Dear Unknown Friends:

This issue of TRO has two subjects. It is about something that has been frightening millions of people throughout the world: the pandemic of COVID-19, the new coronavirus. And this TRO is also about one of the most noted women of French literature: Madame de Sévigné, who lived from 1626 to 1696 and wrote letters treasured for 3½ centuries. We continue our serialization of Instinct & Madame de Sévigné, by Eli Siegel, a lecture he gave in 1964—a masterpiece.

As people in America and the world are faced with something dangerous that we don’t understand, what does it mean to think about it in a way that strengthens our minds and feelings and makes us proud? We should, of course, follow the guidelines of governmental health organizations as to behavior and hygiene; however, I’m writing here not about that but about How can we have a state of mind we truly like ourselves for having? Increasingly, one sees the phrase “coronavirus anxiety.” That is, with COVID-19 so much around, huge numbers of people feel (for instance) depressed, persistently ill-natured, agitated, low, scared in a disproportionate and overwhelming way. What it comes to is that people are using this phenomenon, this ailment, to see the world as cruel and ugly.

The Fight in Us All

Aesthetic Realism’s explanation of the large fight within the self of everyone, is knowledge great and needed for human life as such, whatever we’re in the midst of. Tremendously, people need that knowledge now. We all, Aesthetic Realism makes clear, have two hopes battling in us. One is to see meaning in the world, to like the world honestly. That is our deepest desire. It is the purpose for which we were born. But we also have a desire to look down on the world-not-us, to find it unworthy of us—to have contempt, “a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.”

With everything we meet there is a choice we make, mainly unconsciously: Should I use this thing to despise the world, feel superior to it—or respect it? And the choice doesn’t depend on the goodness of what we’re meeting. We can use a very likable thing to have contempt for the world. For instance, we can use a lovely strawberry shortcake to feel (without articulating it), “Mmmmm, as I eat this I finally have something on my terms, pleasing me, and for this while I can forget about everything else. I feel victorious in putting the rest of the world aside—I’ve beaten out the world. I don’t have to think about what it means to be fair to anything and anyone. As I take some of this luscious cake into me, I feel at last something is adoring me, serving me utterly, making me superior to everything.” (Fortunately, strawberry shortcake does not have to be used that way. It can be used to respect the world itself, from which it comes, including the people and things that are part of that world.)

It is enormously easy to use COVID-19 to have contempt, to feel “What a disgusting world this is,” to feel anything you touch and anyone you pass on the street is going to infect you. Again—of course one needs to behave prudently; there is danger. But people don’t see that there is something in us which hopes, even thirsts, to find the world an enemy. Wrote Mr. Siegel, commenting on contempt:

To see the world itself as an impossible mess—and this is often not difficult at all—gives a certain triumph to the individual. [Self and World, p. 11]

If you find the world an inimical, disgusting thing—while you’re suffering you’re also having the victory of feeling you’re in a world not good enough for you. You’re superior to it; and so you don’t have to question yourself.

Is This True?

Decades ago, Mr. Siegel asked the following vitally important question:

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?

I have seen, through many years of careful looking, the answer is: Yes, it’s true. So I’ll mention 4 aspects of that needed thing, using COVID-19 to like the world.

1) Evil (which the coronavirus stands for and has) is certainly real. But what is good in this world is just as real. There is a terrific tendency—and it’s contempt—to have this pandemic make dim, dwarf, annul in one’s thoughts what is good and beautiful, from a blue sky, to a friend’s kindness, to the music of Beethoven. A central way of using COVID-19 to like the world is to feel, “I want to use this to value what is beautiful: to know it, love it, see it as more real and vivid than I ever did.”

2) The transmission of COVID-19 and the combating of it have centrally to do with what ethics is. They have to do with the tremendous opposites of self and world—of care for me and justice to what’s not me. People usually feel that caring for themselves is not the same as being fair to other things, that these are antithetic. But “to be ethical,” Mr. Siegel wrote, “is to give oneself what is coming to one by giving what is coming to other things” (Self and World, p. 243). The coronavirus pandemic is a showing of something that people, out of contempt, have not wanted to see: that we are related to all other people; that they are as real as we are; that we have to be interested in their well-being, have good will for them, or we ourselves will be hurt. If we use the coronavirus to see and like this truly thrilling fact, we will be using the coronavirus to like the world. The virus is a tough instructor on the subject. We don’t like the teacher, but we should not miss—indeed, we should happily learn—the lesson.

