Ambushed by Surprise

One of the foremost pleasures of broad, unsystematic reading is unexpectedly recognizing oneself in the words of others. This can never be foreseen and, in my experience, cannot be forced. I can’t go looking for it because it happens when I’m reading in repose and without purpose. Mentally, I’m alert, as critical as ever, I suppose, but relaxed and responsive. This has happened several times lately, yet I can go weeks without that characteristic flash of self-illumination I’m talking about.

I read Richard Zenith’s translation of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquietude about two years ago, and an earlier translation back in the 90s, but while grazing through my Penguin paperback the other day I found this:

“Every day things happen in the world that can’t be explained by the laws we know about things. Every day they’re spoken of and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, their secret converting into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can’t be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. What’s alien peeps at us from the shadows.”

For me, Pessoa is talking about mental phenomena, not intimations of the supernatural – the quirks of memory and awareness that flicker for nanoseconds in consciousness. Why am I humming that song? Why do I suddenly remember a face from decades ago? Why does the book that gave me pleasure last night no longer interest me? Why do I suddenly crave a cup of tea when I drink only coffee? Why did that sincere, well-intended resolution abruptly shrivel? Trying to trace such mental events back to their stimuli, whatever sparked them, is futile and humbling. None of them is significant, yet each seems uncanny. Pessoa’s insight feels deeply personal, as though he were confiding in me. Such is the power of great writing that a Portuguese poet who died more than 70 years ago can know something about me that I didn’t know.

And then there’s this, from John Clare, the wonderful English poet who at last came alive for me after I read Jonathan Bate’s biography:

“Truth is always asserted with the fewest words & falshood [sic] with the most protestations. Truth simply thinks you believe her & falsehood [sic] wishes to make you believe her [.]”

This comes from A Champion for the Poor: Political Verse and Prose, published by Carcanet Press in 2000, and edited by P.M.S. Dawson, Eric Robinson and David Powell. I find Clare’s personification of truth as a woman very touching. These sentences, taken from a handwritten manuscript and previously unpublished, confirm an intuition I have left unarticulated for years, one that gives the lie to marketing, advertising, public relations and all forms of “spin”: The truth, simple and unadorned, speaks confidently for itself. It doesn’t need our help. Have you noticed that people with the least to say take the most time saying it? And that what they say, in Harry Frankfurt’s sense, is often bullshit? Truth tends to be laconic, while lies are often garrulous.

Many of Clare’s lines in this collection are memorable. He is, strictly speaking, a “naïve” writer, whose work often straddles the not very useful divide between folk art and – what? High art? I’m not sure. He exercised artistic control, edited out material that didn’t please him, yet he was not a poet in the same sense as Keats, to choose an example from among his contemporaries. Anyway, here’s a passage that resonates for me, a citizen almost 54 years old who has exercised his right to vote only once and has regretted it ever since. Please make allowances for Clare’s unorthodox spelling and punctuation:

“I never meddle with politics in fact you would laugh at my idea of that branch of art for I consider it nothing more or less then a game at hide & seek for self interest & the terms wig & tory are nothing more in my mind then the left & right hand of that monster the only difference being that the latter lyes nearer the windfalls of wills for self interest then the other – that there are some & many who have the good of the people at heart is not to be doubted but with the others who have only the good of themselves in view when balloted I fear that will always be as the few….”