'The Sign of Memory and the Sign of Ecstasy'

The late Victor Brombert writes in The Pensive Citadel (University of Chicago Press, 2023): 

“[T]here is a rarer, quite precious experience that might be called ‘pre-reading,’ when certain dispositions in our character, coupled with circumstances, make us receptive in advance to an author we have not yet encountered.”

 

Brombert’s example in his own reading life is Baudelaire. As a boy growing up in Paris, attending the lycée, he walked the city streets as an unknowing flâneur, predisposing himself to loving the great poet long before embracing the author of Les Fleur du Mal. I understand the process but in my case it was less linear and immediate, more halting and delayed. I shed various bookish enthusiasms along the way before settling on the “receptivity” to the writers who possesses me today.

 

With the passing of adolescence I adopted some of the American realists, of varying talents and readability – Dreiser, Sinclair, Dos Passos, Farrell, Anderson, even Steinbeck. That didn’t last long. Next came Modernism – Joyce, Faulkner, Kafka, Proust – some of whom I still admire and read. After that, the evolution of taste became more diffuse. Post-modernists and various non-aligned figures made their appearances, but my loves and distastes became, after many decades, more settled and defensible – and eclectic, the product of a life spent reading widely.

 

I’m not a literary determinist but I know my mind by this time in my life. My current inner library is not made of bronze and discards are still possible, as are new books and writers, but I’m pleased by what is important to me.

 

So, why do I read what I read? I have no ironclad theories. The unflattering answer is habit. Pure momentum. Without the books I love I don’t know what I would do with my time not devoted to family, work and their corollaries like grocery shopping and laundry. I love movies but for me they amount to a poor substitute for books. They don’t deliver what I demand of serious reading. I’m willing to settle for less with movies.  A good action flick easily keeps me occupied for ninety minutes. I expect more of books. In his essay “Young Poets, Please Read Everything” (A Defense of Ardor, trans. Clare Cavanagh, 2004), the late Adam Zagajewski, a formidably well-read poet, writes:

 

“[O]ur reading takes place chiefly beneath two signs: the sign of memory and the sign of ecstasy. We read for memory (for knowledge, education) because we are curious about what our many precursors produced before our own minds were opened. This is what we call tradition--or history.

 

“We also read for ecstasy. Why? Just because. Because books contain not only wisdom and well-ordered information but also a kind of energy that comes close to dance and shamanist drunkenness. This is especially true of (some) poetry.”

'The Greatest Remedy'

Kafka somewhere says that impatience is a form of laziness. I would add that it’s also a form of egotism, a presumption that our clocks ought to govern the world. We’re likely born impatient, ever awaiting the next feeding. When young, we mistake patience for acquiescence, a shameful surrender. Only later do we reluctantly accept, for instance, pain as an occasional inevitability. In short, that’s life. Dr. Johnson, who suffered a Merck Manual of physical and emotional disorders, understood. In The Rambler of July 7, 1750 he writes: “The great remedy which heaven has put in our hands is patience, by which, though we cannot lessen the torments of the body, we can in a great measure preserve the peace of the mind, and shall suffer only the natural and genuine force of an evil, without heightening its acrimony, or prolonging its effects.” 

Much consolation in those words. Kay Ryan at the conclusion of her poem “Patience” (Say Uncle, 2000), makes a similar point:

 

“Patience is

wider than one

once envisioned,

with ribbons

of rivers

and distant

ranges and

tasks undertaken

and finished

with modest

relish by

natives in their

native dress.

Who would

have guessed

it possible

that waiting

is sustainable—

a place with

its own harvests.

Or that in

time's fullness

the diamonds

of patience

couldn't be

distinguished

from the genuine

in brilliance

or hardness.”

 

Patience doesn’t make the pain go away, but with time and practice it can’t “be / distinguished/ from the genuine.” It’s also cheaper and less likely to result in addiction. Another man who knew sickness and pain throughout his life was Montaigne who, in his essay “Children and Fathers,” recalled that Pericles wore amulets to assuage his illness. Montaigne calls them “vain things” and continues:

 

“I do not say that I may not be carried away someday by that ridiculous notion of committing my life and my health to the mercy and government of the doctors. I may fall into such a madness; I cannot answer for my future firmness. But then, too, if someone inquires of me how I am, I can say to him, like Pericles, ‘You may judge by this,’ showing my hand filled with six drams of opiate. It will be a very evident sign of a violent sickness. My judgment will be extraordinarily unhinged. If impatience and fear win this victory over me, people may infer from it a very fierce fever in my soul.”

 

[The Montaigne passage is from the translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne by Donald Frame (Stanford University Press, 1957).]

'Do These Things Go Out With Life?'

