`The Most Commonplace Conversation'

Only once has a fictional character recommended a book to me. This happened almost 40 years ago when I read the never-completed Stephen Hero, Joyce’s proto-A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It was written between 1904 and 1906 but not published until three years after the author’s death in 1941. Of the soon-to-be Stephen Dedalus, Joyce writes:

“He read Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary by the hour, and his mind which had from the first been only too submissive to the infant sense of wonder, was often hypnotized by the most commonplace conversation.”

“Skeat,” I learned, was the Rev. Walter W. Skeat (1835-1912), the English philologist and author of An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, published in four parts between 1879 and 1882 (the latter being the year of Joyce’s birth). I acquired a beaten-up paperback copy. At the time I was reading Joyce Talmudically, tracking allusions, but reading Skeat turned out to be a sovereign pleasure. Eventually I acquired the large-format 1989 edition published by Oxford University Press, which I pulled from the shelf on Saturday.

A work I’ve known even longer than Joyce’s and Skeat’s is Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, which premiered on Broadway in 1957. I was 10 when the movie came out, and within two years I was singing "Sincere" and “Lida Rose” in the junior-high-school glee club. I know most of the show’s lyrics by heart, or thought I did, and lately have been playing the soundtrack CD in the car for the kids. The first song, “Rock Island,” is set in a train car and contains the line “cash for the noggins and the piggins and the firkins.”

After almost half a century of listening I finally heard those words and wondered what the hell they meant, so I consulted Skeat. He defines noggin as “a wooden cup, small mug,” and adds “a small cask, a firkin,” citing Swift as a source for this usage (“Lines to Dr. Sheridan,” 1719). Piggin is “a small wooden vessel,” and firkin “the fourth part of a barrel. All are words rendered almost extinct by changing technology. “Rock Island” also mentions the Model-T Ford, first manufactured in 1908.

Taken together, don’t noggin, piggin and firkin sound euphemistically salacious? And like the name of a Dickensian law firm?

`A Frivolity Which Is Innocent'

Computer troubles render today’s original post inaccessible, and contingency disallows a substantial replacement. More importantly, I’ve had time to fulfill my paternal obligations and introduce my younger sons to the Three Stooges. The event feels momentous, a handing off of the comedic torch. In first grade we were assigned to make a clock face on a paper plate and set the construction paper hands to our favorite time of day. We showed the class our finished clocks, and they guessed why the time we chose was important. My hour was 5:30, and classmates guessed that was dinner time. No, that’s when Captain Penny, a television host in Cleveland, played a Three Stooges comedy, preferably from the pre-Shemp era. My kids, like all thoughtful children, already prize the sublime Curly over his mediocre successor. Auden writes in The Dyer’s Hand:

“A frivolity which is innocent, because unaware that anything serious exists, can be charming, and a frivolity which, precisely because it is aware of what is serious, refuses to take seriously that which is not serious, can be profound.”

`It's Mainly Because of Thanksgiving'

On Thanksgiving Day, while my wife took the kids to see a movie, I drove 40 minutes on empty freeways to retrieve Christmas ornaments and lights from the storage unit. Earlier in the week we had hung a wreath of fresh conifer boughs on the front door, so each arrival and departure brings with it the scent of a lumber mill. Because of the holiday, about which a religious aura still lingers, I was in the mood for sacred music and put on Lester Young’s “Kansas City” Sessions. By the time I heard Young’s clarinet solo on “Pagin’ the Devil,” I was feeling almost sanctified.

The prison-like storage facility was deserted. Even the caretaker, a loud peroxide blonde who lives on the premises and drives a red Corvette, was absent. Our unit resembles a garage on a corridor of identical garages, in a gray Soviet-style building of concrete blocks. I spent an hour digging through boxes. I found the outdoor Christmas lights but not the small ones for the tree. I found a Little Rascals DVD, the Library of America paperback of Moby-Dick, the board game Othello, two stuffed animals my 8-year-old wanted, two extension cords, and dumbbells and a medicine ball for my wife. We’ve lived comfortably without this stuff for more than six months but I packed it all in the car.

The drive back was faster (I didn’t get lost) and I looked forward to having the house to myself for an hour or so and cleaning the green beans. My wife had already stuffed the turkey and put it in the oven – another good smell in a warm house on a cold day. I wanted to read a poem I had remembered while digging through the boxes – “The Transparent Man” by the late Anthony Hecht. Please read the whole thing, one of Hecht’s dramatic monologues, spoken by a woman with leukemia, but these lines are the reason the poem had come back to me:

“It's mainly because of Thanksgiving. All these mothers
And wives and husbands gaze at me soulfully
And feel they should break up their box of chocolates
For a donation, or hand me a chunk of fruitcake.
What they don't understand and never guess
Is that it's better for me without a family;
It's a great blessing. Though I mean no harm.”

Read out of context, the following line sounds like a Zen bumper sticker. In context, it can make you weep:

“I care about fewer things; I'm more selective.”

`The Freedom to Feel Gratitude'

I wish to offer thanks for something that happened 27 years ago this month in north central Ohio, Sherwood Anderson country. It was a cold, overcast, snowless weekday morning and I had a date in court more than 100 miles away – a final divorce hearing, the end of a marriage I had botched from the start. About 10 miles from the courthouse, my car’s engine overheated. I was on a two-lane road near Archbold, home of La Choy Chinese Food, when I pulled into a service station. The mechanic opened the hood, let out a wall of steam and diagnosed a hole in the radiator.

I don’t ordinarily spew personal history at strangers, but to this guy, a middle-aged man in overalls, on a rural Ohio road flanked by corn fields, I spewed. I’m embarrassed now by my lack of composure. He said he was divorced and knew how important the hearing was. He gave me his keys and told me to drive his van to the courthouse. I know I sputtered and tried to offer him collateral but he wouldn’t take it. I drove to Bryan, sat through the hearing, answered the judge’s questions, signed the appropriate papers and left the courthouse unmarried.

Back at the service station, the mechanic had patched the hole in the radiator and charged me almost nothing. I’d had the presence of mind to fill the gas tank of his van, and tried again to pay him something, but he wouldn’t take it. Even in my callowness, I recognized genuine decency and humility. He seemed indifferent to my thanks – not scornful, but also not judging it necessary or important. He gave no indication he thought himself a fine fellow for trusting me with his van. He treated it as part of the job of being human, and thus embodied what Samuel Johnson identified in The Rambler No. 4:

“They who most deserve praise are often afraid to decide in favour of their own performances; they know how much is still wanting to their completion…”

A friend told me the most appropriate way to express gratitude is to do a good turn and not get found out. When I remember to do that I remember my friend and the nameless mechanic in Archbold. W. Jackson Bate writes in Samuel Johnson:

“An interesting thing about Johnson that is only superficially difficult to reconcile with his aggressive independence of nature is his enormous capacity for gratitude…If Johnson hated envy, and instinctively created a moral wall of taboo against it, he also detested the smallness of nature in those who cannot feel gratitude. So, in one of the Rambler essays (No. 4), he was to attack Swift’s maxim that men are `grateful in the same degree as they are resentful’ (`It is of the utmost importance to mankind, that positions of this tendency should be laid open and confuted’). The freedom to feel gratitude, to express it fully, was itself a sign that one was a `free agent’ and, in a fundamental sense, a `moral being.’”

`Poetry and Not Something Else'

“Those who demand of poetry a day-dream, or a metamorphosis of their own feeble desires and lusts, or what they believe to be `intensity’ of passion, will not find much in [Samuel] Johnson. He is like Pope and Dryden, Crabbe and Landor, a poet for those who want poetry and not something else, some stay for their own vanity.”

This is Eliot on “London” and “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” and might serve as a litmus test to distinguish the classical impulse from the romantic. I almost said the grownup from the childish but that would be neither fair nor entirely accurate. I’ve thought about Eliot’s distinction often while rereading Zbigniew Herbert’s poetry and prose. A passage in Adam Zagajewski’s prose sent me back to him. Herbert’s is public poetry, but never merely public. He is preoccupied with history – Poland’s and the West’s – but his classicism, compounded of learning, tact, tonal reticence and abhorrence of vulgarity, buffers his poems from agitprop and primal scream. In “London” Johnson writes:

“Here malice, rapine, accident conspire,
And now a rabble rages, now a fire;
Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay,
And here the fell attorney prowls for prey;
Here falling houses thunder on your head,
And here a female atheist talks you dead.”

And in “Report from the Besieged City” Herbert writes:

“in the evening I like to wander near the outposts of the city
along the frontier of our uncertain freedom
I look at the swarms of soldiers below their lights
I listen to the noise of drums barbarian shrieks
truly it is inconceivable the City is still defending itself
the siege has lasted a long time the enemies must take turns”

The full title of Johnson’s poem is “London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal.” He wrote it in 1738 when he was 29, and it’s a lesser poem than the later “Vanity” and correspondingly less “classical.” It’s funny (“female atheist”) and feels almost spontaneous, and doesn’t quite fit the image we have of the more mature Johnson.

Herbert’s poem was written in 1982, after the imposition of martial law in Poland, when the poet was almost 60 years old and an internationally respected figure. He might have howled, and people, his compatriots and others, would have listened. Instead, he spoke with dispassionate passion, not with “what they believe to be `intensity’ of passion.” “London” and “Report” are, in Eliot’s words, “poetry and not something else.” Neither can be reduced to potted opinion.
As an amusing diversion, let’s pay one of our periodic visits to Poets at War, a site dedicated to “the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.” Randolph Nesbitt, 47, of Aliso Viejo, Ca., contributes “I Take This War Personal [sic]”:

“I didn’t do that with the
Viet Nam war even though
I was carrying a number
that could be called
I was too busy following
wherever my testicles would lead
I never smelled napalm
only where my fingers
had been
never shot gooks
only anything living in
the ditch that day
and that sad deer
but this war is different
not because of 9/11 either
that debacle will
someday shock even patriots
no, this war has a
dark hand around my neck
I’m older
see the end of my life
and I see with so
much high-def clarity
what we are leaving
for our children to sort out
only some of it can’t be
sorted out
only dealt with
one body
one bullet
one scream
at a time
and when I go
I leave a son
who doesn’t carry
a number
only a curse
for which I helped
form the words”

This is not poetry but some version of Eliot’s “something else.” It has none of Johnson’s brio and elegance, none of Herbert’s moral authority. It’s petulant and vulgar, narcissism masking as principled outrage. Herbert wrote at the conclusion of “The Price of Art,” an essay from Still Life with a Bridle:

“It is we who are poor, very poor. A major part of contemporary arts declares itself on the side of chaos, gesticulates in a void, or tells the story of its own barren soul.

