"Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh"
About this Quote
Valery understands truth as something you manufacture, not something you discover glowing in the wilderness. "Truths we have made for ourselves" carries a sly, almost anti-religious charge: these are personal constructions, stitched together out of experience, doubt, and self-deception. The line refuses the comforting idea that conviction arrives fully formed. Instead, it frames belief as labor, and time as the only honest credential.
The real bite is in the delay: "Long years must pass". Valery isn’t praising patience in the Hallmark sense; he’s describing how slowly the mind stops merely reciting its insights and starts living them. Anyone can draft a philosophy at 25. The harder work is watching it survive boredom, temptation, grief, success, and the thousand small negotiations that turn lofty principles into exceptions. The subtext is brutal: most "truths" never reach the body. They remain elegant sentences, not habits.
"Become our very flesh" makes the idea physiological. Truth isn’t authentic because it’s argued well; it’s authentic when it’s automatic, when it shapes posture and reflex, when it costs you something. That physicality also hints at mortality: flesh is where time leaves its mark. In the early 20th-century atmosphere Valery wrote in - post-positivist unease, the shock of modernity, the looming and then lived catastrophe of war - this suspicion of instant certainty lands as a defense mechanism. If the world can be overturned overnight, only what’s been metabolized over years has a chance of staying put.
The real bite is in the delay: "Long years must pass". Valery isn’t praising patience in the Hallmark sense; he’s describing how slowly the mind stops merely reciting its insights and starts living them. Anyone can draft a philosophy at 25. The harder work is watching it survive boredom, temptation, grief, success, and the thousand small negotiations that turn lofty principles into exceptions. The subtext is brutal: most "truths" never reach the body. They remain elegant sentences, not habits.
"Become our very flesh" makes the idea physiological. Truth isn’t authentic because it’s argued well; it’s authentic when it’s automatic, when it shapes posture and reflex, when it costs you something. That physicality also hints at mortality: flesh is where time leaves its mark. In the early 20th-century atmosphere Valery wrote in - post-positivist unease, the shock of modernity, the looming and then lived catastrophe of war - this suspicion of instant certainty lands as a defense mechanism. If the world can be overturned overnight, only what’s been metabolized over years has a chance of staying put.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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