'A Harmless Drudge'

After reading the February 3 post on “euphonious” words, a reader in the UK writes, “I wondered whether any particular dictionary definitions delighted you.” He adds: “I remember, in my late teens, having to look up the meaning of micturate; I’ve remembered the definition, with amusement, ever since: ‘the morbid propensity to urinate frequently.’” He guessed he had encountered the definition in The Chambers Dictionary but was unable to find it. A general internet search was also futile. 

By happy coincidence, today, February 7, is the 251^st anniversary of the letter Dr. Johnson wrote to Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield. In 1747, Johnson had published his Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language, outlining his intentions and methods for preparing the volume. Chesterfield published two anonymous essays endorsing the project. After seven years of almost single-handed labor, Johnson published the Dictionary on April 15, 1755 – without Chesterfield’s promised public patronage.

 

Johnson got his revenge in the Dictionary, where he defines patron as “one who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.” Of course, Johnson also defined lexicographer as “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.” Plenty of Johnson’s definitions “delight” me, to use my reader’s word. As Macaulay put it, Johnson’s masterpiece is “the first dictionary that could be read with pleasure.” A Johnsonian sampler of delightful words and definitions:

 

Kissingcrust: “crust formed where one loaf in the oven touches another.”

 

Smellfeast: “a parasite; one who haunts good tables.”

 

Thabdomancy (a Sir Thomas Browne coinage): “divination by a wand.”

 

Hector: “a bully; a blustering, turbulent, pervicacious, noisy fellow.”

 

Some of Johnson’s definitions amount to compact moral essays or treatises. Take conscience: “the knowledge or faculty by which we judge of the goodness or wickedness of ourselves.”

'A Paradise and Cabinet of Rarities'

Among my sub-specialties as a newspaper reporter was writing profiles of people who collected things. I collected collectors, including men and women (predominantly men) who sought every variety of the world's sand, bowling alley memorabilia, wood samples from every species of tree, the coins and currency issued by leper colonies and, of course, beer cans. All showed a propensity for taxonomy, organizing their collections according to arcane theories of genus and species. It’s stupid and self-righteous to dismiss such people in glibly Freudian terms as anal retentive. My impression was that they cared deeply for something. They were enthusiasts and, in a sense, were celebrating the bounty of creation. In general, they were happy people who enjoyed showing others their collections.

 

John Evelyn (1620-1706), the renowned gardener and founding Fellow of the Royal Society, for sixty-six years kept a diary, published posthumously in 1818. Its six volumes contain more than half a million words, and I’m reading a selection. In the entry for October 16, 1671, Evelyn describes his “desire to see that famous scholar and physician, Dr. T[homas] Browne, author of the Religio Medici and Vulgar Errors, now lately knighted.” He continues:

 

“Next morning, I went to see Sir Thomas Browne . . . ; his whole house and garden being a paradise and cabinet of rarities; and that of the best collection, especially medals, books, plants, and natural things. Among other curiosities, Sir Thomas had a collection of the eggs of all the fowl and birds he could procure, that country (especially the promontory of Norfolk) being frequented, as he said, by several kinds which seldom or never go further into the land, as cranes, storks, eagles, and variety of water fowl.”

 

I admire few writers of prose more than Browne. His writing is a form of collecting – words, ideas, scraps of knowledge – but I confess the collecting of birds’ eggs disturbs my twenty-first-century sensibilities (I don’t even eat eggs). It comes to seem like needless slaughter, an act not unlike abortion, especially today with all the other threats – loss of habitat, pesticides, etc. -- facing wildlife. I collected butterflies as a boy, which entailed netting, killing and mounting specimens. Nigel Andrew recounts his own evolving reaction to butterfly collecting in his marvelous  book The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment (Saraband, 2025). According to the website of the American Ornithological Society:

 

“Egg collecting, or öology as it was once known, became illegal in the UK in 1954, and collectors have since been excoriated to such an extent than even the sight of a clutch of eggs in a museum can trigger an indignant outburst.”

