy the first rank in any walk of life.”   “We have no right to make unhappy those whom we cannot make good.”   “War is not so heavy a burden as slavery.”   Vauvenargues is often gentler, less cynical than La Rochefoucauld. One tends to think of him as a boy. C.H. Sisson published an essay on him in the Winter 1987 issue of The American Scholar (collected in In Two Minds: Guesses at Other Writers, Carcanet Press, 1990) that begins: “Vauvenargues is hardly the most fashionable of writers. He has a further distinction, that there never was a time when his work was fashionable, yet for some two hundred and fifty years there has never been a time when he might not have been said to have friends and admirers.” Sisson places him among the “observers who lived in the world and recorded their findings in more or less summary fashion.”   Sisson makes a useful comparison: “Vauvenargues is one of those writers, like George Herbert, whose life--and indeed death--cannot be satisfactorily separated from their works.” He adds: “A profound and vulnerable diffidence marks the thought of Vauvenargues as it marks his life,” and we recall how young and “unsuccessful” he was in life. Never married, no children, always fending off poverty. Sisson also wrote a forty-six-line poem titled “Vauvenargues” (Collected Poems, Carcanet, 1998), saying the aphorist “found no resting place on this earth.” He writes:   “They say the boy did not learn much Latin But got drunk on Plutarch—perhaps Amyot? How many years of barracks after that, Inspecting guards, collecting up the drunks, Trailing his pike in the muddy streets, Garrisoned at Besançon, Arras, Reims? There were campaigns, though nothing much perhaps Historians would really care much about . . .”

A blunt fact of modern life: When young, everyone we knew – family, friends, neighbors – lives nearby. Our lives are well-populated. With age, that alignment of geography and acquaintance attenuates. Live long enough and our birthplace turns incrementally, across the decades, into a ghost town. I’ve just learned that the last high-school teacher I remained in touch with has died. No surprise. She was eighty-three. She introduced me to Yeats. I introduced her to Nathanael West. In September I’m returning to Cleveland for my fifty-fifth high-school reunion, and I had planned to meet with my teacher for coffee, as we last did in 2016. The good news is I will spend time with my nephew, my niece and her baby, and one surviving friend. I haven’t lived in Cleveland since 1977 and not in Ohio since 1983, though they remain “home” in some primal sense.  In his Rambler essay for August 7, 1750, Dr. Johnson writes: “[T]he images which memory presents are of a stubborn and untractable nature, the objects of remembrance have already existed, and left their signature behind them impressed upon the mind, so as to defy all attempts of erasure or of change.”   In other words, people and places persist in memory as we knew them, not as they are. Inevitably, there’s a clash of expectation and reality. The old map is no longer reliable. Familiar scenes seem somehow “wrong,” not quite accurate. Johnson understands this discordance, though he was only forty when writing his essay:   “The time of life, in which memory seems particularly to claim predominance over the other faculties of the mind, is our declining age. It has been remarked by former writers, that old men are generally narrative, and fall easily into recitals of past transactions, and accounts of persons known to them in their youth. When we approach the verge of the grave it is more eminently true . . .”

