Profile - Paul Valéry
The New Criterion profiles Paul Valéry
(...) on the night of October 4, 1892, in Genoa, Valéry had a vision, an epiphany, one doesn’t quite know what to term it, but on that night he decided to forego a standard literary career and instead concentrate his intellectual power on what one can only call pure thought. (He later wrote that “there are few poets who do not go through a fundamental crisis between the ages of twenty and thirty, one in which the destiny of their gift is at stake.”) He wanted to know how thought works, what it is based on, its underpinnings, the fundamental mechanisms of the mind itself.
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