In preparation for this new class, I was reading White Collar, the classic 1951 book by sociologist C. Wright Mills. It’s perfect for week 2 of the course because it begins with a discussion of the changes from an American middle class of freeholders and tradesmen to a society of employees. I can only assume that lots of its claims have been disputed and discredited in the past 75 years, but at the very least it gives a window into the urban version of the frontier thesis in American history.
But what I wanted to talk about now is the quote that I put at the title of this...
In preparation for this new class, I was reading White Collar, the classic 1951 book by sociologist C. Wright Mills. It’s perfect for week 2 of the course because it begins with a discussion of the changes from an American middle class of freeholders and tradesmen to a society of employees. I can only assume that lots of its claims have been disputed and discredited in the past 75 years, but at the very least it gives a window into the urban version of the frontier thesis in American history.
But what I wanted to talk about now is the quote that I put at the title of this post. It’s the epigraph to White Collar, and Mills attributes it to Charles Péguy. A Google search points us to a long poem from 1912 entitled Le porche du mystère de la deuxième vertu, translated as The Portal of the Mystery of Hope. I found part of a translation online here, but this was published in 1996 so I guess Mills was quoting from some earlier translation, or maybe he translated that brief passage himself from the French?
Searching in French leads a link to the actual published poem from 1912! I didn’t have the patience to read the whole thing. I skimmed through to see if I could see any passage close to “No one could suspect that times were coming … when the man who did not gamble would lose all the time, even more surely than he who gambled,” but no dice. The document also has a search function (“Estimated OCR rate for this document : 99.69%”), and I searched and searched but couldn’t find anything. I searched on “personne,” “soupçonner,” “temps,” “homme,” “parier” (also “pari,” “pariez,” etc.), “jouer” and its variants, “perdre,” even “sûrement,” but none of these led to anything even close to the quoted passage. Adding to the mystery, the only translation I could see of The Portal of the Mystery of Hope was from 1996–obviously not the version that Mills was quoting from back in 1951.
Can any of you track down this quote? Maybe this is a job for the Quote Investigator. I did a quick search and he’s never covered this one, so who knows.
For reasons that should be obvious, I like the quote a lot, but I’m loath to use it until I know its source. Yes, I could cite as “C. Wright Mills (1951), attributing to Charles Péguy,” but I’d like to do better than that!