On Saturday I saw the first hummingbird of the season in our front garden. I’ve counted eight butterfly species there this summer and found a monarch chrysalis hanging from a tropical milkweed plant. Brown and green anoles have densely colonized the garden, which has never been so lush.  Because of the ample lighting I usually read while seated on the couch by the oversized front window. The garden is a comfort. Framed by the window, it’s like a slow-motion movie. The appeal is less aesthetic than – what? Metaphysical? I like to be reminded of life’s profusion and persistence, the opposite of sterility. There’s little difference between “weed” and “flower.” I like Louise Bogan’s endorsement of weeds in “The Sudden Marigolds” (A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, 2005): “What was the matter with me, that daisies and buttercups made hardly any impression at all. . . . As a matter of fact, it was weeds that I felt closest to and happiest about; and there were more flowering weeds, in those days, than flowers in gardens. . . . Yes: weeds: jill-over-the-ground and tansy and the exquisite chicory (in the terrains vagues) and a few wild flowers: lady’s slipper and the arbutus my mother showed me how to find, under the snow, as far back as Norwich. Solomon’s seal and Indian pipe. Ferns. Apple blossoms.”   A reminder that poets ought to know the names of wildflowers, according to Seamus Heaney. Not every poet would agree. I was looking for something in Zibaldone, Giacomo Leopardi’s 2,500-page commonplace book kept between 1817 and 1832, when I happened on a passage from April 1826 that only Leopardi could have written:   “Go into a garden of plants, grass, flowers. No matter how lovely it seems. Even in the mildest season of the year. You will not be able to look anywhere and not find suffering. That whole family of vegetation is in a state of souf-france [suffering], each in its own way to some degree. Here a rose is attacked by the sun, which has given it life; it withers, languishes, wilts. There a lily is sucked cruelly by a bee, in its most sensitive, most life-giving parts.”   Leopardi’s understanding of biology is limited but his Zeitgeist remains consistent. He goes on for a full page turning a mini-Eden into a raging Hell:   “The spectacle of such abundance of life when you first go into this garden lifts your spirits. And that is why you think it is a joyful place. But in truth this life is wretched and unhappy, every garden is a vast hospital (a place much more deplorable than a cemetery), and if these beings feel, or rather, were to feel, surely not being would be better for them than being.” It's almost as though Leopardi had read the crackpot bestseller The Secret Life of Plants (1973) by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. I first encountered Leopardi more than half a century ago in Samuel Beckett’s Proust (1931). The Irishman refers to the Italian’s “wisdom that consists not in the satisfaction but in the ablation of desire.” Beckett quotes two lines from “A se stesso” (“To himself”): “In noi di cari inganni, / Non che la speme, il desiderio e ’spento.” (“Not only our hope / but our desire for dear illusions is gone.” Trans. Jonathan Galassi, Canti, 2010).   Melville, too, found a kindred spirit in Leopardi. In his 18,000-line Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), Part I, Section 14, “In the Glen,” he writes:   “If Savonarola’s zeal devout But with the fagot’s flame died out; If Leopardi, stoned by Grief, A young St. Stephen of the Doubt Might merit well the martyr’s leaf.”   [Zibaldone was edited by Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino, translated into English by seven translators, and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2013.]

V.S. Pritchett is asked in his Paris Review interview, “Do you think living and writing conflict?” – a rather silly question -- and he replies: “I have always thought that life and literature are intermingled and that this intermingling has been my quest.” Spoken like the kind of reader and writer I can respect. Escape reading is fine. I don’t have much instinct for it–science fiction, thrillers, romance—but I think I understand the attraction. Life is tough. Work and family responsibilities can be exhausting. Nice to get away for an hour or two and find refuge in a make-believe universe. Call it distraction or biding time – an innocent way to briefly forget about commitments, pain and life’s disappointments.  Pritchett’s statement above is a more eloquent way to articulate the founding slogan of Anecdotal Evidence: “A blog about the intersection of books and life.” I formulated that in reaction to the revulsion I felt for a variety of literary dead-ends: dilettantism, propaganda, academic myopia, cheap fashion. Since I was a kid I’ve always assumed good books and life cannot be surgically separated without injuring one or both, often fatally. It’s not usually the prime reason I read a novel or poem, but the desire to learn something about the world, about humans and their motivations, is at least latent in my choice of book.   Pritchett published his first book, Marching Spain, in 1928. At age twenty-six, in the spring of 1927, he had walked three-hundred miles across Spain, from Badajoz to Vigo. Earlier, he had been sent to Spain to report on the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. That’s when he taught himself the language and first read contemporary Spanish literature – Azorin, Pio Baroja, Perez de Ayala, Unamuno. In an introduction he wrote for a new edition of Marching Spain in 1988, Pritchett tells us: “Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life became my Bible.” (I can second that observation when I was even younger than Pritchett.) His comparison is not idle. Pritchett was a secular man with a strong interest in, but no formal attachment to, organized religion.   