`Look Into Everything, Keep the Best'

As a biweekly book reviewer for the New York Sun, Eric Ormsby may have the most enviable job in the world. He rarely reviews a lousy volume and (even better and not unrelated) often reviews the great writers of the past as they are published in new editions, or as biographies and critical works about them appear. Within the last year he has weighed the worth of Shakespeare, Casanova, Samuel Johnson, Hart Crane, Samuel Beckett and R.K Narayan, among other delights. The books he reviews would constitute the foundation of an excellent library, though I’m certain he could amusingly demolish the day’s pretentious trifles. His enviable selectivity seems preferable to the widely accepted convention of reviewing books simply because they are new, regardless of their insignificance.

Ormsby is a poet, practiced in the arts of precision and concision, and he freely exercises his gift for aphoristic pithiness. Each review contains nuggets to be relished, even out of context, apart from the book at hand. In the March 14 Sun, in his review of Gillian Darley’s John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity, he writes:

“John Evelyn might seem of interest only to specialists in 17th-century manners. Nothing could be more mistaken. Not only does the fascination of the man himself grow with acquaintance, but his approach to life offers a tacit rebuke to our own. Compared to him, we look narrow in our interests. An extraordinary openness to life in all its manifestations was his defining feature.”

We take pleasure in the company of knowledgeable, animated, limber-minded, well-read people. Boredom is boring, and “an extraordinary openness to life,” as Ormsby puts it, seems a likely antidote, for openness is aligned with gratitude, and gratitude quells world-weariness. But I can’t help thinking I am “narrow,” and I’m not certain I would have it otherwise. Much that life offers an American living early in the 21st century holds no attraction, but don’t think me ungrateful. I give thanks for antibiotics, black coffee, indoor plumbing and libraries that promise access to any book I wish. I even like the Internet, something I couldn’t have said a decade ago.

But I remain closed, by choice, to much that occupies the attention of my fellow Americans. I’m not interested in opening myself to sports and games, automobiles, advertising, the greater part of television and popular music, fast food, gambling, pop religion, incivility, a vulgar and freely expressed indulgence in anger, pornography, politics as practiced, tobacco and most other mood-altering drugs. I recoil from this list of diversions principally out of indifference, not moral revulsion. And yet, despite my whittling away of options, I have no time to pursue all my interests. I’m reminded of a dream Emerson recorded in a letter, reported by his best biographer, Robert D. Richardson:

“I dreamed that I floated at will in the great Ether, and I saw this world floating also not far off, but diminished to the size of an apple. Then an angel took it in his hand and brought it to me and said, `This must thou eat.’ And I ate the world.”

When Virginia Woolf reviewed Emerson’s Journals, she said “he cannot be rejected because he carries the universe within him.” That spirit of bottomless thirst for the world, never slaked by the tawdry or counterfeit, I adopt as my own. Based on Ormsby’s enthusiasm (and that’s what the best critics do: instill enthusiasm), I checked out Darley’s newly published life of Evelyn from the library. I’ve read only the introduction, but that was enough to learn Evelyn’s personal motto, one he inscribed in all of his books for 80 years:

“Omnia explorate, meliora retinete.”

Darley gives this translation:

“Look into everything, keep the best.”