travel books: THE Year of Philosophy in the life of a young Frenchman was, in my time, the year of intellectual puberty. One can see in Barres' Deracine's the significance for him and his friends of their encounter with the philosopher Burdeau, and in the biographies of Proust the role played by the philosopher Darlu in the formation of Proustian doctrine. For ten years all our attention, first as boys, then as young men had been concentrated upon questions of form, grammar, style. Suddenly the depths were lighted up. Epictetus and Epicurus, Plato and Aristotle, Descartes and Spinoza, Locke and Kant, Hegel and Bergson, contended for mastery in our minds. The metaphysicians dissolved the universe into transparent clouds or dilated the individual until he became coterminous with the world. The moralists proposed contradictory doctrines to justify unvarying virtues. Dizzy and intoxicated, blind and drunk with power, the young man would allow himself to be deliciously borne away in the whirlwind of ideas. My classmates and I at the Lycee of Rouen in 1901 awaited our Year of Philosophy with all the more impatience because our philosopher was a man who had already attained fame. He was named Chartier, but he signed the name Alain to the daily Comments which appeared in the Rouen Dispatch and which were written in the style of a poet and conceived with a vigour of thought that was unrestrained by prudence. At the People's University in Rouen (these groups for mutual education had sprung up all over France after the Affaire Dreyfus) he spoke every week, and even his political adversaries admitted that his lectures were original and eloquent. As for his pupils, our older schoolmates, they behaved like members of an esoteric religious cult, at once enthusiastic and secretive. Canet, a close friend of mine, who later became Director of Religious Affairs at the Quai d'Orsay, had received the Honour Prize in Philosophy the year before. `You'll see,' he told me mysteriously, `his class is not like anything you've ever heard before.' books

Books > Old Books > Call No Man Happy (1943)

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CHAPTER IV
THE RIVER OF THE ARROW

THE Year of Philosophy in the life of a young Frenchman was, in my time, the year of intellectual puberty. One can see in Barres' Deracine's the significance for him and his friends of their encounter with the philosopher Burdeau, and in the biographies of Proust the role played by the philosopher Darlu in the formation of Proustian doctrine. For ten years all our attention, first as boys, then as young men had been concentrated upon questions of form, grammar, style. Suddenly the depths were lighted up. Epictetus and Epicurus, Plato and Aristotle, Descartes and Spinoza, Locke and Kant, Hegel and Bergson, contended for mastery in our minds. The metaphysicians dissolved the universe into transparent clouds or dilated the individual until he became coterminous with the world. The moralists proposed contradictory doctrines to justify unvarying virtues. Dizzy and intoxicated, blind and drunk with power, the young man would allow himself to be deliciously borne away in the whirlwind of ideas.
My classmates and I at the Lycee of Rouen in 1901 awaited our Year of Philosophy with all the more impatience because our philosopher was a man who had already attained fame. He was named Chartier, but he signed the name Alain to the daily Comments which appeared in the Rouen Dispatch and which were written in the style of a poet and conceived with a vigour of thought that was unrestrained by prudence. At the People's University in Rouen (these groups for mutual education had sprung up all over France after the Affaire Dreyfus) he spoke every week, and even his political adversaries admitted that his lectures were original and eloquent. As for his pupils, our older schoolmates, they behaved like members of an esoteric religious cult, at once enthusiastic and secretive. Canet, a close friend of mine, who later became Director of Religious Affairs at the Quai d'Orsay, had received the Honour Prize in Philosophy the year before.
`You'll see,' he told me mysteriously, `his class is not like anything you've ever heard before.'