Dear Unknown Friends:

The two subjects of our previous issue continue here. You can read the final section of Eli Siegel’s truly great 1964 lecture Instinct & Madame de Sévigné. And also, in the midst of a terrible pandemic, as millions of people feel anxious, low, depressed, worried not only about health but about their emotions and thoughts—I’ll continue to comment on what does it mean to think about COVID-19 “in a way that strengthens our minds and feelings and makes us proud”?

In our last issue, I quoted a question asked by Eli Siegel. It is central to everyone’s life at any time—intensely so at the present frightening time:

Is this true: No matter how much of a case one has against the world—its unkindness, its disorder, its ugliness, its meaninglessness—one has to do all one can to like it, or one will weaken oneself?

Yes—I have seen through much study—it is true. And in issue 2028 I began to write about ways that this terrible virus can and needs to be used to like the world: to like—not, certainly, the virus itself—but the world, the world from which all flowers, great literature, good songs, true science, delightful food, courageous deeds, friendly smiles also come.

Do People Welcome Contempt?

In every human being, Aesthetic Realism explains, there is a fight going on between two big desires: to value the world, find vivid good meaning in it, versus the desire to have contempt, to feel we’re more if we can lessen and look down on what’s not us. The desire to have contempt is the most dangerous thing in everyone. People go for it every day; but at a time of worry, the temptation to have contempt for the world is gigantic. So humanity needs to learn what contempt—the opponent of respect for the world—is.

Aesthetic Realism has shown that contempt is the thing in self from which all cruelty comes. For instance, racism arises from contempt, and embodies it: racism is the looking down on a person who seems different so as to make oneself superior.

Further: lying, including by someone in high office, is sheer contempt for the world, its facts, and the people to whom the lie is told.

Contempt is in the hideous and preposterous feeling that the world with its wealth should belong mainly to a few people, not all.

Contempt is also the feeling—so ordinary—that other persons’ lives and emotions are not as real as our own. During a health crisis, this feeling can come to be the not caring whether people—patients or healthcare workers—have the equipment they need. “As soon as you have contempt,” wrote Eli Siegel, “as soon as you don’t want to see another person as having the fullness that you have, you can rob that person, hurt that person, kill that person.”

Contempt, while the source of all injustice, is also that in oneself which hurts one’s own mind. Yes, the world has the fearsome, the terrible; but the world is much more than these. And the contempt in us wants to exploit what’s bad in order to give ourselves a miserable superiority. When we use something bad to feel, however unconsciously, “I’m in a world not good enough for me, and therefore I can diminish—not welcome and make vivid—the value of people and things,” we feel anxious and depressed.

I regret conveying these vital principles so swiftly. They should be commented on with a fullness that I cannot give in a short space. But the people of the world are desperate for the knowledge Eli Siegel came to with his scholarship and kindness; and so I’m conveying rather rapidly some of the comprehension thirsted for now and found nowhere but in Aesthetic Realism. For example:

The “Liking the World Story”

People need, mightily, to know the following—spoken, I believe, by Mr. Siegel in a class. He titled it “Liking the World Story”:

There was once a person who bought a very beautiful painting—it could have been of the 15th century, it could have been of the 16th century, it could have been earlier. That beautiful painting became part of his home and mingled with a wall of where he lived. He looked at the painting and saw its beauty quite often. However, a sister of his died. A schoolmate he was very fond of came to have a very sad and frightening disease. The wrong things happened in his state, and there were many things that were disgusting happening in his country. Because of the sad things that were happening, he felt he no longer liked the painting he had bought.

People who didn’t go through what this person did, know that he was wrong. Just because a relative of his died, and a friend got a very bad disease, was no lessening of the beauty of this painting. That is, deeply, our attitude to the world. There is something about the world that is like this painting, that doesn’t depend on what happens to us immediately, although it is related.

So the question, then, is whether the world has a structure like that of the painting, which is beyond any personal misfortune of our own, though we can use good fortune and misfortune to understand it. This is what Aesthetic Realism means by liking the world. There is a certain structure of the world and everything in it, which can be liked every day, even though we are losing on every horse that day.