3) We should use the coronavirus to be clear that healthcare has to be based on ethics—not on the horrible selfishness of the profit motive. That someone’s ability to be tested and treated for the disease should be based on providing big profits for certain individuals—that such individuals will make money from a health crisis—is absurd, immoral, and inefficient. Seeing it as such is using it to like and be fair to the world.

4) We should use the coronavirus to see that contempt is literally hazardous to people’s health. The previous point is an illustration of that fact. And so is the way the dealing with the virus in the US has been botched. The central reason why tests have been (and are as I write) in short supply, and why the ramifications of this disease were made unreal by persons in high places, is fundamental contempt. Writes Mr. Siegel:

The first victory of contempt is the feeling in people that they have the right to see other people and things pretty much as they please….The fact that most people have felt…they had the right to see other people and other objects in a way that seemed to go with comfort…is the beginning of the injustice and pain of the world. [Self and World, p. 3]

The dealing with the coronavirus was horribly botched chiefly because certain people saw it in terms of what would make them look good and be comfortable. So the pandemic should be used by us to be truly against contempt, in ourselves and anywhere. That would be using it to like the world.

There are other ways the virus can and must be used to like the world. To have that purpose in relation to it is urgent, scientific, intelligent, pride-giving, happiness-enhancing—and in coming TROs I’ll say more on the subject.

She Is Here

Madame de Sévigné, through Eli Siegel’s great understanding of her, is here too. He spoke about her as part of a series of lectures on instinct; and he has defined instinct as “desire not known or seen as an object.” In this section of his lecture, two unprecedented things are taking place. Mr. Siegel speaks about centuries themselves as representing instincts. And he is in the midst of explaining what no other critic understood: the bewildering yet mighty way Madame de Sévigné wrote about and felt about her daughter.

His beautiful way of seeing intellect and culture as richly warm, and the human self as having cultural grandeur, is a powerful good in this world, which I love passionately. It is real and alive, even as COVID-19 rages.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

The Centuries & Her Feeling

By Eli Siegel

Mademoiselle de Rabutin-Chantal, as she was first, and later Madame de Sévigné, read French literature and was very fond of Corneille. She also praised Rabelais, and she was for La Fontaine and for Molière. But the person she had difficulty appreciating was Racine. Don’t hold it too much against her, but that’s one of the scandals of French literature. She was so fond of Corneille, so given to the hero of her younger years, who was getting to be famous when she was a little girl of 10; but here was Racine having the nerve to be born when she was 13, and writing when her tastes were already so lovely, already come to. So she had it against Racine, and, as I say, please try to forgive her. Perhaps if you had been in the same circumstances you would have done the same thing.

The Centuries & What a Classic Has

We go back to the comments by Grant and Peyre on the 16th century and the 17th:*

There was the ardent and joyous love of life, which is the most beautiful quality of this literature of the 16th century; but it was not accompanied by that critical detachment, by that serene maturity, which are not less necessary to great works.

When we see a classic, is there something very fierce underneath the serenity? There always is. It is present in Racine. It is present, of course, in Corneille. It is present in Pascal. Classics, then, are classics because within them is some of the great emotion of the world. A classic is a classic because it contains a great emotion greatly had and greatly presented, which it would be a great misfortune and stupidity to miss. There is emotion in Madame de Sévigné which it would be stupidity to miss.

The 16th century had accumulated materials; it had pillaged without discrimination the treasures of antiquity….The 17th century was to make for a choice among these acquisitions of the Renaissance; into the literary forms transmitted by antiquity, it went about infusing a spirit that is quite modern.

The 16th century was a century of discovery and surprise. The 15th century was even more so, because Greek and Latin classics were discovered in the 15th century. But the surprise quality did not stop in the 16th century. In the 17th century, the classics were being taken for granted; I hate to say this, but I think it’s so. And consequently, the 17th century is a century which has a certain kind of order.

Shortly, the editors will say that the 17th century was interested in the individual person, what a human being’s questions were. The 18th century went back to the 16th century in honoring the surprise quality of the external world. In the 16th century there was surprise in the fact that there was an America, the fact that there was an Italy, that there were statues, that there was time. In the 18th century, the external world once more was looked at, but now as something to be explained.

