'A Dull and Childish Ignorance'

“I have a dreamy way of withdrawing into myself, and, besides, a dull and childish ignorance of many common things.” 

Among the most rewarding gifts of concentrated reading is encountering thoughts we previously assumed were held only by ourselves. This happens most often with writers aware of their own inadequacies. Think of Samuel Johnson and Proust but think especially of Montaigne. Reading his essays is like reading our better selves, but never forgetting our most fallible moments.

 

The line quoted above is taken from a late essay with an unpromising title, “Of three kinds of association.” In it he confirms my “ignorance of many common things.” My list comes readily to mind – foreign languages, sports, Chinese history, automobiles and machines generally (especially computers), politics, gambling, most contemporary pop culture. By this point in my life, I expect to remain “dull and childish” in my ignorance of such things. Montaigne writes:

 

"Life is an uneven, irregular, and multiform movement. We are not friends, and still less masters, we are slaves, if we follow ourselves incessantly and are so caught in our inclinations that we cannot depart from them or twist them about.”

 

The first time I encountered the word “multiform” was many years ago in John Berryman’s poem “Canto Amor” (1947): “Love is multiform.” Montaigne would agree, but the observation doesn’t go far enough. Purity of anything is rare. In the human realm all things are various, shifting, protean. Our natures are watery. Love lives next door to hate. Part of the reason we “follow ourselves incessantly” is that it offers a sense of security, something solid regardless of its truth. I’m reminded of an admirably concise line in Yeats’ poem “Remorse for Intemperate Speech”: “Great hatred, little room.” Yeats is writing of Ireland. He might be writing of human behavior generally. Donald Frame writes in his biography of Montaigne:

 

“His task is to see and describe himself as accurately as he can. His ideas may not be true; his account of them must be. What he aims to make known, he says, is not things but himself; not the measure of things but the measure of his sight. The only certainty he guarantees is ‘to make known what I think, and to what point, at this moment, extends the knowledge I have of what I am treating.’ Hence he speaks out freely even outside his competence. ‘For likewise these are my humors and opinions; I offer them as what I believe, not what is to be believed.’”

 

How unlike so many of us, who assume what we believe, our precious opinions, are Gospel. In his conclusion Montaigne offers some hard-earned advice:

 

“The mind is exercised in books, but the body, whose care I have not forgotten either, remains meanwhile inactive, droops and grieves. I know of no excess more harmful to me, or more to be avoided in my declining years.”

 

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

'The World and All Her Train Were Hurl’d'

How often have you encountered a poem or other piece of writing that not only provoked astonishment on first reading but continues to do so after many years? I mean astonishment, not mere surprise or critical approval. I can think of a few passages in Shakespeare and Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation. There’s another, not so well known, that I first read in 1975, that somehow hasn’t grown tired or used-up or otherwise lost its capacity to inspire awe: “The World” by Henry Vaughan. The first line grabbed me: “I saw Eternity the other night.” That’s like saying, “I ran into God down at the bowling alley.” The colloquial-sounding “the other night” cinches it. 

Joseph Bottum has written appreciatively of another poem by Vaughan, “They Are All Gone into the World of Light.” His reading is inspired:

 

“In grief the absent are more real than the present world, and that’s where ‘They are all Gone into the World of Light’ begins: the light the dead have in memory brighter than the dark world in which the bereaved walk. For that matter, human epistemology is compromised and weak. But by building on that idea of light, Vaughan moves us toward a presaged Heaven and the hints in life that the dead still live.”

 

Vaughan’s lines are often a comfort but don’t read like a panacea. Neither does he preach. He reports:

 

“I saw Eternity the other night,

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

All calm, as it was bright;

And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,

Driv’n by the spheres

Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world

And all her train were hurl’d.”

 

I think of the Einstein rings photographed by the Hubble space telescope.

'Lighter Than a Hummingbird's Feather'

Czesław Miłosz wrote “In Warsaw” in 1945, shortly after the end of World War II:

“I did not want to love so.

That was not my design.

I did not want to pity so.

That was not my design.

My pen is lighter

Than a hummingbird's feather. This burden

Is too much for it to bear.

How can I live in this country

Where the foot knocks against

The unburied bones of kin?”

Few Americans have earned the right to speak so intimately and with such authority of war and its impact on writers and others. Most of us know war from newspapers and books. Boys enjoy playing Army. I remember visiting Gettysburg for the first time with my family when I was ten. My brother and I ran around as though the battlefield were a theme park or “interactive” museum. I’m certain we gave no thought to the 51,000 American casualties suffered in three days in 1863.

 

Not long ago I read a poem about an atrocity in Latin America written by an American: pure propaganda, composed at a safe distance. Political posturing. A poet who wants to be recognized as a moral exemplar. Utterly unconvincing as a moral document. Unlike Miłosz’s poem, there was something morbid about the American’s, as though the poet were relishing a chance to write about an act of depravity. Miłosz concludes his poem:

 

“It's madness to live without joy

And to repeat to the dead

Whose part was to be gladness

Of action in thought and in the

Only two salvaged words:

Truth and justice.”