I love that story. And the spoken prose in which Mr. Siegel tells it is beautiful, and represents his kindness and clarity.

The Structure

The story says that the “structure of the world” is the reason the world can be honestly liked; and Eli Siegel is the philosopher who has described that structure. It is in this principle: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”

For example, take the opposites of Motion and Rest. Every person is made so that we need these opposites to be one in us—and in the bad states of mind I mentioned earlier, they fight. Anxiety, with its agitation, has motion with insufficient rest or composure. Depression has in it an awful feeling of being stuck—a certain miserable immobility, a lack of that motion which is interest. —Yet, in the world there is (for instance) the ocean, which millions of people have loved because in all its tumult it seems so grandly steady: the ocean is, eternally, thrillingly, motion and rest at once.

Then, there is something people of all times and places have delighted in: a good song. Whenever a person has liked a song, that person has felt that a certain thrust in it, change, liveliness, stir, was at one with a certain calm. Different songs accent these opposites differently, but every good song is a oneness of the world’s motion and rest.

And there are people. Does every person want, as we do, to feel excited and composed at once—to have what Mr. Siegel described happiness as being: a state of “dynamic tranquility”? When we see that a fellow human has the world’s opposites, and longs—as we do—to make them one, we cannot be unkind to that person. We feel related to him or her.

A Woman & the Centuries

In the lecture we’ve been serializing, Mr. Siegel speaks about as famous a writer of letters as anyone in world literature, Madame de Sévigné (1626-96). He describes, as no one else ever did, what was deeply impelling her, describes, with beautiful respect, her turmoil and her grandeur. He has been describing the opposites as instincts in her—and also in four centuries. We meet, notably, the instinct for order (which classicism accents) and for passion, fervor.

So we have a person, culture, the centuries—and a current pandemic. Aesthetic Realism is true about them all.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Classical Serenity—& Flame

By Eli Siegel

The editors¹ write:

The literature of the 17th century would be characterized by a harmonious unity, as was monarchical France governed by the Great King.

Manyness into oneness is part of history. There’s a feeling of manyness in the 16th century. There were too many Henrys, in the first place. The way factions, religious and otherwise, quarreled with each other makes the 16th century look uninviting. It was disorderly. And Louis XIV brought to himself all the disorder of the 16th century and changed it. So he is like what Malherbe is in poetry. The editors say: “Malherbe, who is the only great name of French literature in the reign of Henry IV”—that is, in the 17th century before 1610—“gives to his contemporaries lessons in order.”

And the girl who would be Madame de Sévigné is affected by all this.

So, with the 17th century there is the orderly reform carried out in literature by Malherbe (with some opposition), and carried out in government about the middle of the century by Louis XIV. Then prose writers of the later 17th century are mentioned:

La Rochefoucauld, Madame de Sévigné, Madame de La Fayette, Bossuet…have in common the same ideal of serenity, of perfection and of beauty.

Yet later the editors say that these and other “French classics” have a “flame which animate[s them].” That is there—and they are still classic. It is strange to think that that letter of Madame de Sévigné to her daughter, where the mother worries about coaches and highways and heavy rains, and how the coach is getting further and further away from her—that this letter should be part of classicism.

A later letter can be read; it will show Madame de Sévigné’s varying interests and also her power of thought. It is written to her daughter, Madame de Grignan, from Les Rochers, in Brittany, June 15, 1680:

I am ravished with the fact that [my letters] please you; but if you did not tell me otherwise, I would think they were not supportable….I say sometimes, My God! that I should bother my daughter to read this gathering of little stuff….

You are too good in wanting company for me; it is not necessary. Here I am accustomed to solitude….When I am in my room I have such good company that I say to myself, this small place where I am is worthy of my daughter; she will not put her hand on a book that will not please her….The Christian Conversations are by a good Cartesian [Malebranche],…who speaks of…the sovereign power that God has over us in such a manner that we live, we move, and we breathe in him, as St. Paul says, and it is by him that we know all we know.

…Finally, God is all powerful, and does that which he wishes. I understand that. He wishes our heart, but we do not wish to give it to him; and that is the whole mystery.

