`Sentences Suffused with Mind'

Philip Roth refers to Primo Levi’s “sentences suffused with mind,” a quality rare in prose and poetry. When we read the newspaper, the sentences are suffused with – what? Formula, I suppose, albeit clever or skillfully honed. How often are we surprised by word or thought? And should the news to surprise us? We may remember a story but how often do we remember a sentence or word of journalism? The mantra of the newsroom has always been “Same shit, different day.” In “A Treatise of Civil Power,” section XXXVI, Geoffrey Hill writes:

“And news is civil power in the free falling
oligarchical free world: the null stridor
and prattle that ignores its switching-off.
Others are murderers and these are not,
or not directly. Again the words swing by
imagined as rebuke: that kindling her
undazl’d eyes… No change
saying that I have changed, divine Thanatos.”

Reading Hill approximates the wonder and work of reading Donne and late Shakespeare. “Stridor” is “a harsh, shrill or creaking noise,” which I remember Robert Penn Warren using to describe the sound of wind in the pines. It nicely echoes “strident,” but also has a suggestive medical meaning: the ugly sound made when the airway is obstructed. Rimbaud uses the French cognate in "Voyelles": “O, suprême Clairon plein de strideurs estranges…” Hill lifts the four unattributed words in italics from Aereopagitica, Milton’s rousing defense of freedom of the press.

“Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks: Methinks I see her as an Eagle muing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazl'd eyes at the full midday beam; purging and unscaling her long abused sight at the fountain it self of heav'nly radiance; while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amaz'd at what she means, and in their envious gabble would prognosticat a year of sects and schisms.”

“Sentences suffused with mind.”