I’m reading another book by C.E. Montague, a collection of travel essays, The Right Place: A Book of Pleasures (Chatto & Windus, 1924). Montague gets a little rhapsodic on occasion and requires a periodic calming down, but the man survived the Great War and would die in 1928 at age sixty-one so I’m happy to make allowances. Montague begins his “Overture” by entering through the back door: 

“You may wonder how it will feel, to find you are old, and able to travel no more. Perhaps to sit out, with your legs up, in an invalid chair on a lawn when the warm weather comes, and to finger a book of time-tables for trains, and to think how at this hour the day express from Paris is probably nearing Mulhouse and the evening freshness of air that has blown across snow is coming in at the windows; soon the train will be slowing to clank into the station at Bale just when the first lamps are lit in the town and look gay in the twilight.”

 

Yes, I know the feeling, with a different emphasis and different geography. The essay that especially interests me, for personal reasons, is “‘Up to the Alps.” Reading it took me back to my sole encounter with the Alps, in the summer of 1973, when I spent time living in Chambéry (birthplace of Joseph de Maistre), in Savoy in the French Alps. There I bought a Penguin paperback of Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories and dated it “7-24-73.” From the same bookstore I bought the Signet edition of King Lear, which I’ve lost.

 

Both I carried in a manila-colored filet with a ham sandwich and a bottle of vin ordinaire while walking up le Nivolet, topped with the famous Croix du Nivolet. I was self-consciously imitating Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux more than six hundred years earlier and one hundred fifty miles to the southwest. The wine and sun got the better of me and I wanted to sit in the shade. On the side of the road was a small structure that resembled a bus stop made of stone. I sat, cooled off and enjoyed the view. Only later did I learn my bus stop was part of a Carolingian crypt, built, as I recall, in the ninth century. Soon I made it to the summit.

 

One of the pleasures of age is enjoying the memories we have accumulated over a lifetime. I returned to France in 1999 but not to the Alps, and don’t expect to see them again. Montague stokes my pleasure with his epigraph, taken from Charles Lamb’s essay “New Year’s Eve”:

“Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself—do these things go out with life?”

'Do Read a Lot of Novels'

For the first time, my youngest son, working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru, recommended a book for me to read. It was a novel written by an American and published about a decade ago. I read little contemporary fiction but the book’s setting interested me and I felt that I owed my son an honest effort. 

I petered out after seventy pages. I felt guilty about it but the novel was long and my tolerance was short. It’s not a bad book. In fact the novelist is gifted. He writes well and obviously has done his homework. But I stopped caring about his people and their fate. The failure, I suspect, is mine, which is why I’m not identifying the novel or its author. I apologized to my son and asked him not to stop recommending the books he liked.

 

I turned nostalgic and remembered how, when young, I was a fiction-reading machine. When I discovered a writer I liked, I tended to exhaust his back catalogue. Melville comes to mind, and Nabokov. From that experience I learned that certain novels stuck with me and some were forgotten. This is not a universal critical statement but a personal expression of what is lastingly important to one reader. I might mention Death Comes for the Archbishop,  Nostromo, Zeno’s Conscience, Daniel Deronda, The Golden Bowl, Lolita, Parade’s End, The Assistant, Time Will Darken It, War and Peace, The Leopard, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Proust’s masterwork, among many others – all novels I have read at least twice and often many times. 

 

In his essay “Quixotism” (The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays, 2013), Simon Leys recalls a philosopher he knew when young. Leys asked him to assemble “a list of basic readings.” Leys says he treasured this document and then lost it after many years. He has forgotten most of the books on the list but adds:

 

“What I still remember is the postscript the great philosopher had inscribed at the bottom of the page—I remember it vividly because, at the time, I did not understand it and it puzzled me. The postscript said (underlined), ‘Most important of all, don’t forget: do read a lot of novels.”

 

Leys says that as an “immature student,” this shocked him. “Somehow it did not sound serious enough,” he writes. “For, naively, we tend to confuse what is serious with what is deep.” He continues: “It took me a long time to appreciate the full wisdom of my philosopher’s advice. Now I frequently encounter echoes of it.”

 

Among those echoes for me is something Joseph Epstein writes in The Novel, Who Needs It? (Encounter Books, 2023):

 

“The knowledge provided by the best novels is knowledge that cannot be enumerated nor subjected to strict testing. Wider, less confined, deeper, its subject is human existence itself, in all its dense variousness and often humbling confusion.”