'Discipline Imposed By Ourselves'

Marianne Moore died on this date, February 5 in 1972 at age eighty-four. She is a genuine homegrown American eccentric, writing in a manner borrowed, in part, from Henry James. Of him she wrote, “There was in him ‘the rapture of observation,’ but more unequivocally even than that, affection for family and country.” Her self-describing tag from James is taken from his 1875 short story “The Madonna of the Future.” As with Keats, I prefer Moore’s prose to her poetry. Regardless of fame, honors or critical recognition, a good or great writer amounts to a man or woman observing the world and turning what he sees into memorable, sometimes beautiful, sometimes savage words.

I started Anecdotal Evidence twenty years ago today, on February 5, 2006. I started in ignorance, not certain what I wanted to do, unsure of my digital skills. I have posted at least once every day since then – 7,595 times in total -- except for a brief spell in 2019 following spinal surgery. Writing a blog amounts to conducting an education in public. As I wrote on the occasion of the blog’s fifth anniversary: “If a day were to pass without a thought worthy of nurture, I would be a sorry writer. Arranging words in pleasing shapes, like a folk artist snipping tin for a weather vane, is what we do.” I try not to take myself too seriously while taking the writing very seriously.

 

I have many readers and covert teachers to thank. Among the personal dead: Guy Davenport, Kenneth Kurp, D.G. Myers, Helen Pinkerton, Terry Teachout. Among the public dead: Max Beerbohm, Whittaker Chambers, J.V. Cunningham, Dr. Johnson, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Vladimir Nabokov, Michael Oakeshott. Among the living: Nigel Andrew, Gary Baldridge, R.L. Barth, Elizabeth Conquest, Boris Dralyuk, Joseph Epstein, Joel Gershowitz, Dana Gioia, Cynthia Haven, Mike Juster, Thomas Parker, Jay Stribling, Rabbi David Wolpe, Mike Zim and many others. Above all, Dave Lull, my personal copy editor and style conscience since the early days of the blog.  

 

In her 1948 essay “Humility, Concentration, and Gusto,” Moore writes: “All of which is to say that gusto thrives on freedom, and freedom in art, as in life, is the result of a discipline imposed by ourselves. Moreover, any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.” 

 

[Moore’s 1934 essay “Henry James As a Characteristic American” is one of her best. It’s collected in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (ed. Patricia C. Willis, 1986), as is “Humility, Concentration, and Gusto.”]

'These Ghosts Which Claim My Book'

Long ago, during a telephone conversation with the late poet and dear friend Helen Pinkerton, I asked about her friendship with another poet, Edgar Bowers, likewise a former student of Yvor Winters at Stanford. She remembered Bowers as good company, a friend who enjoyed social life and lively conversation with people he liked and trusted. Georgia-born Bowers could be crusty and disapproving of bad taste and bad manners. Here is Helen’s elegy “For Edgar Bowers” (Taken in Faith, 2002): 

“I heard that you were dead, Edgar, and wept.

I thought of times at Miramar we watched

The sun go down, the southern stars emerge,

Hearing the long roll and the crash of surf,

While we sat talking, laughing, drinking till dawn.

 

“Your ashes lie now by the western sea,

Quiet as those of Winters and Valéry.

 

“Your poems live, the spirit’s breath and seed.

Hades, who would take all, spare them his greed.”

 

Conversation, again. Helen adds, below the title, “After Callimachus,” a reference to the third-century-B.C. Greek poet. I hear an echo of lines from a Callimachus poem titled “On Himself” in The Greek Anthology (trans. Peter Jay, 1973). The Greek was born in Cyrene, in modern Libya, and sometimes called himself Battiades, “son of Battos,” after the mythical founder of Cyrene:

 

“You're walking by the tomb of Battiades,

Who knew well how to write poetry, and enjoy

Laughter at the right moment, over the wine.”

