Ubi Nihil Vales Poem by gershon hepner

Ubi nihil vales
don’t attempt to please
the world or solve your malaise
with mere velleities.

Ibi nihil veles,
wish for nothing where
you can’t prevail in melees,
and count for nothing there.

Denis Donoghue writes about the letters of Samuel Beckett in The New Criterion, May 2009 (“Beckett Before ‘Godot’”) that Beckett studied the works of the Flemish philosopher Arnold Geulincx (1624-1669) , whom he cites in Molloy, giving this tag to the passive hero: Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil etiam veles, [“where you are worth nothing, there you should wish for nothing”]. Donoghue continues by citing Beckett’s views on Cézanne: “Cézanne seems to have been the first to see landscape & state it as material of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever. Atomistic landscape with no velleities of atomism.”

5/4/09