'Heed the Current of Your Stream'

In 1995, R.L. Barth published the chapbook Samuel Johnson: Selected Latin Poems Translated by Various Hands, with contributions by ten poets including Len Krisak who adapts Johnson’s “In Rivum a Mola Stoana Lichfieldiae diffuentem.” Krisak titles it “The River by the Mill of Stowe, In Lichfield, Where the Waters Flow”: 

“The river wanders still, and still as glass,

It passes through that boyhood’s grassy meadow where

My little limbs, with little skill, would flail the air

That settled on its pool. And there, held fast,

 

“I heard my father’s voice and learned to swim;

His words were soft and clear beneath the bending limbs

Of willows casting daylight shadows, hiding him

And me below the bright sun. Darkness dimmed

 

The secret place that father taught his son.

Now time has put an axe’s edge to all the trees,

And shade no longer lies there. Even distant eyes

Can see these naked waters barely run

 

“Their undeflected course beneath the air

Of Lichfield, making for the sea. Protected once

By leaf and branch, their channel moves them as it wants,

In openness, as if it did not care.

 

‘Dear Nisus, friend, now learn to do the same.

Ignore eternal age, with all its speed that cuts

Us from without, or wears us from within. Do what

You must, and heed the current of your stream.”

 

In Samuel Johnson: The Latin Poems (2005), the late editor and translator Niall Rudd renders the title as “On the Stream at Stowe Mill, Lichfield,” referring to the city in Staffordshire, about 110 miles northwest of London, where Johnson was born in 1709. Here is Rudd’s prose trot:

 

“The river, still glassy, flows through the green meadows in which as a boy I so often bathed my young limbs. Here I would vainly thrash my arms, which got nowhere with their inexpert movements, while my father with his calm voice taught me to swim. The branches made a hiding place, and an overhanging tree covered the hidden waters in darkness even by day. Now the shadows of old have fallen victim to cruel axes; and the bathing place lies exposed to distant eyes. The water, however, unwearyingly continues on its course from year to year, and where it once flowed unseen it now still flows, though in the open. You too, Nisus, continue your daily course, indifferent to what swift time may bring in from the world outside, and what it may wear away.”

 

Judging from Rudd’s version, Johnson’s original is a fairly traditional meditation on memory, time’s bittersweet passing and lost youth. Rudd’s prose effort is useful but dull. “Cruel axes” seems overdone. The adjective is unnecessary. Preferable is Krisak’s “an axe’s edge.” The late David Ferry titled his version of the poem “The Lesson” (Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translation, 1999):

 

“The stream still flows through the meadow grass,

As clear as it was when I used to go in swimming,

Not good at it at all, while my father’s voice

Gently called out through the light of the shadowy glade,

Trying to help me learn. The branches hung down low

Over those waters made secret by their shadows.

My arms flailed in a childlike helpless way.

 

“And now the sharp blade of the axe of time

Has utterly cut away that tangle of shadows.

The naked waters are open to the sky now

And the stream still flows through the meadow grass.”

 

What Ferry writes is more transformation than translation, and a first-rate English poem. He jettisons “cruel axes” and replaces it with the superior “the sharp blade of the axe of time.” He dispenses with the obligatory Virgilian allusion and reverses the conventional duality of darkness and light. Here, the shadows are comforting, an emblem of Edenic childhood; light exposes memories and leaves everything vulnerable. Some form of “shadow” shows up three times.

 

But for “and,” Ferry’s poem starts and concludes with the same sentence – appropriate in a poem about the unending flow of a river, with the Heraclitean caveat that’s it’s not the same river. We know from anecdotal evidence that Johnson was, in fact, a powerful swimmer, and we know his father, Michael Johnson, had died in 1731, long before his son wrote the Latin poem.

Dr. Johnson was born in Lichfield on this date, September 18, in 1709 and died in London in 1784 at age seventy-five.

'Joy at a Word Because It Is Just What It Is'

I remember one afternoon as a boy while in the neighbor’s back yard falling in love with the word of. A common preposition suddenly seemed intriguing, like a pretty girl you’ve known all your life. English is dense with such small words, known early by most native speakers, that are notoriously difficult to define yet even more difficult to live without, assuming you wish to be reasonably articulate. The OED gives dozens of shades of meaning. The most familiar is probably this: “Of origin or source. Indicating the thing, place, or person from which or whom something originates, comes, or is acquired or sought.” 

However, it was the sound of of I swooned over. The spelling has nothing to do with its pronunciation. It ought to be pronounced like off but it rhymes with love and dove. The o is almost uh, a place holder when we’re looking for an answer. The f is a v. Mouth open, a tremor in the throat, then upper teeth on lower lip. It’s a reassuring sound, like a productive beehive or a barber working in the next room.

 

Isaac Waisburg of IWP Books has introduced me to a writer who would likely understand the seductiveness of words-as-sounds, abstracted from sense. C.E. Montague (1867-1928) was an English journalist who wrote novels and essays. Isaac has posted a book published two years after Montague's death, A Writer’s Notes on His Trade. The title of the first essay is taken from Hamlet: “Words, Words, Words.”   

