350th Birthday

 from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

Uncle Albert in his La Rochefoucauld
at Cannes in 1963 sweater vest

I was still in bed after nine. I was sitting up but wondering if I was going to get up. A gentle rap on the door. Ted came in, dressed for Boxing Day, meaning not at all: he isn't going out from the manor to deliver boxes; the manor is coming to him, Roz's crazy friend What's-her-name, who brings all her minions a pan of lasagna each year. Faded jeans and a ragged-at-the-sleeve-ends Bretagne College sweatshirt, once gray, the logo once maroon: In luctando lux.
          "Can I show you something?" He meant could he help me get up if I needed it, help me get dressed if I needed that? Who said this?: Discretion is the better part of valor. Discretion, meaning in this case accepting help when needed, is the better part of valor, meaning being stubbornly independent when you cannot be.
          What he wanted to show me (he said) were quotes Gaspar Stephens sent to him from commonplace book he found in the back of drawer, which he was compiling in one of his years in sub-Saharan Africa, whose god-forsakenness I have avoided even as I have admired the French spoken by the former-colonists there. (And it isn't, truth be known - and admitted - any more god-forsaken than the rural-Virginia county we live in. But it lacks the amenities we have, central heat and air, dental care, and a church on every third corner, many with a sign out front compiling its own commonplace book.)
          He  doesn't share, my adoptive grand nephew, as many do - to impose their views. He has no views, no more than a cat has views. He shares out of a genuine good nature (if there can be such a thing in this god-forsaken world.) (The depths of my despair are deep today; but I only pretend. I don't truly despair, I only wish I could because I do know there is no hope.)

There is this (from Emil Cioran to Gaspar Stephens to Ted to me):

Even the skeptic in love with his doubts turns out to be a fanatic of skepticism. Man is the dogmatic being par excellence; and his dogmas are all the deeper when he does not formulate them, when he is unaware of them, and when he follows them.
      We all believe in many more things than we think, we harbor intolerances, we cherish bloody prejudices, and, defending our ideas with extreme means, we travel the world like ambulatory and irrefragable fortresses. Each of us is a supreme dogma to himself; no theology protects its god as we protect ourself, and if we assail this self with doubts and call it into question, we do so only by a pseudo-elegance of our pride: the case is already won.

Which reminded me of this sentence of La Rochefoucauld: Il n'y a point de gens qui aient plus souvent tort que ceux qui ne peuvent souffrir d'en  avoir. - Nobody is more often wrong than the one that cannot bear being wrong.
          Because of the way certainty and wrong-headedness must accumulate together.
                                                                                                                                            12/26/2023