“The old masters – all of them without exception –could repeat after Racine, `We work to please the public.’ Which means they believed in the purposefulness of their work and the possibility of interhuman communication. They affirmed visible reality with an inspired scrupulousness and childish seriousness, as if the order of the world and the revolution of the stars, the permanence of the firmament, depended on it.

“Let such naïveté be praised.”

I take this as the opposite of Nesbittian sputtering on one side and Ashbery-esque persiflage, a garrulous, ephemeral drone, on the other.

`No One Can Do It Better'

“A sure sign of a masterpiece in any field of art is the feeling we get, when listening to it, looking at it, or reading it, that this – and no other – is the way things should be done. When reading Henry James we feel that no one can do it better, until we read Tolstoy, when we feel the same thing; when watching a Balanchine ballet we feel that this is precisely the way it should be done until we watch a ballet choreographed by Pepita…”

One of Joseph Epstein’s gifts as a writer is the way he identifies, often parenthetically, some quirk we believed was solely our possession. The paragraph above comes from his most recent book, Fred Astaire, published by Yale University Press. In his chapter on Astaire the singer, Epstein lauds the Verve recordings he made in the early nineteen-fifties with Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown and other jazz musicians. Astaire was returning to the songs he had performed with heavy orchestration 20 years earlier in his movies. Epstein much prefers the studio-recorded jazz settings, saying they “have a sweet brilliance made possible by the high order of musicianship he and the ensemble he is working with bring to them.”

At this point he digresses on masterpieces and one idiosyncratic way to identify them. Epstein’s novelistic succession, from James to Tolstoy, mirrors mine. With stories, it’s Chekhov; with plays and sonnets, Shakespeare. This is not a critical stricture; rather, testimony to the seductive power of great works of art. To say Tolstoy was the greatest novelist as though it closed a door on something or sealed an argument is simple-minded. All Epstein is saying is that great art recruits us and, while we’re engaged, moves us to willingly sign a loyalty oath -- “the way things should be done.”

I share Epstein’s love of Astaire as dancer, singer and actor, and his book is the best I’ve read on the subject, but he casually spins off digressions that offer deeper pleasures than the customary show-biz biography. Epstein is, by temperament and experience, an essayist, with an essayist’s taste for the discursive. He ignores the less-than-interesting and follows trails blazed by his curiosity and imagination. In the final chapter, “Dancing on Radio,” Epstein attempts to define and analyze Astaire’s style and, by extension, artistic style in general. He begins by distinguishing style from mere fashion, and then offers a tentative definition: “a way of viewing the world – a way of viewing the world that at the same time exhibits a strong indication of what one thinks of the world.” He briefly looks at style in painting and literature, and then refines his definition:

“To have style is to be original. Style and originality are one: true style is originality, true originality is style. One can as soon copy another style, in the sense in which I have been describing it, as one can take over another person’s precise way of looking at the world. One can try, I suppose, and even to some appearances succeed, but the result will be something different from style and very far from originality.”

This sounds like a not-so-oblique swipe at what passes for style and originality in the arts today. I can’t think of a single actor who possesses style, in the sense suggested by Epstein, the way Astaire did – and Jimmy Cagney, Robert Mitchum and Alec Guinness – and don’t even think about literature and painting. Using Epstein’s novelistic examples, who supplants Tolstoy as embodying “the way things should be done?” Proust, of course. In his discussion of the Astaire/Ginger Rogers pairing, Epstein implies as much (and who else, writing of Fred Astaire, could carry off a Proust reference?):

“In pursuing Ginger Rogers in the movies they did together, Astaire may have been going a bit down-market, in the way that Charles Swann goes after Odette de Crecy, the cocotte of Marcel Proust’s great novel. Not that the Ginger Rogers roles resembled in the faintest the character of Odette in Proustian complexity, but there is a common masculine fantasy about the pleasures promised by girls of a lower class than one’s own: the fantasy being that they are more passionate, somehow wilder than those of one’s own class; there is the accompanying fantasy that one can bring such a girl up to one’s level and show her, as they say, the finer things. There is, of course, nothing to any of this, as poor Charles Swann learns to his chagrin, but the presence of hard evidence rarely kills a fantasy.”

Just to dispel the suggestion that Epstein may be a bit stuffily professorial when it comes to Astaire, consider this summation of the dancer’s sister Adele:

“Her spirit is nicely captured in a needlepoint cushion she made for her brother and sister-in-law: on one side there was a floral design, on the other the words `Fuck Off.’”

`Literature Is Simply Good Writing'

Over breakfast on Sunday, my 8-year-old asked what a coelacanth was. I told him about the discovery 70 years ago of a fish assumed to have been extinct since the end of the Cretaceous period. Shortly after my lecture I exchanged e-mails with David Myers, proprietor of The Commonplace Blog, on the relative merits of Zbigniew Herbert’s translators. Then I read David’s post for Sunday, “Literature: the very idea,” and realized Samuel Johnson’s common reader (albeit an academic subspecies), once believed extinct, is the coelacanth of the digital age. We survive and thrive, solitary creatures, in the happy depths of our libraries.

A common reader possesses, along with formidable bookishness, an uncommon gift for common sense. David briefly and elegantly reviews Western civilization’s understanding of what constitutes literature, and concludes:

“Literature is just the writing that arouses the impulse to preserve it and pass it on. (I call that the `canonical impulse.’ Canons are inseparable from literature. To call something literature is to start a canon.)”

The canonical impulse, I think, begins in pleasure (others might call it love). I read something and enjoy it. My enjoyment may be purely aesthetic -- pleasure, say, in the music of a poem by Hopkins. It may be moral – an essay by Johnson that exposes or clarifies a worldly dilemma. It may be intellectual, as in one of Donne’s Holy Sonnets. Or it may be all of these things, or some combination of them. A week or 10 years later, I read the text again. It may give the same degree of pleasure, or less, or more, or a different sort of pleasure, or none at all. If my response is among the first four, I probably will, sooner or later, read it again, and perhaps again until it’s memorized (in the case of a short lyric) or at least becomes deeply familiar – second nature, as they say. The work and the reader intermingle and grow together – if the work is inexhaustible and worthy of preservation. Then it will survive – a rare quality, for most writing, even that which is justly or unjustly celebrated, is soon forgotten. In a poem addressed to his friend and fellow-poet, “To Ryszard Krynicki – a Letter” (translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter) Zbigniew Herbert writes:

“Not much will remain Ryszard really not much
of the poetry of our this insane century certainly Rilke Eliot
a few other distinguished shamans who knew the secret
of conjuring a form with words that resists the action of time without which
no phrase is worth remembering and speech is like sand”

In a letter to Benjamin Bailey, on Aug. 14, 1819, Keats writes: “Shakspeare [sic] and the paradise [sic] Lost every day become greater wonders to me.” Every uncommon common reader understands this. In the spirit of David’s “the writing that arouses the impulse to preserve it and pass it on,” let me pass on what Johnson wrote in his “Life of Gray”:

“In the character of his Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.”

Here is David’s conclusion:

“Literature is simply good writing—where `good’ has, by definition, no fixed definition.”

`A Compendium of All Knowledge'

Speculum meant only one thing to me – a rather unpleasant instrument wielded by a doctor, usually a gynecologist, to open a body cavity for examination. Once again, my indefatigable ignorance receives confirmation. On Saturday I came across the word in a decidedly ungynecological context – a field guide to the birds of the Pacific Northwest. It’s not a practicable book. The text is an odd amalgam of the impressionistic and the technically ornithological. The authors refer, without context, to a duck’s “speculum.” I went to the closest dictionary – the Webster’s Third I received as a gift more than 35 years ago – and found this as the fifth definition:

“a patch of color covering the distal portion of the secondaries of most ducks and some other birds (as domestic fowls), exposed in the closed wing, variously colored and often with bluish or greenish iridescence or a frame of a different color, and usu. most brilliant in the adult male.”

All my life I’ve marveled at avian iridescence without knowing it had a name, and certainly never guessing it shared a name with a doctor’s crow bar (a nice avian echo). The etymology seems straightforward – from the Latin speculum, meaning “mirror.” The Latin specere means “to look.” Speculum entered English during Shakespeare’s working life, c. 1597, but he seems not to have used it.

Webster’s first definition is the medical one I already knew. The second has two parts – an ancient mirror of bronze or silver; a reflector in an optical instrument, such as a telescope. Things started getting interesting with the third definition:

“a medieval treatise constituting a survey of life or of philosophy, history, and theology : a comprehensive, encyclopedic presentation of a aiming to be a compendium of all knowledge and usu. beginning with the Biblical account of creation, giving an outline of history, and thence passing chiefly to theology and scholastic philosophy…”

Putting Shakespeare aside momentarily, this definition alone proves the linguistic genius of English. The book I thought of immediately, though not medieval, is The Anatomy of Melancholy – “a compendium of all knowledge.” Number four is likewise unexpected:

“a drawing or table showing the relative positions of all the planets (as in an astrological nativity…”

That a Latin-derived word just over 400 years old can mutate so variously makes one proud to have inherited so fecund a language. Of course, there’s more: Ophrys speculum is a species of orchid. Speculum is the name of “a San Diego California grindcore/death metal band,” and of the scholarly journal of the Medieval Academy of America. A speculum metal is “an alloy containing copper and tin used for making all-metal mirrors.” Roger Bacon wrote Speculum Alchimiae; John Gower, Speculum Meditantis. Getting back to the avian sense, Darwin used it simply in The Descent of Man:

“The wild-duck offers an analogous case, for beautiful green speculum on the wings is common to both sexes...”