 

In a 2009 interview, another Polish poet, the late Adam Zagajewski, said of “In Warsaw”: “Milosz avoids mournful ritual and says that living without happiness is madness. The charm of the world is the poet's obligation. When we stop naming the world, it disowns us and then we are only left with empty rhetoric, a hollow sound. A sense of humour must be combined with the sense of happiness that Milosz vindicates. A great poem is a model for life which influences our experience, albeit delicately.”

'The Circle Is Complete'

Perhaps it’s age but I find growing satisfaction in resolution. I like stories that conclude satisfyingly, often ending where they started, with the distance covered in between being the important part. I feel the same way about most music. You can keep the dissonance, chords that leave you hanging. I’ve grown more aware of cycles. Not cosmic. More prosaic than that – the migration of birds, the hustle of squirrels in the fall, kids returning to school. There’s a Scriptural subtext to Bill Coyle’s “Autumn” (The God of This World to His Prophet, 2006): 

“Harvest time. The circle is complete.

Time to crush the ripened fruit for wine.

Time to grind the gathered grain for bread.

 

“Tru to form, the geese pass overhead,

Giving us the ‘V for Victory’ sign

Even as they beat their long retreat.”

 

When he was seven years old (he is now thirty-nine), I took my oldest son to a nature preserve near Albany, N.Y., where the rangers were leading a twilight walk into the marshes to witness the spectacle of frog courtship. The frogs were Hyla crucifer, peepers the size of postage stamps with a pattern of ill-defined crosses on their backs. In April, males serenade females – a more reliable gauge of spring’s imminence than the return of the robins. At that latitude, spring returns incrementally.

 

We carried flashlights, fifteen or twenty of us, and approached the booming in the night. Though tiny, peepers en masse, thousands of them, are almost deafening. Even when we shined our lights on them, to watch their throats balloon as they called, they ignored us. Everyone laughed, out of amusement and astonishment.

 

Then another, more raucous sound began, impossibly, to drown out the peepers. It was past sunset, black without the flashlights. Directly overhead, flying no more than 25 feet off the ground, a flock of Canada geese honked like drunken saxophonists. In the dark, I felt privileged, disoriented and a little scared (the combined volume of frogs and birds was overwhelming). The darkness and the noise created an illusion of closeness, as though we were indoors, and again everyone, kids and grownups, laughed.

 

In Walden, Thoreau described “the circling groping clangor of some solitary goose.” Multiply that by dozens, and add the steady basso of the peepers. His journal is filled with references to frogs, including the genus Hyla, but he made relatively few observations of geese. Concord, Mass., is at the same latitude as Albany. On April 30, 1852, he followed the sound of the peepers and noted:

 

“It seemed to be a note of alarm. I caught one – It proved to be two coupled. They remained together in my hand. This sound has connexion with their loves probably.”

 

The bachelor Thoreau on the sex life of amphibians: “their loves probably.”

'A Very Peculiar Sorrow Attacks Me'

The feuilleton is an attractively flexible form, part journalism, part essay, that has seldom successfully crossed the Atlantic. The name is derived from the French feuillet, meaning the leaf of a book. Though spawned in France, the feuilleton achieved mastery among German-language writers, specifically Austrian, more specifically Viennese, even more specifically Jewish. Among its most accomplished practitioners are Alfred Polgar, Karl Kraus, Peter Altenberg and Egon Friedell. 

Clive James described the feuilleton as “a demanding genre that reached a high state of development in Vienna.” A minor literary critic named Hitler snuffed out the tradition, which has never fully recovered. Another practitioner, better known in the Anglophone world (thanks largely to the translations of Michael Hofmann), is the great novelist Joseph Roth, author of The Radetzky March (1932).

 

On October 31, 1926, in the Frankfurter Zeitung, Roth published “How does it look in the Russian street?” (trans. Zachary Suri), a feuilleton based on his recent visit to the Soviet Union. Historians will make much of the date, as 1926 is the year Stalin consolidated his power. He had achieved “Socialism in One Country.” The Revolution was nearly a decade old. Unlike many Western visitors to the Soviet Union – Lincoln Steffens, Theodore Dreiser, H.G. Wells, among others – Roth was not seduced by the charms of the Workers’ Paradise. His tone is resolutely unpolitical. He sees people, not politics:

 

“. . . I find the Russian street gray. The masses that people it are gray. It engulfs the red of the scarves, of the banners, of the insignia, and the golden reflection of the church roofs. They are a truly poor and haphazardly dressed people. A great earnestness wafts from them, overpowering in its soberness, pathetic in its poverty.”

 

What Roth misses is the spontaneity of life in a free country. In the Soviet Union he observes little joy, much humorlessness, little sense of life lived for its own sake, few children or animals, no evidence of celebratory improvisation. He concludes:

 

“I confess, ashamed, that in these streets, sometimes a very peculiar sorrow attacks me. In the middle of my admiration for a world which out of its own force—with more ecstasy than material, without money and without friends—prints newspapers, writes books, builds machines and factories, digs canals, after they just barely buried their dead—in the middle of this admiration, a homesickness seizes me for our frivolity and our damnability, a yearning for the aroma of civilization, a sweet aching for our scientifically-already-extinguished decadence. A childish, stupid, but fervent wish to see once again a fashion show at Molyneux, a lovely evening gown on a silly girl, a number of ‘Sourire,’ and the whole downfall of the occident: probably this is a bourgeois atavism.”

