`Beautiful Things are Rare'

I have a friend who, like me, is a former newspaper reporter and now a science writer. He is a passionate rationalist, but then Bob is passionate about everything and without tolerance for any sort of fraud. He is a nonbeliever, as I am, but with less empathy for the religious impulse. I accept the pull of the transcendent and its deep human attraction. Bob does not, yet his favorite poem, unrivalled by any other, remains T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. After long acquaintance (more than 40 years), it has come to seem like the great poem of the miserable 20th century, even to me. Thanks to Dave Lull, by way of Frank Wilson at Books, Inq., I read Eric Ormsby’s much-too-short “T.S. Eliot’s Subway Metaphysics” in Wednesday’s New York Sun. Frank echoes my feelings:

“This [is] quite a piece. Amazing that it should appear in a newspaper. Sad that such pieces don't appear more often in newspapers (though finding people to write them wouldn't be easy).” Ormsby mentions that his preference is for the slender, pocket-size Harvest Books edition, now carrying a $9 price tag. I, too, have the Harvest Books paperback, but I bought mine in 1971. The price: $1.35. Here’s Ormsby:

“….Four Quartets deals with merciless honesty in every section with the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of writing well. Because `words move … only in time,’ they are continually eluding our attempts to use them. No sooner have we written them than they appear inadequate; the pattern has changed, the words no longer correspond: `And so each venture/ is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate / with shabby equipment always deteriorating/in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.’ After the exquisite lyric which begins, `What is the late November doing/ with the disturbance of the spring?’ he comments dryly, `That was a way of putting it — not very satisfactory.’ But he also offers advice that's valid for every writer who should use

“`The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together.’”

Strunk and White, move over. “The formal word precise but not pedantic” has been my not-always-lived-up-to mantra as a writer for years. And Frank is right: It’s a miracle that criticism – any writing, really -- of this order should appear in a newspaper. Ormsby’s writing, as always, is learned and discerning, yet personal and enthusiastic, composed with love. Apropos only of reading Eliot again, consider this well-known passage from Murder in the Cathedral:

“You think me reckless, desperate and mad.
You argue by results, as this world does,
To settle if an act be good or bad.
You defer to the fact. For every life and every act
Consequence of good and evil can be shown.
And as in time results of many deeds are blended
So good and evil in the end become confounded.”

These lines live up to the diffident/ostentatious, old/new, etc. balance proposed by Eliot above. I thought of them the other night, even before reading Ormsby’s piece, while reading this passage in “Some Reflections on Religious Art,” an appendix to Jacques Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism:

“Evil is by nature easy. Because good is a wholeness, whereas evil is a deficiency, and because evil does not act through itself but through the good it preys upon, it takes but a small amount of good to succeed greatly in evil, whereas it takes a great amount of good to succeed but a little in good.”

Elsewhere in the same book, Maritain writes: “Beautiful things are rare.”