`Don't Complain'

I’ve met and spoken to one person who knew Zbigniew Herbert, and she confirmed my impression of the poet as a man of steely principle – not a demagogue or a prig, as the description might suggest, but one unwilling to bend on matters of moral and artistic consequence. He was not by nature political but the 20th century conspired to force politics on him. With a few adjustments, Richard Holmes’ description of Shelley the arch-Romantic, of all people, applies with fair precision to Herbert the arch-anti-Romantic:

“…a writer in the most comprehensive sense: poet, essayist, dramatist, pamphleteer, translator, reviewer and correspondent. He was moreover a writer who moved everywhere with a sense of ulterior motive, a sense of greater design, an acute feeling for the historical moment and an overwhelming consciousness of his duty as an artist in the immense and fiery process of social change of which he knew himself to be a part.”

For “social change” read its opposite, individual autonomy. Herbert is among those writers – like the Samuels, Johnson and Beckett – who make, at least while you’re reading them, much of the rest of literature seem less essential, almost trivial. Their words peer back at us, weighing our worth, and we strive to be worthy by the seriousness of our attention. In “Beginning to Remember” (from A Defense of Ardor), a memoir of Herbert’s centrality to his life, fellow-Pole Adam Zagajewski, writes:

“The hard, very hard life and the radiant clarity of the poetry; the contrast was striking. But Herbert never would have written – as William Styron did, for example – a confessional book on his depression. This choice was both personal and part of the cultural tradition he endorsed. He took classicism to mean: Don’t complain. This is precisely the point of his brief poem `Why the Classics.’ In the depths of despair he wrote another lovely poem, `Old Masters,’ in which he marvels at the anonymous restraint of the Italian Gothic painters. No, he couldn’t write `American-style,’ he couldn’t acknowledge his `problems,’ share his personal cares with his readers.”

And for that, we who detest the virulent narcissism that dominates much American writing, honor him. Sample these oblique, stringent lines from the poems Zagajewski cites. First, from “Why the Classics” (translated by Peter Dale Scott and the late Czeslaw Milosz):

“if art for its subject
will have a broken jar
a small broken soul
with a great self-pity
what will remain after us
will it be lovers' weeping
in a small dirty hotel
when wall-paper dawns”

And these, the opening lines of “Old Masters” (translated by Alissa Valles):

“The Old Masters
did without names

“their signatures were
the white fingers of the Madonna”

Go here for a video memorial to Herbert (in Polish), and enjoy the Mozart. And here for an audio recording of Herbert reading one of his Mr. Cogito poems (also in Polish). This is the first time I’ve heard Herbert’s voice, which Zagajewski describes as “astonishing in its intensity, a deep, strong, beautiful voice, well modulated – although not at all artificial, theatrical in the negative sense…” In the same essay Zagajewski writes:

“Like several other great poets in this historical moment, Herbert stood before Evil and Beauty – the demon and the divinity, two riddles linked by nothing, that create no order when taken together, but likewise provide no illumination when considered separately.”

`The Inferior Role of Chronicler'

Adam Zagajewski mourns the passing of history as a literary art. Modern historians, he says, “write in an inhuman, ugly, wooden, bureaucratic language from which all poetry’s been driven, a language flat as a wood louse and petty as the daily paper.” He names no names but historical writing has seen few heirs to Gibbon and Adams, though let’s give thanks for Shelby Foote.

The Greeks, Zagajewski says in Another Beauty, offer us the examples of Thucydides and Herodotus, “the ideal of the historian-poet, a person who either has seen and experienced what he describes for himself, or has drawn upon a living oral tradition, his family’s or his tribe’s, who doesn’t fear engagement and emotion, but who cares nonetheless about his story’s truthfulness.”
Zagajewski goes on to cite a few hopeful signs:

“We are in fact witnessing a revival of literature that serves this very purpose, but almost no one’s paid attention: writers’ journals, memoirs, poets’ autobiographies harken back to an archaic literary tradition, the writing of history from the viewpoint of a sovereign individual and not an assistant professor, a slave to modish methodologies, a state employee who must flatter simultaneously both the powers that be and the reigning Parisian epistemology. Examples? Here’s a sampling: the autobiographies of Edwin Muir, Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, among other poets, the essays of Hubert Butler, Nicola Chiaromonte, the notebooks of Jozef Czapski, Albert Camus…The sketches of Zbigniew Herbert, Jerzy Stempowski, of Boleslaw Micinski, ill with tuberculosis. Here are people who refused to cheat, who eagerly sought out the truth and shrank from neither poetry nor terror, the two poles of our globe – since poetry does exist in the world, in certain events, at rare moments. And there’s also no shortage of terror.”

Do Zagajewski’s words remind you of anything? Do they recall a phenomenon born since the poet published Another Beauty in Poland 10 years ago? I refer, of course, to the blog, the domain of “a sovereign individual” if there ever was one. If blogging is to amount to more than a self-indulgent hobby, perhaps we ought to pay attention to some of Zagajewski’s suggestions. “Engagement and emotion” plus “truthfulness?” Well, there’s no scarcity of emotion, particularly self-righteous anger, in the blogosphere. And truthfulness, beginning with self-honesty, is always a problem in the human realm. The language of most bloggers is certainly “inhuman, ugly, wooden,” etc., but then most language today is.

No, clearly the most promising quality for bloggers among Zagajewski’s terms is sovereignty, the gift of writing independently, beholden to no one. Of course, such freedom means oceans of narcissistic drivel, but some of the best written, intelligent, principled prose I’ve read of late has appeared on blogs. This would seem to substantiate Zagajewski’s hope that “poetry does exist in the world, in certain events, at rare moments.” But recall what one of his poetic/moral teachers, the great Zbigniew Herbert, said in an interview with The Manhattan Review:

“Writing -- and in this I disagree with everybody -- must teach men soberness: to be awake. [Spoken in English.] To make people sober. It does not mean not to try. But with a small internal correction. I reject optimism despite all the theologians. Despair is a fruitful feeling. It is a cleanser, from desire, from hope. `Hope is the mother of the stupid.’ [This is a Polish proverb.] I don't like hope.”

But getting back to the role of bloggers as a mutant strain of historians, Herbert writes in “Report from the Besieged City” (translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter):

“Too old to carry arms and fight like the others –

“they graciously gave me the inferior role of chronicler
I record – I don’t know for whom – the history of the siege”

`Where Are the Songs of Spring?'

“…the superficial, that is to say, the subject matter.”

Sometimes it takes less than a sentence to wake up a reader. R.L. Barth roused me late Tuesday evening as I was reading his preface to The Selected Poems of Janet Lewis. Barth defends his description of Lewis as a “domestic poet,” citing her frequent references to “gardens, housework, children, domesticated animals.” He also calls her an “occasional poet” because she writes about “quarrels between friends, birthdays, friendship.” Then he moves in:

“Let me be honest, though: such adjectives – whether applied to war poets, domestic poets, or whatever kinds of poets – merely address the superficial, that is to say, the subject matter. Any perceptive reader recognizes immediately that, whatever their domestic subject matter, the themes of many of the poems transcend the merely domestic: love, death, memory, acceptance. We must not confuse the subject matter with the themes.”

For some reason I had not read Lewis’ poems before though I know the work of her husband, Yvor Winters, and some of his students, particularly Edgar Bowers, J.V. Cunningham, Thom Gunn and Donald Justice. The loss is mine because her poems have an appealing clarity, directness and absence of “poetic” ornamentation. Lewis (1899-1998) was born the same year as Hart Crane and outlived him by 66 years. She wrote and published poetry for more than 70 years. One senses the example of Imagism but not its slavish imitation. Here’s an early poem, “Fossil, 1919”:

“I found a little ancient fern
Closed in a reddish shale concretion,
As neatly and as charmingly set in
As my grandmother’s face
In a round apricot velvet case.”

Selected Poems is brief – 83 poems – but I read it straight through as though it were a novel. The cumulative impact of reading her consecutively and at one sitting – something I’ve almost never done – was therapeutic. I mean that in the sense of encouragement. Lewis handed me what Kenneth Burke called “equipment for living.” I don’t talk about poetry or any writing that way very often but following Barth’s suggestion, I think Lewis is a poet whose subject matter will never be confused with her themes, which are big, even eternal. Here’s another early poem, “October Morning”:

“The pump froze, the trees
Were hoar with mist.
In the plumed branch
Of white pine
Near the woodshed door
Were dozens of honey bees.”

In part because I had been reading Keats and writing about him earlier in the day, I thought of “To Autumn.” The season is right. “Hoar” is a Keatsian word, one he used in “Endymion,” “Hyperion” and “Lamia.” And at the close of his first stanza, he mentions bees and their “clammy cells.” So how pleasing it was the next morning to visit About Last Night and read Laura’s close reading of Keats’ final ode. She rightly calls it “a perfect and magical piece of writing, with effects that resonate and evolve for a lifetime.” Laura deprecates her reading as “amateur observations,” but we all know the etymology of amateur.

My history with the poem is also long and devoted, a sort of marriage, but my fondest association dates from the fall of 2002. I had returned to college after dropping out in 1973, at the end of my junior year. I needed only another four classes to graduate. One of them was independent study in my major, English, and I chose to write about Henry James. My thesis adviser was an English-born professor who had studied under the late Tony Tanner. Like Tanner, she loved James. We met weekly to discuss my reading and review potions of the thesis.

