'intelligence without traditions'

For a few minutes my father-in-law seemed to soften his judgment (After all, it’s difficult for all of us to orient ourselves in the chaos of the Italian crisis, and I can understand that young men like him find themselves in trouble, especially when they have a desire to act), then he rose to go to his study. But before he disappeared he had a second thought. He paused in the doorway and uttered harshly: But there is doing and doing, Sarratore is intelligence without traditions, he would rather be liked by those in charge than fight for an idea, he’ll become a very useful technocrat. . . . 

. . . I hoped that Adele would find a conciliating phrase that might soothe me, and so I asked: 

“What does it mean that Nino is intelligence without traditions?” 

She looked at me ironically. 

“That he’s no one. And for a person who is no one to become someone is more important than anything else. The result is that this Signor Sarratore is an unreliable person.” 

“I, too, am an intelligence without traditions.” 

She smiled. 

“Yes, you are, too, and in fact you are unreliable.” 

—Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child (2015, trans. A. Goldstein)

Becoming

Become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me, but I realized it for the first time only in that situation. I wanted to become, even though I had never known what. And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition. I had wanted to become something—here was the point—only because I was afraid that Lila would become someone and I would stay behind. My becoming was a becoming in her wake. I had to start again to become, but for myself, as an adult, outside of her.

—Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013; trans. A. Goldstein 2014)

'a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene'

Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, "homeostasis," i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

—Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (1946, trans. 1959)

'something to reach for'

After that he had talked to Johnson every Saturday for the rest of the year. He talked at random, the kind of talk the boy would never have heard before. He talked a little above him to give him something to reach for. He roamed from simple psychology and the dodges of the human mind to astronomy and the space capsules that were whirling around the earth faster than the speed of sound and would soon encircle the stars. Instinctively he concentrated on the stars. He wanted to give the boy something to reach for besides his neighbor's goods. He wanted to stretch his horizons. He wanted him to see the universe, to see that the darkest parts of it could be penetrated. He would have given anything to be able to put a telescope in Johnson's hands.

—Flannery O'Connor, "The Lame Shall Enter First," Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965)

"Good work is not done by 'humble' men."

Some egotism of this sort is inevitable, and I do not feel that it really needs justification. Good work is not done by 'humble' men. It is one of the first duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his own importance in it. A man who is always asking "Is what I do worth while?" and "Am I the right person to do it?" will always be ineffective himself and a discouragement to others. He must shut his eyes a little and think a little more of his subject and himself than they deserve. This is not too difficult: it is harder not to make his subject and himself ridiculous by shutting his eyes too tightly.

—G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology (1940)

Making us God

True, this offer no longer seems to arouse much interest in a certain number of people, adepts of a Christianity which claims to want to be not "moderately" but fully "modern", perfectly adapted to a world hostile to all mystical excesses, whether moral or metaphysical...."Would a man with good sense today still want to become God?" What a surprising lack of ambition in this "modern" Christianity!...Let us conclude that "a Christianity which offers man something less than making him God is too modest..." [Quoting Joseph Ratzinger].

—Henri de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature & Grace (1980)

'I wish God had made me vaster myself'

—Now events of this moment are so mad that of course I can't keep up but worse they're as though they were fond memories that from my peaceful hacienda or Proust-bed I was trying to recall in toto but couldn't because like the real world so vast, so delugingly vast, I wish God had made me vaster myself—I wish I had ten personalities, one hundred golden brains, far more ports than are ports, more energy than the river, but I must struggle to live it all, and on foot, and in these little crepesole shoes.

—Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody (1951-'52)

'successful and decided action'

Dreams! Always dreams! And the more ambitious and delicate the soul, all the more impossible the dreams. Every man possesses his own dose of natural opium, ceaselessly secreted and renewed, and from birth to death how many hours can we reckon of positive pleasure, of successful and decided action? Shall we ever live in, be part of, that picture my imagination has painted, and that resembles you?

—Charles Baudelaire, "L'Invitation Au Voyage," Paris Spleen (1869) (trans. Louise Varèse 1947)

'its superlatives do not match ours'

All the frenetic schemings, the cigar smoke, the coke smoke, the carbolic and retch of the el, the frightened passion for movement of an ant nest suddenly jarred, the vast hurried grabbing plans of thousands of men whose importance is confined to a street, a café, and there is no other sense than one of the present. History is remembered with a shrug; its superlatives do not match ours.

—Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (1948)

'Jeez, it's beautiful, really beautiful'

He sits on the bench for over an hour, calms at last. The river languishes by, stippled and quivering like the play of light on a metallic cloth. Across from him, the dormitories of the business school lance their reflections into the water, and the automobiles in the distance seem tiny and alive. He feels the earth under him germinating in the spring night, the sweet assuasive air. In the sky the stars are studded in the warm intimate velvet of the night.

Jeez, it’s beautiful out. A play of yearnings, lost and never articulate. Makes ya think. He sighs. Real beautiful, makes ya think. The woman with whom he could share this. I’m gonna be something.

Awe. Night like this makes you know there’s a God, dumb atheists. Jeez, it’s beautiful, really beautiful, it makes ya think things are gonna be okay.

He sits there, absorbed in the night. I ain’t like the other guys, theah’s somethin’ special in me. He sighs again. Boy, to … to … He fumbles for his thought as though his hand were groping for a fish in the water. Jeez to …

—Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (1948)

'however serious, however trifling'

... there was a company of little figures, whose sphere and habitation was in the mahogany case of his organ, and whose principle of life was the music, which the Italian made it his business to grind out. In all their variety of occupation—the cobbler, the blacksmith, the soldier, the lady with her fan, the toper with his bottle, the milk-maid sitting by her cow—this fortunate little society might truly be said to enjoy a harmonious existence, and to make life literally a dance. The Italian turned a crank; and behold! every one of these small individuals started into the most curious vivacity. The cobbler wrought upon a shoe; the blacksmith hammered his iron; the soldier waved his glittering blade; the lady raised a tiny breeze with her fan; the jolly toper swigged lustily at his bottle; a scholar opened his book, with eager thirst for knowledge, and turned his head to-and-fro along the page; the milk-maid energetically drained her cow; and a miser counted gold into his strong-box;—all at the same turning of a crank. Yes; and moved by the self-same impulse, a lover saluted his mistress on the lips! Possibly, some cynic, at once merry and bitter, had desired to signify, in this pantomimic scene, that we mortals, whatever our business or amusement—however serious, however trifling—all dance to one identical tune, and, in spite of our ridiculous activity, bring nothing finally to pass. For the most remarkable aspect of the affair was, that, at the cessation of the music, everybody was petrified at once, from the most extravagant life into a dead torpor. Neither was the cobbler’s shoe finished, nor the blacksmith’s iron shaped out; nor was there a drop less of brandy in the toper’s bottle, nor a drop more of milk in the milk-maid’s pail, nor one additional coin in the miser’s strong-box; nor was the scholar a page deeper in his book. All were precisely in the same condition as before they made themselves so ridiculous by their haste to toil, to enjoy, to accumulate gold, and to become wise. Saddest of all, moreover, the lover was none the happier for the maiden’s granted kiss! But, rather than swallow this last too acrid ingredient, we reject the whole moral of the show.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

'must you chase your destiny like a harpoonist?'

She left him on the desk and walked out onto a small wooden balcony. There she adopted a rentier's stance—arms spread, hands on the rail. She would track down an interesting job, she vowed. She would study Hesse and Mann. She would refuse to make a nightly fourth at bridge, and to pay calls on local drips. This austerity would clear her decks for action. Still she wondered: did the present deliver up the future, or must you chase your destiny like a harpoonist?

—Edith Pearlman, "Hanging Fire," Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories (2011) (originally published in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 18, No. 1, Spring, 1977)

'push on to a greater failure'

To me, the tragic alone has that significant beauty which is truth. It is the meaning of life—and the hope. The noblest is eternally the most tragic. The people who succeed and do not push on to a greater failure are the spiritual middle-classers. Their stopping at success is the proof of their compromising insignificance. How petty their dreams must have been!

—Eugene O'Neill, quoted in Alfred & Barbara Gelb, O'Neill (1962)

'all of our so-called successful men'

Doc said, "Look at them. There are your true philosophers. I think," he went on, "that Mack and the boys know everything that has ever happened in the world and possibly everything that will happen. I think they survive in this particular world better than other people. In a time when people tear themselves to pieces with ambition and nervousness and covetousness, they are relaxed. All of our so-called successful men are sick men, with bad stomachs, and bad souls, but Mack and the boys are healthy and curiously clean. They can do what they want. They can satisfy their appetites without calling them something else." This speech so dried out Doc's throat that he drained his beer glass. He waved two fingers in the air and smiled. "There's nothing like that first taste of beer," he said.

Richard Frost said, "I think they're just like anyone else. They just haven't any money."

"They could get it," Doc said. "They could ruin their lives and get money. Mack has qualities of genius. They're all very clever if they want something. They just know the nature of things too well to be caught in that wanting."

—John Steinbeck, Cannery Row (1945)