'The Dead World's Much Too Crowded'

“I know, for both of us, the dead world’s much too crowded.” 

Live long enough and all, reluctantly, must agree. Most of our relatives and oldest friends are dead – the unhappy price paid for longevity. As Dr. Johnson describes grief in The Idler (January 27, 1759):

 

“The loss of a friend upon whom the heart was fixed, to whom every wish and endeavour was tended, is a state of dreary desolation, in which the mind looks abroad impatient of itself, and finds nothing but emptiness and horror. The blameless life, the artless tenderness, the pious simplicity, the modest resignation, the patient sickness, and the quiet death, are remembered only to add value to the loss, to aggravate regret for what cannot be amended, to deepen sorrow for what cannot be recalled.”

 

The line at the top is from “Letter to Horace After Reading Ode i.24” by a poet new to me, Tamara Nicholl-Smith, published in Modern Age. The poem is dedicated to David Solomon. She addresses the Roman poet as she might a friend:

 

“Horace, I must confess, you’ve managed to surprise

Me. I had thought there were too many centuries

Between us—that your verse would sound like dusty, sighs;

Nothing that would please.”

 

Nicholl-Smith endorses a notion commonly dismissed: a writer born millennia ago can still speak to us, often more potently than contemporaries. “Despite our progress, pain is pain. / And Death, in any age, won’t give back what he reaps.” The next line in the fourth stanza, “Our loss remains his gain,” sounds like an echo from Bob Dylan’s "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest": “My loss will be your gain.”

 

Horace’s Ode i.24 is dedicated to Virgil. David Ferry’s translation (Of No Country I Know, 1999) begins: “How should this grief be properly put into words?” It concludes:

 

“It is hard. But all of this must be endured,

And by endurance what can never be changed

Will be at last made easier in the heart.”

'I Would Have Been Enchanted'

We think Titus Lucretius Carus died on this date, October 15, in 55 B.C. at roughly age forty-four. We know he wrote the philosophical poem De rerum natura, usually translated On the Nature of Things. Though read less often than other Roman poets, Lucretius can be traced in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, George Santayana, Wallace Stevens and Guy Davenport. 

I’ve stumbled on him again while reading The Search for Roots: A Personal Anthology, edited by Primo Levi and published in Italy in 1981. The collection is an inspired hodgepodge Levi describes as “a harvesting, retrospectively and in good faith, which could bring to light the possible traces of what has been read on what has been written.” Included by Levi are selections from Sir William Bragg’s Lucretian-titled Concerning the Nature of Things (1925).

 

In his introduction, the translator, Peter Forbes, writes: “It is Lucretius who provides the link between Levi’s scientific, moral and aesthetic worldviews.” Levi worked for decades as an industrial chemist and credited his reading of Bragg’s book at age sixteen with inspiring his choice of careers. Bragg had won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1915 for development of the first X-ray spectrometer. In his introduction to the excerpt from Bragg’s book, Levi says the physicist “belonged to an epoch in which a pioneering genius could still do brilliant work in isolation.” The same, of course, was true for Levi. 

 

He titles his selection from Lucretius “The Poet-Researcher” (as translated from the Latin by Sir Ronald Melville), and says in his introduction: 

 

“If I had read Lucretius in high school I would have been enchanted, but he is not willingly read in school, officially because he is too difficult, actually because there has always been a whiff of impiety about his verses. For this reason, at the end of antiquity a cloak of silence was wrapped around him and today almost nothing is known of this extraordinary man. Consciously or not, for a long time he was regarded as dangerous, because he sought a purely rational explanation of nature, had faith in the evidence of his own senses, wanted to liberate man from suffering and fear, rebelled against all superstition, and described earthly love in lucid poetry.” 

 

In his introduction, Forbes revels, as does Levi, in Lucretius’ proto-scientific thinking and the sheer pleasure he took in it: 

 

“In Lucretius the world of sensation is a joy: it sings with the sights and sounds and feel of the world, with the spirit of healthy animals enjoying their animality. There is a wonderful Italian tradition of science writing that derives from Lucretius. Galileo is its greatest figure as a scientist, and Italo Calvino, Levi’s contemporary and friend is another exponent. In Levi’s case, his philosophy was put to the starkest test in Auschwitz. The result is as if Lucretius had endured Dante’s hell and emerged, a survivor, tempered by the experience.” 

 

What I most enjoy in Lucretius is the mingling of scientific observation and speculation, and a zest for the pure physicality of the universe. The examples he cites are vivid and humble. This comes from the C.H. Sisson translation, De Rerum Natura: The Poem of Nature (1976): 

 

“In any building, if the basic measure is wrong 

And there is error in judging the perpendicular 

Or the level somewhere is even the slightest bit wrong, 

Everything will be out of true and lopsided, 

Crooked, sloping, leaning this way or that; 

It will threaten to fall and some of it actually will fall 

And all on account of the first erroneous measurements: 

So your reasoning about things is always bound to be false 

If it is based on sense you cannot rely on.”