One afternoon in early October we were seated in her third-floor office. The campus, in upstate New York, is dense with red, black and white oaks, and her windows were filled with their copper-colored leaves, burnished by the late sunlight. One of us brought up “To Autumn” and I mentioned that Nathan Zuckerman quotes from it in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. Together we began saying the poem, piecing it together from memory. We had the first stanza complete. The others were patchier, like the lyrics to an old song without the music. There was competition between us but also mutual aid, and we carried on through “And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.” Both of us were laughing and had tears in our eyes, and I’ve never enjoyed a poem so much with another person.

`Homage is Due the World'

Guy Davenport’s collection of stories from 1993 has a curious and beautiful title – A Table of Green Fields – taken from a disputed line in Henry V. At the start of Act II, Scene 3, a character named Hostess (probably Mistress Quickly from Henry IV) describes the death of Sir John Falstaff:

“…after I saw him fumble with the sheets and play with flowers and smile upon his fingers' ends, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a' babbled of green fields.”

The final phrase has been read as a mishearing of Psalm 23 -- “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.” We know from Guy Davenport and James Laughlin: Selected Letters that Davenport approved the following passage from the story collection’s dust jacket:

“A constant theme in this book is the transmission of the past as an imaginative act; hence the title, Falstaff’s dying vision of `a table of green fields,’ probably a mishearing of his recitation of the Twenty-third Psalm, corrected by editors to `he babbled of green fields,’ a symbol of all fiction, an art that must be exact about the uncertain.”

Both readings of Shakespeare’s text are emotionally powerful, heightened by the Fat Knight’s death taking place offstage and related by a minor character speaking in the vernacular. Clearly, John Keats was moved by the passage. On the night of Feb. 3-4, 1820, the poet coughed and suffered his “death-warrant” hemorrhage. Trained as a physician, Keats recognized the stain on his sheets as arterial blood and knew his tuberculosis was advanced and almost certainly fatal. Ten days later he wrote in a letter to his friend James Rice:

“…--how astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties upon us! Like poor Falstaff, though I do not 'babble,' I think of green fields; I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy--their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with a superhuman fancy. It is because they are connected with the most thoughtless and the happiest moments of our lives. I have seen foreign flowers in hothouses, of the most beautiful nature, but I do not care a straw for them. The simple flowers of our Spring are what I want to see again.”

The poignancy of Keats’ words can make you weep but it’s the casual brilliance of his poetic linkages that remains astounding. He thinks of his beloved Shakespeare and seemingly the least Keatsian of his characters – “poor Falstaff.” Less than a year from his own death, Keats quotes Sir John’s final words and turns them into a vision of his childhood, then into a transcendent vision of eternal spring. I read “our Spring” to represent his years as a boy, our years as children. And behind that echoes the 23rd Psalm. So much for the slander of Keats the wraith-like ephebe. I’m reminded of a brief essay, “Hegel and Keats,” in Adam Zagajewski’s Solidarity, Solitude. As a Pole, Zagajewski had lived the consequences of Hegel’s odious legacy, and his first paragraph is a witty demolition of the philosopher. Then he turns to Keats:

“If one wants to find someone altogether different from the Prussian philosopher, one must go elsewhere. To John Keats, for example, the poet who died young. Keats believed things exist, that some of them are beautiful. He believed, or rather he simply knew, that the contours of objects are hard. If something is, then it is. Meadows [“green fields”] and forests really exist and our rapture is also no illusion although it cannot last forever. A nightingale concealed in the branches of a tree does not lead Keats to reflections of a theological or historiosophic nature. Keats does not contradict the nightingale and does not cast doubt on its sensual nature, because he hears its song, he is intoxicated and happy.

“Things exist, clouds move slowly across the sky, mountain streams fall in a light foam over the cliffs, the pines sway in the wind, their trunks creaking. Homage is due the world. The song of a nightingale is at once final and ruthless and cannot be undermined, but it also conceals the vague desire to have some other song respond, a poem by Keats, for example.”

`The Gristle of Conscience'

Dave Lull passes along a link to Craig Raine’s fine, cranky review of Zbigniew Herbert’s The Collected Poems in the Telegraph. Here’s a sample:

“And why did Herbert not succumb to communism's high-minded ideal of equality like so many 20th-century intellectuals, like Milosz, like Aragon, like Picasso, like Sartre? Was it because -- Brodsky's empty brag -- he saw through the system at the age of nine? No, it was because communism offended his taste. It was vulgar. And his taste was snobbish and `rightly’ so, as he records in `The Power of Taste’: none of the Nobel characteristics were needed:

“`It did not take any great character
our refusal dissent and persistence
we had a scrap of necessary courage
but essentially it was a matter of taste
Yes taste
which has fibres of soul and the gristle of conscience.’”

`A Method Rather Than a Form'

Frank Wilson has a new weekly column, "That’s What He Said," at When Falls the Coliseum. He starts, appropriately, with a look at the first blogger, Michel de Montaigne:

"Montaigne [...] doesn’t seem to have arrived at any conclusion before he began to write. The point of his writing wasn’t to advance a position, but to record a process of thought. This is writing as an act, first and foremost, of self-examination, not self-expression (though it is that as well, of course). I have long thought a great opportunity has been missed in the failure to explore the essay as a method rather than a form."

`The Best Kind of Reading for the Long Winter'

“Some people, seduced by the demon of knowledge, read systematically, coupling one book with another. Others – like Montaigne – read for pleasure, trying a bit of everything. Still others buy famous and expensive books, though they never have time for them.”

Into which category of reader does the author of this passage fall? And you? I’m squarely in the second with an occasional migration into the first, and no experience of the third. The author, Jerzy Stempowski, places himself in another category entirely -- “My reading was guided by what I found on my way.” – because history had prepared a detour.

The excerpts are from “The Smuggler’s Library,” included in Four Decades of Polish Essays (1990), edited by the theater critic Jan Kott (author of Shakespeare, Our Contemporary). Stempowski (1894-1969) was a Krakow-born literary critic and essayist whom Kott calls “the undisputed master of the Polish essay.” As best I can tell, none of his books has been translated into English though Kott also includes “Essay for Cassandra.”

“The Smuggler’s Library,” written in 1948, reads like an intellectual adventure story, one in which private history intersects violently with global history. It’s late December 1939, almost four month after the Nazi invasion of Poland. Stempowski is a patient in a makeshift hospital in the Carpathian Mountains, sick with pneumonia and a kidney disorder. We never learn how a middle-aged writer ended up in this remote corner of southeastern Poland or where he had been on Sept. 1. When discharged, he’s befriended by smugglers who provide him with a hideout. One says to him:

“`You must have been reading your whole life, and now you’re going to be sad without books. I’ll try to get you something to read.’

“On the next day a young smuggler, Andrijko, appeared with a sack on his shoulder. He put it on the floor. When the room warmed up I untied the bag and started to take out the books. The first to appear was a good edition of Horace, then the Metamorphoses, Virgil’s Bucolics and Georgics, and some Latin poets of the Renaissance. Next there came some Spanish publication, mostly from the time of the Civil War, although they included Gracián y Morales. At the very bottom of the sack I found the English romantics – Southey, Coleridge – and also several volumes of Walter Scott, Pride and Prejudice, and a slightly worn copy of Spencer’s Faerie Queene.

“It was the best kind of reading for the long winter.”

Stempowski spends much of the rest of the essay piecing together the histories of the volumes, how they came into his possession in wartime Poland. Basically, good fortune – for him; ill fortune for previous owners -- delivered them:

“During wars and upheaval a reader leaves his library at home. He takes only his favorite book, but even this book is soon abandoned in a roadside inn or at a forest crossroads. The smugglers’ library was a vivid testimony and a warning. A wartime reader must rely first and foremost on his memory. At the end of the road he will be left only with what he remembers.”

I have a friend, not notably paranoid, who embodies the Boy Scout motto – “Be Prepared.” He boasts he can pack and be on his way in less than five minutes. He lives alone and has never been acquisitive. He is ready if – what? If the secret police come knocking? I don’t know. He’s a sensible fellow. His preparedness is not a response to external events, past or present; it’s an obscure but insistent demand. If he fled in the night, I’m certain, he wouldn’t pack a book.

It’s an adolescent parlor game, like debating whether I would crack under torture (I would): What book would I grab in the middle of the night on the way out the door? My Shakespeare is bulky – three hefty volumes. Montaigne and Boswell, too, are bricklike; same for Ulysses. My Walden, Dante, Lives of the English Poets and Gulliver’s Travels are pleasingly compact. How to calculate the sustenance-to-weight ratio? Perhaps I should invest in a paperback Lear.

Read Stempowski’s lovely essay to see what he reads and what he concludes from his reading. The only spoiler I’ll offer is that he spends most of his time that winter with Virgil, and that those books influence his decision over what to do when spring arrives. Here’s the conclusion of the essay:

“On the last day of my stay in the mountains I carried the bag of books back to the smugglers’ inn. As far as I know the place was later ransacked many times, and its inhabitants either died a violent death or dispersed throughout the world. Who knows what fate befell the books? Soldiers and bandits plundering the inn were looking for vodka and tobacco and probably took little interest in books. Perhaps they still wait in the ruins of the inn for their reader. To the one who will find and read them – the unknown lover of Virgil and the Latin poets of the Renaissance – salutem.”

`The Stuff of Everyday Life'

A tutor and his student sat at the next table in the kid’s section of the library. The boy was a 15- or 16-year-old Chinese American who looked baffled and bored. His teacher was tall, heavy, bald and Caucasian. I was happy to see yet another stereotype punctured but felt sorry for the kid. The tutor would not modulate his voice and seemed unaware that he had attracted the attention of everyone on the first floor of the library. He spoke loudly and earnestly and accompanied his harangue -- he actually said “the joys of math,” while negating its reality – with histrionic gestures. With the other indignities he was suffering, the boy was embarrassed. Librarians, quick to jump on illicit cell phone use and the antics of conspicuously drunk or crazy people, watched the guy and muttered among themselves but did nothing.