 

Helen asked me during that telephone conversation if I found the poems in Bowers’ first collection, The Form of Loss (1956), difficult. Indeed, I did. The lines are often so compressed that ready comprehension is delayed, at best. Here is “To the Reader,” the prologue to that debut collection:

 

“These poems are too much tangled with the error

And waste they would complete. My soul repays me,

Who fix it by a rhythm, with reason’s terror

Of hearing the swift motion that betrays me.

Mine be the life and failure. But do not look

Too closely for these ghosts which claim my book.”

 

I’ve lived with Bowers’ poems for years. The early ones especially are inexhaustible and release their secrets slowly, across the years. The tone is at once melancholy, humble and reverent of the past. Among the ghosts one hears are Ben Jonson and Fulke Greville.

Among the participants in “How Shall a Generation Know Its Story: The Edgar Bowers Conference and Exhibition” in 2003, three years after Bowers’ death, was the poet and friend to Bowers,  Suzanne Doyle. Her contribution is a series of excerpts from Bowers’ emails to her: “My friendship with Edgar in the last few years of his life,” she writes, “was one long rendition of Ben Jonson’s poem, ‘Inviting a Friend to Supper,’ and this happy state of affairs is documented in our email exchange:

 

From 1996: “[M]ost ‘philosophers’ write foolishly about art . . . if you find a copy of [Etienne] Gilson’s The Unity of Philosophical Experience, get that! It’s a wonderful book, fun as fiction, and always something to talk about. Also Eric Voegelin’s The Mind of the Polis . . . Another wonderful book for its own sake and philosophical in the true sense and full of learning and information and insight. . . . I’m off tonight to a class in Chinese Cooking that Heals!”

 

Bowers died twenty-five years ago today, on February 4, 2000, at age seventy-five.

'A Word So Delicious'

A former colleague at the university asked if I would proof a paper he had written before he sent it to an academic journal. That’s part of what I did for a living for many years, before retirement, and he knows I'm fast and reliable. It felt like giving an old friend a modest gift. I found a few typos and questioned one of his citations but best of all I encountered the word in the English language I most enjoy pronouncing: molybdenum (Mo, atomic number 42). 

My fondness has nothing to do with molybdenum’s chemical properties or its use in military armor, aircraft parts, electrical contacts and industrial motors. I just love saying that double iamb. It sounds like the quintessential mumble. I would have loved to hear Marlon Brando saying the word, which is rooted in scientific Latin. Other nominees for the title Most Euphonious Word in the Language: scrim, adamantine, limbeck, epanalepsis, atrorubent, Precambrian, scofflaw, ball-peen, Guelph, rawky . . .

 

Jules Renard writes in a February 1888 entry in his Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020): “A word so delicious that one wishes it had cheeks, so as to kiss them.”

'Weldon Kees: The Disappearing Poet'

 Dana Gioia has written, produced and posted a much-needed video about the curious life and work of the American poet Weldon Kees. Wait for the cameo appearance of Boris Dralyuk.

'To Notice, to Wonder, to Marvel, to Be Astonished'

In his Notebooks, 1922-86, Michael Oakeshott titles an entry from March 1955 “The True Believer”: 

“Before he became a member of the Party he felt himself to be merely an isolated individual, lonely & lost, tormented, helpless, vindictive, but quite incapable of forming judgments either about himself or about the affairs of the world. He held no standard of values; he felt himself to be a pariah. All he knew for certain was that he was not a man at peace with himself & and could not be at peace with other men. He sought an authority to obey; in the party he found release.”

 

Oakeshott sounds remarkably like the American “longshoreman philosopher” Eric Hoffer (1902-83). His “Reflections” column was syndicated in U.S. newspapers, including The Cleveland Press, from January 1968 to April 1970 – my high school years. I read the columns, clipped and pasted them in a scrapbook, then moved on to Hoffer’s books, in particular his first, The True Believer (1951). Compare Oakeshott’s observation with a passage (Sec. 2, Chap. 10) from that book:

 

“A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.

