The wind is rising… we must attempt to live.

This line is from Paul Valéry’s poem “Le Cimetière marin” (“The Graveyard by the Sea”), first published in 1920 and later collected in Charmes (1922). The poem is set in the sunlit cemetery overlooking the Mediterranean at Sète (Valéry’s birthplace), where the speaker meditates on mortality, stasis, and the lure of pure contemplation against the sea’s ceaseless motion. Near the poem’s close, the rising wind becomes a physical and symbolic disturbance that breaks the spell of stillness, prompting a turn from abstract reflection toward the necessity of action and lived experience.

The “rising wind” signals change, pressure, and the return of time—an external force that makes continued detachment impossible. Against the cemetery’s emblem of fixed death and the mind’s temptation to remain in lucid, self-contained thought, the imperative “we must attempt to live” reads as a hard-won resolve: life is not guaranteed, not fully knowable, and not perfectly controllable, yet it demands engagement. The verb “attempt” is crucial: Valéry frames living as an effort undertaken amid uncertainty, rather than a simple state. The line crystallizes the poem’s tension between contemplative purity and the risky, embodied movement of life.

“Le vent se lève !… il faut tenter de vivre !” (French original)
“The wind is rising!… We must try to live!”
“The wind is rising… we must try to live.”