The volume rose as the youngest member of an Indian family – a girl of about four -- decided to throw a tantrum on the staircase. Even my kids, who are not notably hushed, stared and huffed at the din. Of course, the culprits were an adult and a girl, so my sons, five and eight, experienced the undeniable pleasures of moral superiority. We left.

What I’ve described are misdemeanors. I venerate libraries as the central American institution. More serious compromising of their sanctity comes from within – administrators and their chronic pandering to popular culture and casual illiteracy – DVDs of Chucky and Desperate Housewives, a display of “lesbian mysteries.” An anecdote: I had seen a first edition of Tom Disch’s best novel, Camp Concentration, on the fiction shelf. It was the edition I had read 40 years ago when it was first published, and though I’m not a science-fiction fan I’m a great admirer of Disch’s work, particularly his poetry. Disch committed suicide on July 4. A few days later I checked the shelf and the novel was gone. I checked the catalog to put a hold on it, and found an entry saying the book had been “weeded,” perhaps during the very week of Disch’s death. Libraries, like culture, decay from within.

In Another Beauty (2000), the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski describes a comparable experience with a library:

“Of all the libraries I know, the worst is probably the vast library of the Centre Pompidou at the Beaubourg in Paris. It actually has quite a good collection, and it subscribes to the wonderful American principle of ready access to the stacks, which means you can roam freely among the books yourself. On the other hand, though, it calls to mind the vast waiting room of a central railroad station. Besieged by hordes of students and vagrants, it doesn’t offer much by way of peace and quiet. In addition, as befits a railroad station, it’s been equipped with loudspeakers, which make announcements in a very civilized voice every fifteen minutes or so: `Please look out for pickpockets. Do not leave your personal belongings unattended.’”

Zagajewski’s praise for the “American principle” of library procedure makes one proud, though the poet goes on to pillory some of the same abuses I’ve described. A more celebrative assessment can be found in “A Defense of the Book,” one of William H. Gass’ finest later essays (collected in A Temple of Texts, 2006): “The aim of the library is a simple one: to unite writing with its reading.” Here is his final paragraph:

“The books in the library regularly leave it, leave it for fresh human attentions, and the work of the institution will often take place far from its doors: at a kitchen table maybe, in someone’s suddenly populated bed, amid the rattle of a commuter train, even in a sophomore’s distracted head. Every day, from the library, books are borrowed and taken away like tubs of chicken to be consumed, though many are also devoured on the premises, in the reading room, where traditionally the librarian, wearing her clichés, sushes an already silent multitude and glares at the offending air. Yet there, or in someone’s rented room, over seven by a sunny pool – who can predict the places where the encounter will occur? – the discovery will be made. And a finger will find the place and mark it before the book’s covers come closed; or its reader will rise and bear her prize out of the library into the kitchen, back to her dorm room, or, along with flowers and candy, to a bedside, in a tote bag onto the beach; or perhaps a homeless scruffy, who has been huddling near a radiator, will leave the volume behind him when he finally goes, as if what his book said had no hold on his heart, because he cannot afford a card; yet, like Columbus first espying land, each will have discovered what he cares about, will know at last what it is to love – a commonplace occurrence – for, in the library, such epiphanies, such enrichments of mind and changes of heart, are the stuff of everyday life.”

`What Is Not is Also Reality'

Variations on a theme, secular and religious, respectively. First, J.V. Cunningham, writing in 1966:

“Illusion and delusion are that real
We segregate from real reality;
But cause and consequence locate the real:
What is not is also reality.”

And from R.S. Thomas’ “The Absence” (Frequencies, 1978):

“It is this great absence
that is like a presence, that compels
me to address it without hope
of a reply. It is a room I enter

“from which someone has just
gone, the vestibule for the arrival
of one who has not yet come.”

While Cunningham’s “What is not” is not identical to Thomas’ “great absence,” both remind us of the sway exerted on our lives and thoughts by the absent, hidden, disguised, delusional, hallucinatory, imaginary, wish-fulfilling, fictional, misplaced, evaporated, quiescent, moribund and dead. No one, not even Richard Dawkins, is immune. The mind is amenable to many ambiguous and contradictory species of “reality” (which Nabokov said should always be accompanied by quotation marks).

These thoughts were stimulated by an amusing incident in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. Everyman’s Library has published in a single volume Boswell’s travel book and Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. The passage in question occurs on Aug. 16, 1773, just two days into their journey. Boswell and Johnson are touring the former’s native city, Edinburgh, and dine with some of its eminent citizens. Dinner conversation includes this exchange:

“We talked of the Ouran-Outang, and of Lord Monboddo’s thinking that he might be taught to speak. Dr. Johnson treated this with ridicule. Mr. Crosbie said, that Lord Monboddo believed the existence of every thing possible; in short, that all which is in posse might be found in esse. Johnson: "But, Sir, it is as possible that the Ouran-Outang does not speak, as that he speaks. However, I shall not contest the point. I should have thought it not possible to find a Monboddo; yet he exists.”

This is typical Johnson, witty, dismissive of cant and other foolishness, and reminiscent of his refutation of Bishop Berkeley. The same day’s entry in Boswell’s book, by the way, includes the Johnson observation that contributed to the naming of Anecdotal Evidence:

“I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. If a man is to wait till he weaves anecdotes into a system, we may be long in getting them, and get but a few, in comparison of what we might get.”

`Two Hours Sooner Than He Wished to Rise'

Thanks to Dave Lull for passing along a link to a catalog of Samuel Johnson’s library of 760 volumes. One is impressed though hardly surprised by the seriousness of Johnson’s books. He was the least frivolous of men and his library makes mine, which contains perhaps four or five times as many books, appear trifling. Do I really need Stephen Dixon’s Frog or a biography of S.J. Perelman? As Johnson often told Mrs. Thrale:

“Books without the knowledge of life are useless, for what should books teach but the art of living?”

Johnson’s library reflects the breadth of his interests and accomplishments. Volumes in Greek and Latin predominate, with a smattering of others in French and Italian. Included are books of theology, chemistry, economics, medicine, law, mathematics, history, philosophy, painting, mythology, geography, metallurgy, geology, travel, music, gardening, astronomy, botany, numismatics, agriculture, even fiction (Richardson’s Clarissa), and many Bibles and dictionaries. When I consider the vastness of Johnson’s reading I feel like an idle dilettante. This week I’ve corresponded daily with a reader in Scotland. I admitted the inadequacy of my reading in his nation’s literature – a little Burns and MacDiarmid, some Scott and Stevenson, but not in years – and he set me straight:

“RLS certainly isn't just a boys' writer. Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae, and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde are certainly for grown-ups, and there's so much more too. I re-read The Silverado Squatters a week or so ago, and was charmed by it. Did you know Stevenson got married in San Francisco? If you ever get to Edinburgh I'm sure you'll love it for its strong RLS associations. Not to mention the Scott Monument!”

He has more faith in my reading than I do, though thanks to his enthusiasm I plan to mend my ways with Stevenson. I find one comfort in reading the catalog of Johnson’s library -- the handful of books our shelves share, beginning with Shakespeare. And both of us prize Robert Burton’s peculiar masterpiece. As Boswell reports in his Life of Johnson:

“Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, he said, was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise.”

`The Thin Juice of a Man's Understanding'

Something I read in Religio Medici last week sent me forward a century to The Dunciad, where I didn’t find what I was looking for, which probably didn’t exist in the first place, but I did find this:

“Nonsense precipitate, like running Lead,
That slip’d thro’ Cracks and Zig-zags of the Head.”

Almost 40 years ago I had a professor of English literature who read aloud long passages from Pope, laughing all the while. Pope was her Groucho Marx, and that’s how I’ve read him ever since. The “Lead”/”Head” rhyme cracks me up and I like the conceit of nonsense flowing like molten metal from the skull. These thoughts in turn sent me back to Tristram Shandy, or rather to the notebook I kept during my most recent rereading of Sterne’s novel.

The first time I read Tristram Shandy, with the professor mentioned above, I saw mostly sex and death – hardly a novel reading for a 19-year-old. Since then I’ve come to see him as a master of comedy and metaphor – and sex. It remains a deliciously dirty book. I also see him as the progenitor of Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien – the usual suspects – but also of Coleridge, Lamb, Melville, Tolstoy and others with an expansive, elastic, limits-defying sense of what prose can do.

During this most recent rereading, I paid closer attention to Sterne’s borrowings from and parodies of John Locke, and the way he depicted the workings of the brain – consciousness, in a word. I don’t plan to read Proust Was a Neuroscientist but I would like to borrow and amend the title: Laurence Sterne Was a Neuroscientist. Tristram Shandy is consigned to the sanitarium of “experimental” fiction, though I’m convinced Sterne as a writer never once had an experimental impulse and was, in fact, a genuine eccentric with utter confidence in his own eccentricity. He regularly extrapolates his own cognitive eccentricity (“like running Lead”) onto the human mind in general:

“-- the thought floated only in Dr. Slop’s mind, without sail or ballast to it, as a simple proposition; millions of which, as your worship knows, are every day swimming quietly in the middle of the thin juice of a man’s understanding, without being carried backwards or forwards, till some little gusts of passion or interest drive them to one side.”

The maritime metaphor is comically sustained and “thin juice” is awfully good.

“Now, whether we observe it or no, continued my father, in every sound man’s head, there is a regular succession of ideas of one sort or other, which follow each other in train just like –A train of artillery, said my uncle Toby.--train of a fiddle stick!—quoth my father,--which follow and succeed one another in our minds at certain distances, just like the images in the inside of a lanthorn [lantern] turned around by the heat of a candle.—I declare, quoth my Uncle Toby, mine are more like a smoak-jack.—Then, brother Toby, I have nothing more to say to you upon the subject, said my father.”