During his long walk across Spain, Pritchett made a pilgrimage to Salamanca, where Unamuno served as rector of the University of Salamanca from 1900 to 1924, and 1930 to 1936:   “I felt that in Salamanca,” Pritchett writes, “I should in some unexplained way breathe of the spirit of Unamuno, who in these days was exiled from Spain by the unutterably stupid dictatorship. The crassest of all pilgrimages this, walking two hundred miles to find a man who had been forced out of his country because he happened to prefer liberty to generals. ‘God give thee not peace, but glory,’ he writes at the end of The Tragic Sense of Life. One is always one’s own hero; if I did not find peace I might at least blunder into glory.”   He met both Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset. For Pritchett, travel and immersion in a foreign country serve as his literary apprenticeship. Two decades later he returned to Spain and in 1954 published a much better book, The Spanish Temper. This most English of writers came alive as a writer elsewhere. He had a reporter’s appetite for gossip, landscape, history and conversation, coupled with a non-cloistered bookishness.   It was Pritchett who introduced me to many previously unknown writers, including Spain’s Benito Pérez Galdós. (Guy Davenport played a similar role in my education, especially for urging me to read Charles Montagu Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta). Pritchett writes in his introduction to the 1988 edition of Marching Spain:   “Now, when I re-read my first book, I forgive myself for the patches of rhetorical writing. After all, I reflect, the famous foot-sloggers, like Hazlitt, Stevenson, Meredith, not to mention the poets of the Open Road school, had always harangued the scenery and the people they met as they clumped along, talking and even declaiming to themselves.”   In the second volume of his memoirs, Midnight Oil (1971), half a century after his first visits to Spain, Pritchett writes:   “[P]resently I saw that literature grows out of literature as much as out of a writer’s times. A work of art is a deposit left by the conflicts and contradictions a writer has in his own nature. I am not a scholarly man; and I am not interested for very long in the elaborate superstructures of criticism. Some of my critics speak of insights and intuitions; the compliment is often left-handed, for these are signs of the amateur’s luck; I had no choice in the matter. Anyone who has written a piece of imaginative prose knows how much a writer relies on instinct and intuition.”

“ordinary sanity in extraordinary prose”  The phrase is the American poet David Mason’s in his essay “The Freedom of Montaigne.” In characterizing the Frenchman and his essays, Mason describes an ideal seldom attained and occasionally scorned. Today, extreme, sweeping statements seem to get all the attention. You don’t attract readers by being, as Montaigne’s biographer Donald Frame puts it, “basically conservative, not radical, an accepter, not a reformer, seeking harmony, not conflict, within.” A New Immaturity has taken over. Intensity of expression is confused with human truth. We’re all back on the playground again, taunting and bullying our playmates, leaving little room for understanding and empathy.   Mason seems especially taken with the essay “Of Cruelty” (1578-80), in which Montaigne writes: “Among other vices, I cruelly hate cruelty, both by nature and by judgment, as the extreme of all vices. But this is to such a point of softness that I do not see a chicken’s neck wrung without distress, and I cannot bear to hear the scream of a hare in the teeth of my dogs, although the chase is a violent pleasure.”   Typically, Montaigne is honest, a perennial adult. Like some of us, he’s a softy, even with the wars of religion raging around his home in France. He acknowledges the thrill of the hunt while feeling pity for the game. His age, like our, was barbarous – that’s merely human nature, which hasn’t changed. Only the scale of cruelty during the twentieth century and after would have surprised him, not its lingering impulse. For one example, he lived through the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and wrote about the public executions he witnessed.   Mason knows Shakespeare read Montaigne and found him useful, as we do. He describes Montaigne as “the Shakespeare of the essay form” – the highest critical praise possible. Both writers can never be exhausted. We read and reread them across a lifetime and they remain new and vital, as though we were reading them for the first time, even at an advanced age. Frame writes in his biography of Montaigne:   “I believe it is above all his sturdy, honest independence, his cheerful self-acceptance, that draws the crowd of readers to his book today. Our love of moral independence is ambivalent; our anxiety and sense of guilt make us often hanker rather for an ‘escape from freedom.’ And here we have a man, not the best that ever lived no doubt but assuredly far from the worst and better than most of us, who with scandalous serenity lays himself on the line and says in effect, quite simply, Here I am.”   [Mason’s essay is published in the Autumn 2017 issue of The Hudson Review and collected in Incarnation & Metamorphosis: Can Literature Change Us? (Paul Dry Books, 2023). The Montaigne passage is from the translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne by Donald Frame (Stanford University Press, 1957). Frame is also the author of Montaigne: A Biography (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965).]