'Anything But Superficial'

Charles Lamb in a letter to his childhood friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge on October 30, 1809: 

“I have put up shelves. You never saw a book-case in more true harmony with the contents, than what I’ve nailed up in a room, which, though new, has more aptitudes for growing old than you shall often see—as one sometimes gets a friend in the middle of life, who becomes an old friend in a short time. My rooms are luxurious; one is for prints and one for Books; a Summer and Winter parlour.”

 

First, savor Lamb’s metaphor about friendship. He’s right. Most date from childhood or early adulthood. One of life’s great rewards is a friend made later in life – so unexpected and likelier to be based in something substantial and lasting, not mere proximity.

 

In 1823, Leigh Hunt published “My Books” in The Examiner. He describes Lamb’s (“C.L.”’s) books: “I believe I did mention his book-room to C. L., and I think he told me that he often sat there when alone. It would be hard not to believe him. His library, though not abounding in Greek or Latin (which are the only things to help some persons to an idea of literature), is anything but superficial.” Hunt goes on to log a tempting assortment of authors:

 

“It looks like what it is, a selection made at precious intervals from the book-stalls,—now a Chaucer at nine and twopence, now a Montaigne or a Sir Thomas Browne at two shillings, now a Jeremy Taylor, a Spinoza, an old English Dramatist, Prior, and Sir Philip Sidney, and the books are “neat as imported.” The very perusal of the backs is a “discipline of humanity.” There Mr. Southey takes his place again with an old Radical friend: there Jeremy Collier is at peace with Dryden: there the lion, Martin Luther, lies down with the Quaker lamb, Sewell . . .”

 

Lamb’s tastes were admirably excellent and eclectic. He was a dedicated habitué of London’s book-stalls. My experience is confined to les bouquinistes along the Seine in Paris. The idea of books exposed to sunlight and rain makes me nervous. Lamb had no such misgivings. His Dickensian celebration of London’s charms and of urban living in general, in the letter he wrote to Thomas Manning on November 28, 1800, includes the book-stalls:

 

“Streets, streets, streets, markets, theatres, churches, Covent Gardens, shops sparkling with pretty faces of industrious milliners, neat sempstresses, ladies cheapening, gentlemen behind counters lying, authors in the street with spectacles, George Dyers (you may know them by their gait), lamps lit at night, pastry-cooks' and silversmiths' shops, beautiful Quakers of Pentonville, noise of coaches, drowsy cry of mechanic watchman at night, with bucks reeling home drunk; if you happen to wake at midnight, cries of ‘Fire!’ and ‘Stop, thief!’ inns of court, with their learned air, and halls, and butteries, just like Cambridge colleges; old book-stalls, ‘Jeremy Taylors,’ ‘Burtons on Melancholy,’ and ‘Religio Medicis’ on every stall. These are thy pleasures, O London with-the-many-sins! O City abounding in--, for these may Keswick and her giant brood go hang!”

'Be Faithful Go'

J.J. Kimche writes in his most recent edition of The Jew from Nowhere, “Who Shall Sway Over the Trees?”: 

“One of the abiding oddities of my seven years in the United States has been the extraordinary disparity between the calibre of the American people and that of their political representatives. Every day, I encounter Americans who are serious, competent, conscientious and, above all, comparatively normal. I’m talking about the sort of chaps who go about their business calmly, hold the elevator for strangers, and demonstrate a reassuring capacity for rational thought and civil disagreement. Yet, through some mysterious political alchemy, scarcely any of these admirable creatures ever find their way onto a ballot.”

 

Kimche confirms one of my long-held convictions: we seldom elect people to public office who are worthy of us. Years ago I interviewed the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, who told me he loved and respected our country but we had no talent for electing good presidents. Subsequent years haven’t altered the accuracy of his observation, which he delivered apologetically. Which reminds of one of the last century’s great moral testaments: Zbigniew Herbert’s 1974 poem “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito” (trans. Bogdana and John Carpenter, Mr. Cogito, 1993), which includes these lines:  

 

“be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous

in the final account only this is important”

 

And these:

 

“and do not forgive truly it is not in your power

to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn

 

“beware however of unnecessary pride

keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror

repeat: I was called—weren’t there better ones than I”

 

And in conclusion:

 

“and they will reward you with what they have at hand

with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap

 

“go because only in this way will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls

to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland

the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes

 

“Be faithful Go”

 

In his reverence for honor and conscience, Herbert reminds me of another Polish-born writer, Joseph Conrad, in Nostromo: “Government in general, any government anywhere, is a thing of exquisite comicality to a discerning mind.”

 

Herbert was born on this date, October 29, in 1924, and died in 1998 at age seventy-three.