Typically, Sterne ends the chapter there, only to resume the conversation between Tristram’s father and Uncle Toby. Tristram says of Toby: “his head like a smoak-jack:--the funnel unswept, and the ideas whirling round and round about in it, all obfuscated and darkened over with fuliginous matter!” And another great extended metaphor:

“My most zealous wish and fervent prayer in your behalf, and in my own too, in case the thing is not already done for us, -- is, that the great gifts and endowments both of wit and judgement, with everything which usually goes along with them – such as memory, fancy, genius, eloquence, quick parts, and what not, may this precious moment, without stint or measure, let or hindrance, be poured down warm as each of us could bear it – scum and sediment and all (for I would not have a drop lost) into the several receptacles, cells, cellules, domiciles, dormitories, refectories, and spare places of our brains – in such sort, that they might continue to be injected and tunned into, according to the true intent and meaning of my wish, until every vessel of them, both great and small, be so replenished, saturated, and filled up therewith, that no more, would it save a man’s life, could possibly be got either in or out.”

This sort of thing is not for every reader, I’m certain. For an earnest lover of the linear, Sterne must be infuriating. But if you trust him, as he trusts his own waywardness, and if the infinite digressiveness of the internet is part of its appeal, Tristram Shandy is, as Sterne reminds us in the novel’s final sentence, “A COCK and a BULL…And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.”

`A Good Damner'

On the same day a reader asked why I hate William Hazlitt I started listening in the car to a seven-cassette recording of A.J. Liebling’s collection of boxing essays, The Sweet Science (1956). In fact, I love Hazlitt’s essays if not always the man. He was a prickly character fueled with bile and emotional immaturity (Keats called him “a good damner”), who compromised his gifts with political doltishness. Hazlitt admitted, “I am not in the ordinary sense of the term a good-natured man,” but he was author of some of the best prose in the language, sentences charged with his favorite critical encomium – “gusto.” His 1822 boxing essay “The Fight” was much admired by Liebling. In my first Anecdotal Evidence post, I included a passage from “The Fight” as an invitation to readers:

“…we agreed to adjourn to my lodgings to discuss measures with that cordiality which makes old friends like new, and new friends like old, on great occasions. We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves, and have neither thoughts nor feelings to impart to them. Give a man a topic in his head, a throb of pleasure in his heart, and he will be glad to share it with the first person he meets.”

What confused my reader was a post I had written in July – lightheartedly, I thought – in which I confessed to sentimentally favoring Lamb over Hazlitt. Some readers, it seems, wish to impose a rigid consistency on literary tastes: “Proust or Raymond Chandler. Kay Ryan or Elizabeth Bishop. You can’t have it both ways.” Well, yes I can. In fact, I have no choice: Art is not a democracy. It’s ruthlessly unfair, its gifts meet no quota scheme and are distributed without regard for tender feelings. Art is fickle and so are its consumers. Without shame it encourages promiscuity. Only in art, in fact, can one be at the same time promiscuous and faithful. I can love the poems of Philip Larkin and Geoffrey Hill – who detested each other – and it’s nobody’s damn business.

Few writers are at once so beguiling and irritating as Hazlitt, and I look forward to reading Duncan Wu’s new biography, William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man. The reviewer for the Independent, Jonathan Wright, says:

“Hazlitt will always be a writer's writer. We love the fact that he had to scratch for a living and we appreciate the image of him frequenting a coffee house on Chancery Lane, making his daily meal out of cold roast beef and apple tart. We are happy for him when, after a commission came in, he treated himself to a pheasant or a brace of partridges. We admire his intellectual curiosity as he walks 200 miles to hear Coleridge preach. Most of all, we adore how he writes. For all his faults, his quirky, bombastic, soaring prose is unsurpassed in the canon (assuming such a thing still exists) of English literature.”

Hazlitt’s undoing as a writer and man was peevishness and, not coincidentally, politics. The young, impatient, headstrong and intolerant are drawn to radicalisms of various stripes, right or left, with their simple, usually violent solutions. Oddly – but not unexpectedly for so volatile a sensibility – Hazlitt eviscerated Shelley with words that apply with damning precision to his own testy personality. I know an English professor, long retired, who lobbied me to reevaluate Shelley, but all his arguments came down to political, not literary, values. I wish I had known Hazlitt’s demolition at the time:

“Whatever shocked the feelings of others conciliated his regard: whatever was light, extravagant and vain was to him a proportionable relief from the dullness and stupidity of established opinions. The worst of it however was, that he thus gave great encouragement to those who believe in all received absurdities, and are wedded to all existing abuses: his extravagance seeming to sanction their grossness and selfishness, as theirs were a full justification of his folly and eccentricity. The two extremes in this way often meet, jostle – and confirm one another…”
There’s nothing new about writers sparring. In his introduction to The Sweet Science, while extolling the pioneering fight writing of Pierce Egan (Hazlitt’s contemporary, author of Boxiana) Liebling writes:

“Egan was the greatest writer about the ring who ever lived. Hazlitt was a dilettante who wrote one fight story.”

`Observing All the Things We Meet'

Keeping my brother-in-law’s dog for a week gives me a ready-made excuse to take an extra walk each day. The park is a mile away and the route we follow snakes through a working-class neighborhood of small houses like the one we rent, with one floor and no garage – “ramblers” they’re called. November means rain in the Northwest. The sky is gray milk and people talk about the sun as though it were an estranged relative. I’ve lived here long enough not to bother with an umbrella.

The chill seems to spur plant growth. Our lawn is home to a second wave of mushrooms, a different species from those erupting late in the summer. Under the magnolia is a third sort of fungus – myriad little white umbrellas. Like cheap toupees, lichens and moss cover tree trunks and branches. In Ohio and upstate New York, where I’ve spent most of my life, November is a time of hunkering down, moving inward, dormancy – “a damp, drizzly November in my soul,” and all that. Not here. Except for insects, there’s as much to see as in June, and people ignore the ever-falling drizzle. I passed a plot of gray sunflower stalks, as tilted and gaunt as a herd of Giacomettis. Crows tug-of-warred a corn cob. The front of one house was hung with dozens of wind chimes, and I gave thanks for living four blocks away. I thought of the heroic age of walking, when Coleridge covered 40 miles in a day to visit a friend, and I thought of this stanza from Thomas Traherne’s lovely “Walking”:

“To walk is by a thought to go;
To move in spirit to and fro;
To mind the good we see;
To taste the sweet;
Observing all the things we meet
How choice and rich they be.”

`A Rapture of Conviction'

I’ve always believed the most precious right, though not formally articulated in the Bill of Rights, is the right to be left alone. In human history it’s also the most anomalous, held in deep suspicion always by most of humanity and by each of us at least on occasion. We seem to be hardwired to distrust democracy and the sovereignty of others. Selfishness is forever subverting the dinner table and the social order. Frank Wilson reminded me of this last week when he linked to a brief video of the late Michael Crichton speaking to high-school students. I know Crichton only as a brand-name author. I’ve never read his books but have seen several of the movies adapted from them, so I was surprised by his soft-spoken thoughtfulness.

Crichton tells the kids he has become interested in why people “really want to tell other people how to behave.” Many possess, he says, “a deep and secret impulse to live in a totalitarian state.” No one who reads comments left on literary blogs or who has attended a meeting of the PTA or a congressional subcommittee can reasonably argue otherwise. I’ve been rereading Joseph Brodsky’s essays in On Grief and Reason, including his Nobel lecture from 1987. Before we start congratulating our enlightened, let-and-let-live selves, consider the words of a poet who experienced the totalitarian impulse first-hand:

“A literate, educated person, to be sure, is fully capable, after reading some political treatise or tract, of killing his like, and even of experiencing, in so doing, a rapture of conviction. Lenin was literate, Stalin was literate, so was Hitler; as for Mao Zedong, he even wrote verse. What all these men have in common, though, was that their hit list was longer than their reading list.”

As though he were administering a fast-acting antidote to moral smugness (his and ours), Brodsky quickly adds:

“What's wrong with discourses about the obvious is that they corrupt consciousness with their easiness, with the quickness with which they provide one with moral comfort, with the sensation of being right. Herein lies their temptation, similar in its nature to the temptation of a social reformer who begets this evil.”

`Strange and Extraordinary New Conditions of This Life'

Today is the 90th anniversary of the Armistice, the cessation of fighting that represented the beginning of the end of World War I. Among the more than 40 million casualties were Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg. About the last I’ve written here. In the fall of 1916, a year and a half before his death on April Fool’s Day, 1918, Rosenberg wrote a letter to his friend Laurence Binyon. It contains these brave, sad words:

“I am determined that this war, with all its powers for devastation, shall not master my poeting; that is, if I am lucky enough to come through all right. I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.”

`A Whole Day With Delight'

I bought The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne in the Cleveland bookstore where I worked in April of 1975. It’s a fat yellow paperback, part of the Anchor Seventeenth-Century Series, and includes all the major works and selections from the letters and minor essays – 646 pages and a cover designed by Leonard Baskin for $3.95. Given my frequency of use, it may be the best book bargain of my life.

As I reread Religio Medici, other prose seems thin and watery. We’re told we use but a fraction of our brains, and Browne convinces me we use but a fraction of our gift for language. While you and I may wonder at nature’s bottomless capacity for variation, Browne writes:

“It is the common wonder of all men, how, among so many millions of faces, there should be none alike: now, contrary, I wonder as much how there should be any. He that shall consider how many thousand several words have been carelessly and without study composed out of twenty-four letters; withal, how many hundred lines there are to be drawn in the fabrick of one man; shall easily find that this variety is necessary: and it will be very hard that they shall so concur as to make one portrait like another.”