This minding of other people’s business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national, and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor’s shoulder or fly at his throat.”

 

The busybody, in other words, is a sad soul, empty and likely without mature values. He dwells in a state of eternal childhood: If you don’t like Daddy, find a new Daddy, one who will hold your hand and lead you down the path to righteousness. The type brings to mind conversion to the more rabid forms of religious practice.

 

What moved me about Hoffer’s work, and what still moves me, were his commonsensical ideas, his lack of pretentiousness and snobbery, the clarity of his prose, his gift for aphorism, his hatred of Communism and other tyrannies, his support for Israel and his working-class origins. Not that I could have identified many of those qualities when I was fifteen. Apart from my teachers and doctors, I knew no one who had gone to college. I grew up knowing that autodidacticism was the essence of true education. Degrees still mean little to me. Hoffer seemed like a guy I could talk to. Oakeshott returns to these themes and their alternatives throughout his Notebooks:

 

“A man incapable of being happily resigned to being a nobody is never likely to be a somebody.”

 

“To notice, to wonder, to marvel, to be astonished, perhaps to be dismayed—la chase--& then what? To understand that one never completely understands.”

 

“Some people take everything for granted; to others, everything is wonderful and mysterious. What else is there to do with the mystery of human life but to fall in love with it!”

'Try to Make Something New'

Almost the only thing I ever write down so I don’t forget it is the grocery list. Sporadically I kept a diary when younger but each time the essential tedium of recording quotidian events defeated me. I discovered that most of my own life, the practical stuff that consumes so much of my time, is too trivial to preserve. And I didn’t reread these ghastly transcripts of the day’s events and my precious reflections anyway. Some things are meant to be forgotten. I no longer keep a commonplace book. I find that my memory of what I have read remains fairly reliable. Kay Ryan speaks for me in her essay “Notes on the Danger of Notebooks”: 

“We must run roughshod over what threaten to become memories. For the truth is that memories are indistinguishable from matter in that they can neither be created (despite the claims of vacation brochures) nor destroyed.”

 

Ryan’s ruthlessness I’ve always found refreshing. As a poet she combines a drily comic tone with philosophical heft and a well-oiled bullshit detector. She defies us to take her seriously, when we’d rather laugh her out of the room. She continues:

“For of course it is only within the context of loss that anything can be said to be found. That seems ridiculously obvious, and yet we struggle against it. And isn't finding, the moment of finding, our supreme thrill? We call it discovery and make much of it, forgetting that it is the gift of loss.

 

“Still, it is as dangerous to cultivate loss as it is to try to stop it through the keeping of notebooks; we are a self-regarding creature and we will watch ourselves losing and become bewitched by our own affecting actions. We are so moved by ourselves. This is natural, but it is distracting. What can we do?” 

 

A young man asks why I write. I write to keep myself amused, not to document my life. Even I don’t care much about that. If others share my enjoyment, I’m happy and take it as an endorsement. I like pleasing people and getting a morale boost as much as the next guy. But if I stopped finding pleasure in playing with words, I would give it up without guilt or remorse. I think Ryan is brilliant and she is one of my mentors, though I’ll never be a poet. Here’s how she closes the first section of her essay:

 

“I think we should try to do something, try to make something new, try very hard to write a poem, say; desire very much to articulate something that doesn't yet exist, something we don't yet know; try so hard that currents are created in the electric broth of what is not lost but not kept either, currents which draw to the mind the bits of the not lost and not kept that join together through the application of great mental force, extreme mental force, in some new and inevitable sequence appropriate to the new realm of the neither lost nor kept. It is incredibly stable when done right.”

 

[Ryan’s essay was originally published in Parnassus in 1998 and collected in Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose (2020).]