Presentiment

Use in the book

The intimation of a thousand intellectual possibilities torments Guérin when he cannot turn it into progress. Presentiment here is a half-access to understanding. Lamennais’s repeated sense of approaching death has a different object and reaches the diary through another person’s alarm. The record preserves the emotion and uncertainty of that report; it does not verify prophetic knowledge.

Later the soul escapes the immediate demands of action, sustained by an allegedly infallible presentiment of wonders in unknown places. The confidence is experientially strong while its destination remains unspecified. This combination of attraction and ignorance recurs throughout the notebook. Guérin may discern a coming inward revolution, yet the eventual shape of his powers and work remains unsettled.

Fortune is sometimes personified as a poor woman who waits outside the refuge and then takes the traveler’s hand. Providence can give the same uncertainty a more explicitly trusting interpretation. The contrast should not become a rigid distinction between pagan fate and Christian guidance: Guérin’s figures are local ways of living with an unreadable future.

Places to read

1. 22 March 1833 · ¶2Intimations multiply faster than intellectual achievement and become a torment.
2. 24 March 1833 · ¶1Lamennais’s apparent foreknowledge of death is reported through an anxious conversation.
3. 7 December 1833 · ¶1Fortune waits on the threshold of retreat and resumes the journey with the speaker.
4. 16 July 1834 · ¶2Changes within the faculties seem to announce an approaching inward revolution.
5. 23 November 1834 · ¶1An infallible presentiment sustains movement toward unknown inward destinations.

Translation in this edition

The English gives “intimation” at 22 March 1833 · ¶2 but “presentiment” at 23 November 1834 · ¶1, preserving the differing objects and force of the same French noun. Foresees or predicts would be too definite for several of these apprehensions.