`To Crave and to Have'

I remember, while reading the slender black Penguin edition of Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia in college, that I underlined more sentences than not. The book seemed dense with wisdom and learned observation, rooted in Johnson’s humane sensibility, and I feared missing something. It is, after all, the story of a young man and his teachers, in some ways like my life at age 19, and to that degree I was an ideal reader and wished to live up to Johnson’s accomplishment as a writer. What I feared most was failing him, and I worked hard to be worthy of his book. In a sense that labor has never ceased. Here’s a passage, chosen almost randomly, from Chapter 4 of Rasselas:

“His chief amusement was to picture to himself that world which he had never seen; to place himself in various conditions; to be entangled in imaginary difficulties, and to be engaged in wild adventures: but his benevolence always terminated his projects in the relief of distress, the detection of fraud, the defeat of oppression, and the diffusion of happiness.”

That was a model I hoped to emulate, but my success has always been compromised. My earnestness was matched only by my laziness and bad faith. I know with certainty that nonfiction can be a source of wisdom. Consider Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Johnson, Emerson and William James. But what about fiction? Can a novel or story still dispense wisdom in our skeptical, ironical age? This passage come from Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping, published in 1980:

“Imagine a Carthage sewn with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water—peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need for slaking. For need can blossom into the compensation it requires. To crave and to have are as alike as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole.”

With allowances for differences in language, though both writers are rooted in the Bible, Robinson is channeling Johnson late in the 20th century. The passage is doubly persuasive because it grows organically out of the themes, characters and events of Housekeeping, and is not tacked on arbitrarily like a superimposed sermon. Robinson’s words echo a reiterated theme in Johnson’s work. Look at this, from Adventurer No. 67, published June 26, 1753:

“That the happiness of man may still remain imperfect, as wants in this place are easily supplied, new wants likewise are easily created; every man, in surveying the shops of London, sees numberless instruments and conveniences, of which, while he did not know them, he never felt the need; and yet, when use has made them familiar, wonders how life could be supported without them. Thus it comes to pass, that our desires always increase with our possessions; the knowledge that something remains yet unenjoyed, impairs our enjoyment of the good before us.”

As another example of wisdom in fiction, consider the words of the narrator of William Maxwell’s Time Will Darken It (1948). He is garrulous, not afraid to stop the proceedings in a manner that recalls a more reticent version of George Eliot’s narrator. This reader, at least, welcomes his interpolations. In Part 4, Section 9, he writes:

“The truth is necessarily partial. Every vision of completeness is a distortion in one way or another, whether it springs from sickness or sanctity. But in the visions of saints there are voices that speak reassuringly of the cloud of Unknowing.”

Wisdom is not moralizing and I’m not calling for a revival of fiction-as-tract. When Tolstoy lost his artistic nerve and put on the mantle of prophet, he repudiated fiction and wrote screeds. At their best, novelists like Robinson and Maxwell possess the imaginative confidence to include wisdom among their pleasures, without sacrificing the supreme pleasure, which is aesthetic. Listen to Johnson again, this time from his life of Dryden:

“Works of imagination excel by their allurement and delight; by their power of attracting and detaining the attention. That book is good in vain which the reader throws away. He only is the master who keeps the mind in pleasing captivity; whose pages are perused with eagerness, and in hope of new pleasure are perused again; and whose conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow, such as the traveller casts upon departing day.”