'He Lessens the Gayety of Life'

I’ll spare you the joke the phlebotomist told me while drawing blood from my arm. Given the circumstance I mustered a polite titter in response. I had already diagnosed him as a member of that blight on humanity, the would-be comedian, the sort of guy – almost always male – who wishes to be thought a funny fellow, a jokester, a real card (“he has to be dealt with” – heh-heh). To make sure you recognize his wit, he helpfully laughs at his own joke. The condition’s etiology remains a mystery but I blame misguided parents who laughed at Junior’s jokes regardless of their witlessness. In her essay “The Mission of Humour” (Americans and Others, 1912), Agnes Repplier left-handedly defends the humorless man: 

“Charles Lamb said it was no misfortune for a man to have a sulky temper. It was his friends who were unfortunate. And so with the man who has no sense of humour. He gets along very well without it. He is not aware that anything is lacking. He is not mourning his lot. What loss there is, his friends and neighbours bear.”

 

Repplier refers to section XVI of Lamb’s “Popular Fallacies,” “That a Sulky Temper Is a Misfortune.” She continues:

 

“A man destitute of humour is apt to be a formidable person, not subject to sudden deviations from his chosen path, and incapable of frittering away his elementary forces by pottering over both sides of a question. He is often to be respected, sometimes to be feared, and always—if possible—to be avoided. His are the qualities which distance enables us to recognize and value at their worth. He fills his place in the scheme of creation; but it is for us to see that his place is not next to ours at table, where his unresponsiveness narrows the conversational area, and dulls the contagious ardour of speech. He may add to the wisdom of the ages, but he lessens the gayety of life.”

'No Gold This Go-Round'

This is the time of year I feel a pang for the Northern autumn. The temperature in Houston, as I write on Monday, is eighty-six degrees. The trees are as green today as they were last month and last April. Butterflies still flit in the garden, as do anoles, green and brown. Years have a circadian rhythm as do our days. Mine is definitely Northern, Ohio by way of upstate New York, and my clock is always off.

Our front yard was the deepest on the street, lined on the right with four silver maples, with a sugar maple nearest the street. All are long gone, but starting in September when I was a kid all were blazing yellow with the occasional dash of red. I remember writing a paper in which I described maples as “sugar factories.” Few maples grow in Texas. In her poem “Suburban Samsara,” Maryann Corbett, who lives in Minnesota, writes of the cycle of seasonal change and the larger cycles of life. Here is the second stanza:

“Arid, this summer. | After, when air

chilled, and the days | damped down, cheerless,

small color came: | the crabbed rust-brown,

the dull, dry green. | No gold this go-round,

wealth we waited for. | Only the work—

the raking, bent, | the wrenched back.”

Yes, hours of raking, in our yard and the neighbors’. Samsara is the Sanskrit word for the cycle of life, death and rebirth, common to Buddhism and Hinduism. Every autumn, this native Northerner recalls a sentence from The American Scene (1906) by Henry James:

“[T]he way the colour begins in those days to be dabbed, the way, here and there, for a start, a solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy-ball, with the whole family gathered round to admire her before she goes.”

'The Second Life of Art'

As an obstinately monolingual American, I rely on the precious work of translators. The three poets I read most often in translation, in order of frequency, are Dante, Eugenio Montale and Zbigniew Herbert. I have much English and American poetry safely stored in memory – one of many reasons I am almost never bored -- but only scraps of the Italians and the Pole. Rough outlines, fragments, incomplete lines, yes. This is shameful, I know. One of the tests of great writing, especially poetry, is memorability. The personal stamp of some poets is so indelible, so poetically DNA-specific, as to lay claim not only to stanzas, lines and phrases but individual words. Perhaps this is the ultimate memorability, to wield a single word so forcefully that readers, centuries later, recognize its ownership. “Slant” immediately conjures Dickinson; “madding,” Gray. “Fruitfulness” and “clammy” are forever Keats’. I'm denied this with the three foreign-language poets cited above. 

Montale was also a memorable writer of prose. In his 1949 essay “The Second Life of Art” he writes: "An art which destroys form while claiming to refine it denies itself its second and larger life: the life of memory and everyday circulation. I will try to explain what this second life of art is so as not to be misunderstood.” Montale dismisses much of modern poetry for the absence of this “second life”; that is, in the reader’s consciousness and, sometimes, his memory:

 

“Paradoxically, one could say that music, painting, and poetry begin to be understood when they are presented but they do not truly live if they lack the capacity to continue to exercise their powers beyond that moment, freeing themselves, mirroring themselves in that particular situation of life which made them possible. To enjoy a work of art or its moment, in short, is to discover it outside its context; only in that instant does the circle of understanding close and art become one with life as all the romantics dreamed.”

