`Enlivened'

Frank Wilson, writing about his happy meetings in Philadelphia with Canadian blogger Nigel Beale, sounds almost utopian:

“Not that many years ago, he would have been a book lover in Canada and I a reviewer in Philadelphia and anything we knew about each would have been purely accidental. Thanks to blogging we are part of a worldwide network of kindred spirits. Admission to that network is based on mutual love of books and reading and writing. Note to newspaper editors: People like Nigel and I - and Dave and Paul and Maxine and Patrick - are the people you should go to if you want to know what people who care about books and reading are really interested in. And politics and policy do not top the list, even though it appears to exhaust the list for said editors, most of whom couldn't quote a line of poetry if their lives depended on it, have never really listened to the Bach cello suites, or stood in front of a Sargent for several minutes just taking it in. It's called civilization.”

Only by our degraded standards – admittedly, yawped by the loudest voices – could this be understood as utopian. Bookishness is mistrusted and misunderstood and perhaps never more so than now. It’s not timidity or neurotic maladjustment and it’s certainly not, to use my favorite cant word, elitistism. Bookishness, a devotion to books, is a willing communion with other minds, some long dead. Frank’s “kindred spirits” experience an intensification of this intimacy: They have nurtured friendships with others already in communion. I like Boswell’s account of Johnson’s indirect definition of friendhip:

“I regretted that I had lost much of my disposition to admire, which people generally do as they advance in life. Johnson: `Sir, as a man advances in life, he gets what is better than admiration, --judgement, to estimate things at their true value.’ I still insisted that admiration was more pleasing than judgement, as love is more pleasing than friendship. The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne. Johnson: `No, Sir, admiration and love are like being intoxicated with champagne; judgement and friendship like being enlivened.’”

That’s it: In the company of a friend I’m enlivened. I have a surfeit of thoughts and impressions because I know he will listen to them, appreciate them even in disagreement, and respond in kind. A friend encourages me to become more than myself. Blogging has given me friends, whom I trust and who offer reliably good company, I’m likely never to have otherwise known. We would have remained passengers on a train, departing from the same station, arriving at the same station, having never intersected, like parallel lines in a geometry text. Frank wrote in another post, in another context, on Sunday:

“As I have made plain here a number of times, my life was enriched by encounters with great teachers. But what made those teachers great was that they never lost sight of the connection between the subjects they were teaching and life.”

One’s bookish friends place books in one dish, life in the other, and the scales always balance. On Saturday, Frank, via Dave Lull, linked to a story in Harper’s by Wyatt Mason about the writer and teacher Josiah Mitchell Morse. A long time ago Dave suggested I read Morse, a name previously unknown to me, and now, finally, I have – The Irrelevant English Teacher, published by Temple University Press in 1972. This aphoristic and logically constructed passage from Morse’s preface will sound reassuringly familiar to friends:

“We are perishing for lack of style.

“Style is a matter of intellectual self-respect. To write well, a certain moral courage is essential. A certain insouciance.

“Literary judgment is not a matter of feeling but a matter of intellectual perception. This too takes courage. And knowledge.

“Good writing is relevant to itself. It need not be relevant to anything else.

“Bad writing is not relevant to itself, or to anything else.

“The difference between good writing and bad is objectively demonstrable.

“The contemplation of a well-made sentence is the second greatest pleasure in life. The greatest, of course, is to write such a sentence oneself. What did you think it was?”

Well, friends?