René Daumal
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René Daumal (March 16, 1908 – May 21, 1944) was a French writer, philosopher and poet.
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- Each time dawn appears, the mystery is there in its entirety.
- “Poetry Black, Poetry White,” no. 19-20, Fontaine (Paris, March/April 1942)
[edit] The Lie of the Truth (1938)
- Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth.
- Vol. 2, Essais et Notes
- Man is head, chest and stomach. Each of these animals operates, more often than not, individually. I eat, I feel, I even, although rarely, think.... This jungle crawls and teems, is hungry, roars, gets angry, devours itself, and its cacophonic concert does not even stop when you are asleep.
- Vol. 2, Essais et Notes
- Truth is one, but error proliferates. Man tracks it down and cuts it up into little pieces hoping to turn it into grains of truth. But the ultimate atom will always essentially be an error, a miscalculation.
- Vol. 2, Essais et Notes
[edit] La grande beuverie (A Night of Serious Drinking) (1938)
- Words are made for a certain exactness of thought, as tears are for a certain degree of pain. What is least distinct cannot be named; what is clearest is unutterable.
- Foreward
- It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content ... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.
- Foreward
- Common experience is the gold reserve which confers an exchange value on the currency which words are; without this reserve of shared experiences, all our pronouncements are cheques drawn on insufficient funds.
- Foreward
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- You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.