 

Montale was a rare critic who changed for the better my understanding of art. Clive James writes of him:

 

“If it ever came to the point where a lifetime’s memories of artistic exaltation shrank to nothing except a single image, an image of dignity would be a good one to see. One would want to retain at least that much. But Montale must have had that idea in mind, or he would not have talked about the inevitability of forgetting in a way that emphasized the quality of what is remembered.”

Montale was born on this date, October 12, in 1896 and died in 1981 at age eighty-four.

 

[The Montale prose translations are taken from The Second Life of Art (trans. Jonathan Galassi, 1982). Clive James’ essay on Montale can be found in Cultural Amnesia (2007).]

'An Interzone Between Prose and Poetry'

Among Clive James’ books, perhaps the least read is Gate of Lilacs (Picador, 2016), a book of poems mostly about Marcel Proust and James’ imminent death (he would die in 2019). The poet taught himself French by reading Proust and a dictionary across many decades. Proust and his masterwork were essential to my education as well. I first read the Scott-Moncrieff translation, Remembrance of Things Past, over the summer of 1971 while managing a miniature golf course – a silly setting Proust would have appreciated. Ten years later, when I was working as a newspaper reporter, I read Terence Kilmartin’s newly revised edition of In Search of Lost Time. While reading Proust I remember thinking all the rest of literature was somehow second-rate, even Shakespeare. That left me feeling rather guilty and somehow disloyal. In his postscript James writes: 

“Proust was a very clever man, and had nothing to do with his day except observe, study and write. His powers of observation were as acute as Dante’s, Shakespeare’s or Goethe’s, but we might say the same of Lucretius, or of Homer when he registered in a set of syllables the quivering of a bowstring: when Conrad said that the writer’s aim was ‘above all, to make you see’, he forgot to say that the ability to observe is the writer’s first qualification.”

 

That’s what I remember: Proust’s powers of concentration, the way he could observe a scene and analyze it for many pages without being tedious. James takes up one of his favorite themes: the relationship of prose to poetry:

 

“Perhaps it merely blurs categories to say that the expression of a thought in prose can have a poetry of its own, but in fact poets have always been attracted to the mere sound of phrases lying loose. Tell a poet that Kepler, with his newly improved refracting telescope, observed SN 1604 in Serpentarius and you might get no reaction. But tell the same poet that Kepler studied the geometry of lunar shadows and he might make a note, because the phrase sounds good. There is an interzone between prose and poetry: a porous border where the discursive expression of a thought is rhythmic or resonant enough to take off on its own and enter the area where words and phrases, seemingly in search of one another, combine into a meaning beyond analysis.”

 

The accompanying poems are not merely discursive. James often returns to his illness and mortality. In the section titled, after Prospero, “I’ll Drown My Books,” James writes:

 

“And soon

All that I love will leave me, as I go

First into silence, then the fire, and then

The harbour water, in which there will be

At last no room to breathe, no time to think:

No time to think even of you, Marcel.”

 

If you have ever contemplated reading Proust but have been daunted by its length or reputation, let me recommend Gate of Lilacs as an excellent orexigenic – an appetite stimulant. I’m taking a dose of it myself for a third reading.

'An Art of Measured Speech'

Can a congenital pessimist reject the notion of an imminent apocalypse, a collapse of all that Western Civilization has accomplished? Sure, I can. I dislike fashionable doom-saying at least as much as blinkered, kneejerk optimism. Not everyone out there is a mindless nihilist, a lazy critic of all that is best in our species. I’m reminded of the late Terry Teachout calling himself (and H.L. Mencken) an “ebullient pessimist.” We have attained too much wisdom and aesthetic accomplishment to let it rot or be torn down from within. It’s easier to criticize, say, Aristotle or Shakespeare, if you haven’t read them and incorporated the way they look at the world into your life. 

I’m thinking of writers like James Joyce, who could hardly make a move without evoking Aquinas or Flaubert, or George Santayana, who wrote with Democritus and Spinoza at his shoulder. At the conclusion of Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter (1990), his three-hundred-page historical and aesthetic defense of formal verse and review of free verse, Timothy Steele writes:

 

“What is most essential to human life and to its continuance remains a love of nature, an enthusiasm for justice, a readiness of good humor, a spontaneous susceptibility to beauty and joy, an interest in our past, a hope for our future and above all, a desire that others should have the opportunity and encouragement to share in those qualities. An art of measured speech nourishes these qualities in a way no other pursuit can.”

 

Steele is no stiff-necked reactionary. One page earlier he writes:

 

“The poetry of the past can elevate and console us. But it cannot do this as fully and richly as poetry of the present. Only the poetry of the present speaks of our life and time. And though the poetry of Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson can connect us with the past, only the poetry of our time can connect us with the future and give us the indispensable hope that something that we say will matter to our descendants and will enable them to live more intelligently and happily than otherwise they might. Only the poetry of our time can offer the prospect that, after we and those we love have returned to dust, some reader somewhere will be moved by lines that bear witness to us and will commit our words to heart and mind that we may live again.”