Instincts Are There

It is quite clear: there’s a certain mood in the 16th century. And that has to do with instinct. There’s a certain mood in the 17th. There’s a certain mood in the 18th. And in the 19th, with Romanticism, the human being, or, as it was put, man himself, was got back to, but with more of a feeling of wonder or surprise or astonishment than the 17th century had about humanity. In the 17th century, man was looked at as if he were a much greater being than the weasel or the jaguar or an uncultivated person—because the person who was seen as a Man was the Honest Man, l’Honnête Homme—the man who was cultivated and had some kind of order within himself. These moods, which one can feel in a century, are distinctive of one century as against another.

The editors say of the 17th century: “It went about studying man in himself, his passions and ambitions, desires and dreams.” That is true for Madame de Sévigné. There is a wonder in describing a person, which she felt. Then, she also had a notion of the person who was sensible. She did not find someone she felt was sensible in her husband, who died very early in a duel. And she did not find that in her son. But her daughter, she felt was more sensible than she was.

What Was She Looking For?

The question is whether Madame de Sévigné was looking for order in her tremendous emotion about her daughter. There is something hard to explain in it. So I’ll read one of the famous letters, a sad letter this time, of Madame de Sévigné to her daughter, Madame de Grignan. This is in February 1671, and that daughter has just gone off with her husband to Provence, in the south of France.

I receive your letters as you received my ring; I melt into tears in reading them; it seems that my heart wants to split in two….You love me, my dear child, and you tell this to me in a manner that I cannot bear without tears in abundance. You go on your trip without any sad adventure, and when I learn that, which is just everything that could be the most agreeable thing to me, this is the state in which I am….You say you love better to write your sentiments to me than to tell them to me. In whatever way they come to me, they are received with a tenderness and a sensibility which is not understood but by those who know how to love as I do. You make me feel for you all that it is possible to feel that is tender….I think continually about you: it is what religious people call a habitual thought; it is what is necessary to have for God….

Many, many letters of Madame de Sévigné have this feeling, and it seems never to have abated. What she expresses, while related to literature very much, has in it something the world hasn’t shown before in just this manner. There is a presence of the other world in a living feeling.

It was pointed out that while Madame de Sévigné was a busybody in a way, interested in everything that happened in France, it seemed the one person she had emotion for was her daughter. Occasionally she talks of Madame de La Fayette as perhaps consoling her and not doing that so well, and it’s interesting to think of a woman who was also in French literature not being able to do that which a girl or woman not in French literature at all could do. In other words, Madame de La Fayette couldn’t take the place of Madame de Grignan. The letter continues:

Nothing can give me distraction; I am always with you; I see that coach, always going on, and never coming near to me….I have sometimes fear that it will overturn; the rains that have been going on for three days put me in despair; the Rhône gives me a strange fear. I have a map before my eyes, I know all the places where you are going to sleep….

When that letter is joined with others, we find a possibility of emotion in this world.

She Could See Another Way Too

Yet while Madame de Sévigné, again and again in her letters, is pointing to her daughter as a person having a certain meaning that no one else has, she does tell things that are going on. Also, when she can think of her daughter in terms of how she, Madame de Grignan, reads, the daughter isn’t given that strange quality. We see, then, that this daughter not only was something but stood for something. For example, Madame de Sévigné was a contemporary admirer of Pascal, and one of her later letters is a chiding of her daughter as to how she reads Pascal. It seems her daughter could read Pascal or not read him, the way most people are today—they’re not worried about reading Pascal; they’ve got other things to do. But Madame de Sévigné is sort of wild about Pascal. On December 21, 1689, she says about Pascal’s Provincial Letters:

Good God, what charm! and how my son reads them!…but your brother says that when you read them you find “it is always the same thing.”…

Can one have a style that is more perfect, a way of jesting that is finer, more natural, more delicate?…[And later,] what seriousness! what solidity! what force! what eloquence! what a love for God and for truth!…I am quite sure that you haven’t read them but while running your eyes around….

This is Madame de Sévigné talking about an author she likes and chiding her daughter for not liking that author as much as she does. So at a time when the daughter was seen not just as Daughter, with all that that meant, but as a person having her own way of seeing things, Madame de Sévigné was not in the field of torturing divinity, but could talk sense as many Parisians might.

We have had, then, intensity in Madame de Sévigné, and there is more intensity still. She should be seen as of these centuries: the 16th, 18th, and 19th, along with the 17th. The centuries themselves seem to have an instinct.