March — σωφροσύνη
"They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered."
Writer’s Note: Why yes, it has almost been a year. If I am diligent enough, these monthly entries might make a return…
To explain my absence, here’s a quote, this time from Barthes:
My expressive needs oscillate between the mild little haiku summarizing a huge situation, and a great flood of banalities. I am both too big and too weak for writing: I am alongside it, for writing is always dense, violent, indifferent to the infantile ego which solicits it. Love has of course a complicity with my language (which maintains it), but it cannot be lodged in my writing. I cannot write myself. What, after all, is this "I" who would write himself? Even as he would enter into the writing, the writing would take the wind out of his sails, would render him null and void—futile; a gradual dilapidation would occur, in which the other's image, too, would be gradually involved (to write on something is to outmode it), a disgust whose conclusion could only be: what's the use?
During these last ten months, I have attempted, with no avail, countless times to write. A reflection on college graduation. A travel diary from the summer. A defense of Americana. All pointless. And on each occasion, everything I generated revealed themselves to be subpar facsimiles. Indeed, what’s the use of writing when I can never securely fasten any of my thoughts onto the page? I jot down ideas in a notebook, but they are inelegant and, worst of all, uninspired—I can recognize nothing worthwhile when the novelty of the experience fades. This very paragraph itself is derivative! Who among you reading this has not felt the same way? Observe: in a letter to his mistress Louise Colet, Gustave Flaubert had this to say about writing:
Everything depends on the conception. So much the worse! I am going to continue, and as quickly as I can, in order to have a complete picture. There are moments when all this makes me wish I were dead. Ah! No one will be able to say that I haven’t experienced the agonies of art!
Even when I feel like I have stumbled upon something remarkable, I struggle to set it to pen as the right words elude me, forever leaving me with a poor taste in my mouth, knowing that what is utterly indecipherable to me is perfectly accessible to others. While I can produce pages upon pages of academic writing when push comes to shove, it would take a miracle for me to create even half of a decent creative paragraph. And unfortunately, my mind has outlawed such miracles. Perhaps Roquentin from Sartre’s Nausea describes it best:
Most of the time, because of their failure to fasten on to words, my thoughts remain misty and nebulous. They assume vague, amusing shapes and are then swallowed up: I promptly forget them.
As such, lately, I have been feeling like Amory Blaine from This Side of Paradise:
Where now he realized only his own inconsequence, effort would make him aware of his own impotence and insufficiency.
Admittedly, it warrants deep self-introspection when one begins to see themselves reflected in Fitzgerald’s main characters, but as Marguerite Duras once said:
Very early in my life it was too late.
So where does this leave me? Well, I have been having these impulses, sudden urges to do and declare. Well noted by others, a critical character flaw of mine is that I have never been able to get over anything in my life. I recall that one day during Chemistry class in high school, I confessed to Nicole and Volodia that I was what Captain Renault from Casablanca would’ve refer to as a “rank sentimentalist.” I still don’t think I have seen them laugh harder than that day…
Sure. Waxing poetics with friends on the phone is fun and all, but it does little to extinguish my relentless desire for self-expression. Is creative writing through Substack, the literary version of creating a podcast, really the right answer? I can’t say. But the problem has been brewing and spilling over into other avenues of my life. I am restless. So I must write.
Ancient Greek Word of the Month(s): σωφροσύνη (sophrosyne)
σωφροσύνη, derived from σῶς (safe) + -φρων (mind) + -σῠ́νη (abstract noun forming suffix), can be translated in a few ways: soundness of mind, prudence, discretion, sanity, moderation in sensual desires, self-control, temperance.
One of the Cardinal Virtues, in Ancient Greece, σωφροσύνη was an ideal—an excellence of character alongside other exalted virtues. It is mentioned by Plato in Meno 73b:
Σωκράτης: τῶν αὐτῶν ἄρα ἀμφότεροι δέονται, εἴπερ μέλλουσιν ἀγαθοὶ εἶναι, καὶ ἡ γυνὴ καὶ ὁ ἀνήρ, δικαιοσύνης καὶ σωφροσύνης.
Socrates: Then men and women both need the same things, if they want to be good: justice and prudence.
And Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics 1117b:
μετὰ δὲ ταύτην περὶ σωφροσύνης λέγωμεν: δοκοῦσι γὰρ τῶν ἀλόγων μερῶν αὗται εἶναι αἱ ἀρεταί.
After Courage let us speak of Temperance; for these appear to be the virtues of the irrational parts of the soul.
According to Aristotle, those who possess σωφροσύνη desire things that are not impediments to health, not contrary to what is beautiful, nor beyond that person's resources. Such a person judges according to ὀρθός λόγος (orthos logos)—right reason.
Consider the following quote from David Hume (The Treatise of Human Nature, 2.3, 2.4) for a moment:
Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.
I find it hard to disagree with Hume on this point. Passion, even ignoring the psychoanalytic framework of desire, lies at the foundation of all human activity. We frequently describe succumbing to our passionate desires as a failure to follow reason, and Hume explains that we do so because our operations of the passions and reason often feel similar. The person who possesses “will power” is not an individual whose reason conquers her passions, but rather someone who has a will that is primarily mediated by not violent passions, but calm ones.
Reading:
A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Birth of Tragedy / The Case of Wagner by Friedrich Nietzsche
Watching:
Accurate Depiction of New York City private high school.
Back on my French New Wave grind…
Still holds up…
Listening:
jeans by 2hollis
Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23 by Chopin (Zimmerman)
She’s Gone by Daryl Hall & John Oates
Here’s to painting a prettier picture—together.
My advice? Never get over anything that should solve your woes <3
gotta lock in on calm passions more after this thanks adam