It has been said that Madame de Sévigné had a religious feeling that is authentic, and profound enough. And the way religion is mingled with writing to her daughter is something to look at too. We feel the two instincts which were present in Madame de Sévigné: the instinct to feel that at last something is abiding—and she felt this in thinking her daughter was well and with her—and the other instinct, the instinct to think that everything was tottering, teetering, rumbling, changing into unseen debris. But I am presenting Madame de Sévigné as a mingling, in a way, of the instincts of four centuries.

Order, the Unconscious, & Kings

François de Malherbe (1555-1628) was a person notable in standing for order. Meanwhile, in his poem “Prayer for the King [Henry IV], about to Go to Limousin” there are lines in which he says that there is an unconscious desire for unhappiness in man. In English the lines are: “An unknown unhappiness glides among men, / Which makes them enemies of the repose in which we are.”

In the 17th century there is criticism of kings. There’s a funny story told by Madame de Sévigné about the king who deceived a courtier, and that has been famous for a long time. But this, translated, is a stanza of the Malherbe poem:

This is for order. And Henry IV, I may mention, is a tremendous study in order and disorder.

However, Malherbe, in his time, was opposed, and various persons who opposed him are now being studied. There is Mathurin Régnier (1573-1613). Régnier is a realist, and he describes things almost as Dreiser might, or Zola, or Flaubert if he were interested in slums. Régnier feels that Malherbe is asking too dryly for order and also sees himself as too majestic in his certainty about poetry. Well, the 17th century, quite early, began doubting the 16th century, and Malherbe couldn’t find much good in his immediate predecessors. He couldn’t stand Ronsard and du Bellay and Belleau. Régnier says that Malherbe saw the poets of the 16th century this way:

Régnier is saying that Malherbe is being strict and forgetting poetry.

These passages have to do with some of the feeling that was in Madame de Sévigné as she was growing up.

As to the uncertainty about poetry, which was present in the 17th century too, there is the story that I mentioned. It’s in a letter Madame de Sévigné is writing to Monsieur de Pomponne, December 1, 1664:

The king has been busy a little in making verses….The other day he made a little madrigal, which he himself did not find too pretty. One morning he said to the maréchal de Gramont: “…Will you read this little madrigal and see if you have ever seen anything so impertinent, so out of place? Because people know that for some while I have loved poetry, verses of all kinds are being brought me.”

The maréchal, after having read the poem, said to the king: “Sire, Your Majesty divinely judges well…: this is the most foolish and the most ridiculous madrigal that I ever read.” The king began to laugh, and said to him, “Is it not true that he who made that madrigal is quite a stupid person?” “Sire, there’s no means of using any other term for him.” “Ah well!” said the king, “…It is I who made the madrigal.” “Ah!…Would Your Majesty give it to me again; I must have read it quickly.” “No, monsieur le maréchal: the first sentiments are always the most natural.”

…As for me, who love always to reflect, I wish that the king would do likewise, and that he would judge through this how far one is from knowing ever what truth is.

Uncertainty & Classicism

So we come, through this jesting story, to the uncertainty of Madame de Sévigné. The worry about her daughter is one of the most tremendous domestic things ever. That it should be inseparable from one of the classic situations in all literature, that it should be inseparable from a highpoint in one form of literature—the epistolary art—makes the two things notably joined: the anguish was there; the classicism ensued. In many ways, the uncertainty and certainty of Madame de Sévigné is to be seen. When people love the unknown and the known, they can suffer a great deal, but loving both is one of the ways to be notable in art in any century.

In the first letter I discussed in this class, we see Madame de Sévigné finding something hard to believe and talking in short, brusque, speedy, continuous, breathless phrases of that thing—the marriage of somebody in the royal family to someone not in a royal family. Then in other letters there is the variegated worry, the encyclopedic despair. These things are in Madame de Sévigné as a classic. And as one reads the letters, one takes over some of that worry.

The relation of worry and classicism says something about instinct, as Madame de Sévigné herself does. And that is why, in behalf of the full meaning of instinct, she was talked about this evening.