We might say nature possesses pattern and design, parts correspond to other parts and to wholes. Browne writes:

“I can look a whole day with delight upon a handsome picture, though it be but of a horse. It is my temper, & I like it the better, to affect all harmony, and sure there is music even in the beauty, and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument. For there is a music wherever there is a harmony, order or proportion; and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres.”

We can find comedy in Browne’s words, too. He married Dorothy Mileham in 1641, and the couple had 12 children in 18 years, but Browne writes:

“I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar act of coition; It is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life, nor is there anything that will more deject his cooled imagination, when he shall consider what an odd and unworthy piece of folly he hath committed.”

Browne's nature, in a century of civil and religious strife, was remarkably tolerant and big-spirited:

“I could never divide my selfe from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgement for not agreeing with mee in that, from which perhaps within a few dayes I should dissent my selfe: I have no Genius to disputes in Religion, and have often thought it wisedome to decline them…”

A physician and a scientist of sorts, Browne sustained a sense of awe before creation. Even in the midst of depravity he felt awe. He never lost his appreciation for what Marianne Moore called “life’s faulty excellence.”

The University of Chicago, I see, maintains a useful and interesting Browne site.

ADDENDUM: Dave Lull passes along this piece from The Spectator on Browne the word-coiner:

"According to Madan’s list, the most prolific neologist was Sir Thomas Browne. He is credited with inventing precarious, insecurity, medical, literary, electricity, hallucination, antediluvian and incontrovertible. That is a formidable achievement, if true."

`The Stalest Repetition'

Considering the amount of time I once spent reading newspapers – six or eight a day until about 15 years ago – I ought to be a gentleman of leisure. I was a reporter and each morning customarily read the paper I worked for and the other dailies in the region, and on the way home stopped at the newsstand for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe (mostly for “Zippy”) and New York Newsday (mostly for Murray Kempton). I read the newspaper eccentrically, as journalists often do – never sports or financial news, seldom politics, but as though it were a grand buffet and I was grazing for the toothsome. Then, not at first quite aware of it, I stopped looking at newspapers. The change was slow and unplanned, and certainly not a matter of principle. It’s fashionable today to complain about and dismiss the “mainstream media” but I’ve never felt that way. I lost interest, just as I once gave up stamp collecting and watching television.

Today, my reading time is devoted to books, a couple of magazines, a handful of favorite blogs and the occasional online article someone recommends. I didn’t enter journalism because I was interested in news. I wanted to earn a regular paycheck by writing, and I had an interest in a good journalist’s two essential media – language and human beings. News has usually bored me. As Thoreau says in “Life Without Principle”: “I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up.” Someone said there’s more news in The Iliad than in the daily newspaper, and most days I think he was right. This, too, is from “Life Without Principle”:

“The news we hear is not news to our genius. It is the stalest repetition.”

`The History of His Parish'

About 10 years ago I read reviews of two books in a science journal -- Darwin's Dreampond: Drama on Lake Victoria by the Dutch evolutionary biologist Tijs Goldschmidt, and Sea Shells, Paul Valery’s essay in applied aesthetics. I read both volumes, and of the former I remember nothing except some nasty business about waterborne parasites. The latter has lodged comfortably in my imagination and this week I reread it with undiminished pleasure. Judged by a superficial précis of each volume, my reactions are ridiculous. Goldschmidt, I recall, is a fair-to-middling writer and addresses the critical issue of speciation in a natural test tube – weighty matters. Valery meditates on the casings of marine mollusks collected by children at the beach. The significant difference is not the subject but the treatment. In his journal for March 18, 1861, Thoreau put it like this:

“You can’t read any genuine history – as that of Herodotus or the Venerable Bede – without perceiving that our interest depends not on the subject but on the man, -- on the manner in which he treats the subject and the importance he gives it. A feeble writer and without genius must have what he thinks a great theme, which we are already interested in through the accounts of others, but a genius – a Shakespeare, for instance – would make the history of his parish more interesting than another’s history of the worlds.”

Theoretically, it should be possible to write an interesting book with a dull or unpromising premise – living in the woods, as in Walden; oranges, John McPhee; boxing, A.J. Liebling. Dull writers with dull sensibilities and little gift for language write dull books, even if they have “great themes.”

`Snapshots Taken During a Long, Slow Journey'

Can we say with justice that Maeve Brennan is best known for her short fiction when in fact she is hardly known for anything because most readers have never heard her name and those who have have probably forgotten it? Born in Dublin, she died in New York City in 1993, age 76, after years of mental illness, alcoholism and literary oblivion. Her name was briefly resurrected a decade ago by her friend and one-time editor at The New Yorker (she joined the staff in 1949), William Maxwell, who ushered into print The Springs of Affection, The Rose Garden and The Visitor. Like every story writer she’s been likened to Chekhov, with some justice. If that sounds enticing, track down her wonderful books.

It’s Brennan the nonfiction writer I most admire. Between 1954 and 1981 she had one of the best jobs in the world, writing sketches of street life in Manhattan for “The Talk of the Town” department in The New Yorker. Her persona was The Long-Winded Lady, and a collection with that title was published in 1969. Houghton Mifflin issued an expanded paperback edition in 1998.
The style and tone of Brennan’s nonfiction are less raffish, more casual than those of her colleagues A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell. She is matter-of-fact, bemused but not coyly faux-naïf. In her author’s note, Brennan says:

“Now when I reread through this book I seem to be looking at snapshots. It is as though the long-winded lady were showing snapshots taken during a long, slow journey not through but in the most cumbersome, most reckless, most ambitious, most confused, most comical, the saddest and coldest and most human of cities.”

A snapshot implies casualness and a desire to preserve, the secret to Brennan’s charm and success. Her sketches just seem to happen, as in early Chekhov, and they almost never neatly resolve. They end abruptly but artfully. They are never portentous. She specializes in unexpectedness and odd connections. The Long-Winded Lady is attuned to loss, failure, grief and various species of unhappiness, but not like a professional do-gooder (again, like Chekhov – or Stevie Smith). She draws no sociological or political conclusions. Her pet theories are personal and make no claims on the world. In “Balzac’s Favorite Food,” published Sept. 21, 1963, she visits a bookshop on Forty-eighth Street. In one volume she learns Balzac’s favorite meal was sardines and some other ingredient mashed together and smeared on bread. As she tries to find the other ingredient she’s interrupted:

“…my ears were insulted by hard voices screeching right outside the door – people making remarks about the books in the window. `Hey, Marilyn Monroe has been reduced!’ a man’s voice shouted. `Five seventy-five to one ninety-two!’ There were squawks of laughter, and then a woman’s voice said (it was a harridan speaking), `Wait till she goes down to a dollar.’ `Too much! Too much! A dollar is too much!’ the man shouted, and then these horrors were trooping into the shop, and I took off my glasses to get a look at them. Cruelty and Stupidity and Bad Noise – there were three of them, a man and a woman and another, but I did not see the third, who was hidden behind the tall spindle bookcase they were all looking at and making merry over. They called out names and titles, and made a lot of feeble puns, ruining the place for everybody, and I paid for the books I had under my arm, and left.”

This is Brennan as New York satirist, in Dawn Powell mode, but she seldom leaves it at that – funny but too easy. Her humor is rooted in something deeper and probably Irish. She walks to a restaurant called Le Steak de Paris (Long-Winded Lady spends a lot of time in small restaurants), where she orders sardines and bread, and vows not to think about the “hyenas” in the bookshop:

“Their capacity for arousing violence will arouse somebody who IS violent one of these days. (That is what I told myself.) They will trip over their own shoelaces. Time will tell on them. They will never know anything except the miserable appetite of envy. They will learn, like the boy who cried wolf, that people who mock the Last Laugh are incinerated by it when it finally sounds. I don’t care.”

She resolves to return to the bookshop: “Before the evening is finished, I will know exactly what the Master’s favorite food was, and I will also know how it tastes today.” It’s typical of Brennan that she seeks something forgotten, elusive and scorned. Delicately, without pretension, the Long-Winded Lady stands up for civilization. Time has only burnished the quiet dignity and sadness of these stories. Her world has vanished. Two months after this story appeared, President Kennedy was murdered and the real sixties, the decade of hyenas, was started. In a piece from 1967, Brennan quotes another Irish writer, Oliver Goldsmith:

“Innocently to amuse the imagination in this dream of life is wisdom.”

This is from the section on water fowl in A History of the Earth and Animated Nature. Four sentences later, Goldsmith concludes his chapter like this:

“Even those, that are tyrants by nature, never spread capricious destruction, and unlike man, never inflict a pain but when urged by necessity.”

`What We Can Turn to Use'

“Chekhov’s privacy is safe from the biographer’s attempts upon it – as, indeed, are all privacies, even those of the most apparently open and even exhibitionistic natures. The letters and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity of death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography.”

This is from Janet Malcolm’s Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (2001), a hybrid of literary criticism, travelogue and secondary-source biography, a 200-page digressive essay, most successful when Malcolm follows a whim of temperament and doesn’t take herself too seriously. She adores Chekhov and visits the places in post-Soviet Russia where he lived and worked, and where he set some of his stories and plays. Her book begins above the beach at Oreanda, near Yalta, the site of a crucial scene in “The Lady with the Dog.”

The passage above I cite as evidence of Malcolm’s authorial humility. She has no illusions about gaining “insights” into Chekhov, the man or the work, by visiting Melikhovo or Taganrog. She visits them for the same reasons we read a biography of someone we admire – awe, curiosity, emulation. Call it a human-specific strain of biophilia. We enjoy our friends’ company. Why not the company of a writer who died more than a century ago? This reasoning, of course, is anathema to the cadres of neo-New Critics who shun anything outside the text. The subject of the premiere biography in the language had this to say on written lives:

“I esteem biography, as giving us what comes near to ourselves, what we can turn to use.”

