`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.”