— And what if all this were only an innocent and serious pastime for old age? To build oneself an Olympus, a place of peace and delight in space and eternity, is worth more than the rattles of youth and the castles of middle age.

May 14.

“Poetry is not an art, but an enthusiasm,” Plato said. Talent comes from nature or from heaven; art was born of experience.

Dance is not inspired: it is (as the Athenian said) an invention of men.

“To doubt (says M. de Servan) is to leave an error.” — And often a truth; but this is what M. de Servan does not add. Let us then say it for him and to complete the thought: — To doubt is to leave an error, and often a truth.

May 15.

Heaven has placed in their mind a voice and an instrument. It is thus that a musician is only a man whose difference from other men consists solely in being endowed with an enthusiasm, a voice and an instrument that he knows how to direct with art.

Comparison is better, more cheerful and more agreeable when [it] is made, not from an individual to an individual, but from one nature to another. For example, say of an orator that he is an eagle, of a poet that he is a swan: you will speak better and more ingeniously than if you said of the poet that he is a Homer, or of the orator that he is a Bossuet, a Pascal, etc. And when comparison does not leave a single species, it is better then that it be made between individuals of different countries and centuries, and to say, for example, of the orator that he is a Demosthenes, of the poet that he is a Shakespeare, etc. Great names that have become too popular have little effect in comparison, as in saying of a warrior that he is a Caesar, or of an author that he is a Cicero. It seems that there is too little reflection and labor in these easy comparisons. They also offer too little novelty, consequently too little variety.

But the most defective comparisons are those in which external objects are compared to man, and bodies to the soul, instead of comparing souls to body and man to outward things. For example, when one compares a stirred sea to an agitated heart, whiteness to innocence, the crash of thunder to the soul’s tempests. Man carries himself, possesses himself, has a perpetual feeling of himself. All this teaches him nothing and tightens and contracts him instead of extending him. (Tightens itself and contracts itself is well said. One then indeed experiences, through the perceptions of taste, a feeling rather like the sensation produced in us by the contraction of some muscle. This is vivid, but it is not agreeable.) Our illustrious Chateaubriand sometimes commits this fault. It is an abuse, etc.

In comparisons one must pass from near to far, from inward to outward, from one to the other, and from the known to the unknown.

In comparisons that tend toward the odious or the ridiculous, the contrary of all these rules may hold. They can never be too familiar. Thus you will say better: He is a Pradon, than: He is a Tersite; he is a Cartouche, a Mandrin, than a Sisyphus, a Cacus, etc. People also say “ugly as a mortal sin,” “yellow as envy.” The people say “pale as death,” etc.

— Indeed, every comparison and even every figure, to [be] noble and agreeable, must extend the mind’s views, and not tighten [them].

In the verses: “What is this monument...” etc.; whiteness is […] compared not to the innocence of the Soul, but to the innocence of Age […] the comparison is good because of the kind of work and the [occasion], etc.

From the abstract to the concrete; and from the unseen to the seen.