 

“In youth you easily fall in love with words, written and spoken. You come, like other lovers, to feel an unreasoned sensuous thrill of joy at a word because it is just what it is – the sound of it and the look of it on a page – as a child’s mind thrills at the touch of fur because it is sleek and at that of a file because it is not. Apart from the interest of their use in any particular place, such words as ‘burnish,’ ‘crozier,’ ‘lustre,’ ‘beatitude,’ ‘dawn’ become enamouring objects, with glowing hearts of their own, like red wine or rubies.”

 

No two people will share identical lists of such words, and to some the proclivity is madness. I note that “enamouring” is good word and an effective way to characterize those stricken with word-love. Montague continues:

 

“A sculptor alone in his studio will fondly stroke a lump of unworked marble or bronze; he can doat on its qualities. A writer or a good reader will do much the same: his mind will finger single words and caress them, adoring the mellow fullness or granular hardness of their several sounds, the balance, undulation or trailing fall of their syllables, or the core of sunlike splendour in the broad, warm, central vowel of such a word as ‘auroral.’ Each word’s evocative value or virtue, its individual power of touching springs in the mind and of initiating visions, becomes a treasure to revel in.”

 

One needn’t be Alexander Theroux or the author of Finnegans Wake – or their readers – to appreciate the magic and music of language. It’s a gift. Polonius asks in Act II, Scene 2: “What do you read, my lord?” Hamlet replies: “Words, words, words.”

'Once Read, Always Known'

“He is almost as important to me as Shakespeare, and I think of him almost as the second most important writer in English, absurd as that might sound.” 

I am always surprised and gratified when someone expresses a conviction I thought was mine alone, as though my privacy had been wire-tapped with my approval. Literature is a public art, only fulfilled when writer and reader collaborate, yet our understanding of books, the way we claim some as our own and cherish them, is utterly subjective. Their status in our lives is a private preserve beyond mere opinion, fashion and criticism.

 

Henry Oliver is writing, of course, about Samuel Johnson. What other writer in English might be fitted into his formulation? For some, Keats or Dickens, I suppose. Perhaps Swift or Austen. Let it go at this: such devotion and identification is always rare. It’s more than “liking” a writer or being a “fan.” Oliver writes:

 

“As with the greatest poets, there are lines of Johnson’s that I have never forgotten, even though I never tried to remember them. He has the quality of the highest writing: once read, always known. He is known to me like a real person and I keep the images and ideas of him that I have accreted over the years with me wherever I go.”

 

What such writers share is a universal humanity that might be appreciated by any reader, combined with some personal quality – a moral stance, a way with words, learning out of the ordinary – that sounds a chord within us. They inspire the love and loyalty we might feel for flesh and blood. Oliver tells us Johnson thought books “ought to be useful to life.” But not in some reductively utilitarian sense:

 

“Thus,” Oliver writes, “his aphorisms: ‘Books without knowledge of life are useless; for what should books teach but the art of living?’ and ‘The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.’ These ideas stand bright and clear against all the great mass of critical and scholarly writing that has been produced in the English tradition since Johnson.”

 

I can no longer read my Penguin paperback edition of The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759) I was assigned by an English professor in 1971. The pages are brown and brittle, the spine is broken and the whole mess is held together with a rubber band. I keep it for sentimental reasons, as one of my entrées to Johnson’s work. The same professor introduced me to Boswell’s Life. Some years ago I acquired Vol. 16, Rasselas and Other Tales, in the “Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson.” It’s a sturdy hard cover, built for rereading.

 

I love the exchange in Chap. 11, “Imlac’s Narrative (Continued)—a Hint of Pilgrimage.” Imlac tells the prince, “There is so much infelicity in the world, that scarce any man has leisure from his own distresses to estimate the comparative happiness of others.” He enumerates “the particular comforts of life” enjoyed by Europeans. Rasselas replies: “They are surely happy who have all these conveniences, of which I envy none so much as the facility with which separated friends interchange their thoughts.” Imlac gets the last word in the chapter: “The Europeans are less unhappy than we, but they are not happy. Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed,” which suggests the human condition has changed very little after three centuries.

 

Start anywhere with Johnson. You can hardly go wrong. I might suggest a selection of his periodical essays, especially The Rambler. Or his version of Juvenal’s Tenth Satire, “The Vanity of Human Wishes.” Or browse in his Dictionary. “This is supposed to be an introduction to Johnson,” Oliver writes, “but you do not need a guide to his works, or a list of which order to read them in. You need to find your own way.

 

This Friday, September 18, we will observe Johnson’s 317^th birthday.