That’s Johnson quoted by Boswell in Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. To study his life is to wish to emulate him, to “turn [him] to use” – if not for his depression, then his lifelong struggle to ameliorate it. Few of us have known ourselves half so well, and in comparison we’re blind. To read in tandem Johnson and his biographers, beginning with Boswell, is to approach what Malcolm calls “the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life” -- sometimes more than we know of ourselves.

The last 30 years may some day be regarded as a golden era for literary biography -- W. Jackson Bate’s life of Johnson; Richard Holmes’ Coleridge; Robert D. Richardson’s Thoreau, Emerson and William James; Roy Foster’s Yeats; and Jonathan Bate’s John Clare. Bad biographies – Blotner’s Faulkner is emblematic – outnumber these titles 10,000-to-one, but that’s hardly a modern blight. Consider Johnson’s assessment in The Rambler #60:

“Biography has often been allotted to writers who seem very little acquainted with the nature of their task, or very negligent about the performance. They rarely afford any other account than might be collected from public papers, but imagine themselves writing a life when they exhibit a chronological series of actions or preferments; and so little regard the manners or behavior of their heroes that more knowledge may be gained of a man's real character, by a short conversation with one of his servants, than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree and ended with his funeral.”

`Leaves to Which Something Has Happened'

“I do not doubt but the majesty and beauty of the world are latent in any iota of the world…

“I do not doubt there is far more in trivialities, insects, vulgar persons, slaves, dwarfs, weeds, rejected refuse, than I have supposed…”

These lines from Whitman’s “Assurances” came to mind even before I opened Janet Malcolm’s new book Burdock. The eponymous weed, a thistle, is conventionally scorned as botanical vermin. As kids we called it “elephant ears” for its oversized leaves. Its burrs snagged our sweaters in the fall. There’s the scientific name, Arctium lappa; the common name, burdock; and the folk name, elephant ears -- all poetry.

Over three summers at her home in the Berkshires, Malcolm collected burdock leaves and photographed them against a white background, propping them in small glass bottles visible in two of the book’s 28 photographs. In her introduction Malcolm says she shot the leaves “head on, as if they were people facing me.” Richard Avedon’s high-contrast, black-and-white photos of celebrities served as her models:

“Avedon radically extended photography’s capacity for cruelty. The ravages of time and circumstances on the faces he photographed were mercilessly, sometimes gruesomely, recorded.”

In the Avedon spirit, Malcolm says she prefers “older, flawed leaves to young, unblemished specimens – leaves to which something has happened.” Nearly every leaf she includes is diseased, tattered, discolored or insect-gnawed. One is so thoroughly perforated it resembles coarse green lace.

A noteworthy difference between Avedon’s people and Malcolm’s burdocks: One cannot be cruel to weeds. Avedon was a voyeur with a sadistic streak whose subjects, many of them masochists and narcissists, sought him out. His photos of ravaged living people resemble post-mortems. Malcolm’s pictures reveal unsuspected elegance and beauty, as a close look at any natural phenomenon will.

Malcolm cites old herbals and botanical models, “whose subjects have been similarly plucked from nature and rendered in splendid unnatural isolation,” as sources of inspiration, and then writes her truest sentence, “Looking at natural forms close up is an exercise in awe.” Any effort to look and see is laudable, which reminds me of Guy Davenport’s wonderful essay “Finding,” in which he refers to “a Thoreauvian feeling of looking at things.” He writes in a spirit similar to Malcolm’s:

“Our understanding was that the search was the thing, the pleasure of looking.”

For all the pleasure I derive from Malcolm’s photos, I note a whiff of preciousness about her project. Would Yale University Press have published a book of weed pictures by an unknown photographer with gifts equal or superior to Malcolm’s? For the cover price of $60 you get a two-page introduction (in which she uses, unforgivably, “transformative” and “decontextualization”) and 28 photographs. Whitman could never have afforded the book, and I relied on the library.

Politics

The day before, on Nov. 5, 1860, Henry Thoreau had visited a neighbor’s 12-acre oak lot in Concord. He measured a white oak and noted its circumference at the ground was 19 feet. Three feet higher it measured 11 feet, seven inches. In addition to white oaks he observed red, black and swamp white oaks, and a few maples. By counting the rings on a white oak stump he estimated the tree’s age when cut down at 147 years. In his journal, Thoreau extrapolates to humans his observations about trees:

“I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true of human beings. We do not wish to see children precocious, making great strides in their early years like sprouts, producing a soft and perishable timber, but better if they expand slowly at first, as if contending with difficulties, and so are solidified and perfected. Such trees continue to expand with nearly equal rapidity to an extreme old age.”

The rest of the journal entry for Nov. 5 is speculation on the growth of oaks, pines and other trees. The entry for the following day is unusually brief:

“Sawed off half of an old pitch pine stump at Tommy Wheeler’s hollow. I found that, though the surface was entire and apparently sound except one or two small worm-holes, and the sap was evidently decaying, yet within, or just under the surface, it was extensively honeycombed by worms, which did not eat out to the surface. The rings included in the outmost four of five inches were the most decayed, -- including the sapwood.”

On that day, Nov. 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln defeated John C. Breckinridge, Stephen A. Douglas and John Bell, and was elected the 16th president of the United States. Thoreau makes no mention of the event. The Civil War started in April 1861. Thoreau died May 6, 1862, maintaining his journal until a few months before his death. In its more than 2 million words, he never mentions Lincoln by name.

`An Almost Sacred Quality'

When I reached the age of 12 my parents deemed me mature enough to ride the bus into downtown Cleveland unaccompanied. This ranks among their minor acts of misjudgment but I was a timid boy, less likely to instigate trouble than to walk into it schlimazel-fashion. My most vivid memory of riding alone occurred one summer before city buses were equipped with air conditioning. I was seated next to the front door, on one of the long bench-like seats. The driver stopped for passengers and in walked a spherical, middle-aged man in Bermuda shorts and unbuttoned shirt. His gut was ample and, to use Huck’s description of his father’s skin, “a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white.” The matronly black woman seated across from me stared at this vision of unself-conscious corpulence and said the most tactful thing imaginable: “Dat man coolin’ his self.”

I went downtown looking for books, less interested in independence for its own sake than in finding the volumes I was unable to locate in libraries. On Public Square was Schroeder’s, a stationary/magazine/candy shop that stocked cheap paperbacks (where I bought Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition and Clancy Sigal’s Going Away). The block is long gone, replaced by the BP building. In the Old Arcade was Keisogloff’s, usually too pricey for my adolescent budget. The best shops were Kay’s Books on Prospect Avenue, where I was to work as a clerk 10 years later, and Publix Bookmart on Huron Street. Both disappeared in the nineteen-eighties. I still own a dozen volumes I found in those stores, 35 years ago or more, including three volumes of Emerson’s journals.

Such pleasures have disappeared from Cleveland and elsewhere. The travails of small, owner-operated bookshops, with their character and characters, and deep, uncataloged stocks of old books, are well known. In “Of Bibliophilia and Biblioclasm,” Theodore Dalrymple compares his experience with George Orwell’s in the 1936 essay “Bookshop Memories.” Dalrymple is a true book lover (he has patronized one shop, with one owner, for 40 years), not a poseur or “first edition snob” (Orwell’s phrase). Inevitably, Dalrymple resorts to an elegiac tone:

“But the pleasure of second-hand bookshops is not only in finding what you want: it is in leafing through many volumes and alighting upon something that you never knew existed, that fascinates you and therefore widens your horizons in a completely unanticipated way, helping you to make the most unexpected connections.”

The joy of a first-rate bookshop is in serendipity. I always enter a shop with a mental list of titles and authors. If I find what I wanted, I’m pleased. If I find what I didn’t know I wanted, I’m jubilant. Today in Cleveland only one shop remotely resembling the sort I’m describing remains in business. It has no posted hours. It’s in a storefront at street level but might as well be on the 47th floor. As it happens, the owner and I graduated the same year from the same high school but never suspected the other existed until several years ago.

I’ve visited his shop only once and probably never will again. I had telephoned in advance and made certain he had the two-volume edition of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria I wanted. It’s the Oxford University Press reprint from 1958 of the 1907 edition edited by J. Shawcross – no dust jacket, no foxing or underlining, somewhat overpriced but I wanted it, especially when he couldn’t find the Ruskin titles I sought. I soon concluded the owner and I had nothing in common, not even the reading of books (even first-rate book dealers are seldom first-rate book readers). My brother came with me but almost immediately walked out when the owner’s wife sharply told him not to touch a stack of art-history volumes. I felt as though we had entered a speakeasy run by a tyrant bent on eliminating any possibility of pleasure. The shop was crowded but obsessively clean and well organized – itself a symptom of neurosis in the typically cluttered, dusty world of booksellers. The jackets of most volumes were covered with plastic, as in a library. It reminded of the living room of a woman I once knew who laminated her furniture.

Dalrymple notes that booksellers often hold customers in contempt. That’s how I felt with my former classmate. Browsing the stock without interruption was impossible. I felt disproportionately disappointed and saddened. Here was another reminder that the downtown book-hunting expeditions of my youth were gone forever. The irony was bitter: A bookseller who took anally fastidious care of his volumes but by his presence made them unapproachable. And what will happen to his stock when he dies or decides to give it up? The thought of so many books -- probably the last such collection in downtown Cleveland – randomly, unlovingly dispersed, was chilling. Dalrymple would understand my anxiety:

“Books, even without association with anyone known, have an almost sacred quality in any case: it is necessary only to imagine someone ripping the pages out of a cheap and trashy airport novel one by one to prove to oneself that this is so. If we saw someone doing it, we should be shudder, and think him a barbarian, no matter the nature of the book. The horror aroused by book burnings is independent of the quality of the books actually burnt.”