`I Assure You I Find This World a Very Pretty Place'

Omens are amusing, not life-altering, so I pay attention to them. The first song I heard on the radio in Houston was Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson’s cover of “Pancho and Lefty,” a favorite song written by Townes Van Zandt, who lived in Houston. The song is a novel, lives compressed in rhyme:

“The poets tell how Pancho fell

Lefty's livin' in a cheap hotel
The desert's quiet and Cleveland's cold
So the story ends we're told
Pancho needs your prayers it's true,
But save a few for Lefty too
He just did what he had to do
Now he's growing old.”

On the plane I worked the crossword puzzle in the airline magazine and read What There is To Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell and my old Modern Library Giant of The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb. Away from family, back to a job and city I enjoy, a little lonely and tired but energized, I savor the letter Lamb wrote his friend Robert Lloyd on Nov. 13, 1798:

“You say that `this World to you seems drain'd of all its sweets!’ At first I had hoped you only meant to insinuate the high price of Sugar! but I am afraid you meant more. O Robert, I don't know what you call sweet. Honey and the honeycomb, roses and violets, are yet in the earth. The sun and moon yet reign in Heaven, and the lesser lights keep up their pretty twinklings. Meats and drinks, sweet sights and sweet smells, a country walk, spring and autumn, follies and repentance, quarrels and reconcilements, have all a sweetness by turns. Good humour and good nature, friends at home that love you, and friends abroad that miss you, you possess all these things, and more innumerable, and these are all sweet things. . . . You may extract honey from everything; do not go a gathering after gall…. I assure you I find this world a very pretty place.”

`What Happens Must Be Slow'

Life’s familiar props have grown a little alien. The book shelves are empty. The closet clanks with coat hangers. The suitcase fills slowly with books and socks. I’m living and working in two places, for now, and the vertigo is spatial, yes, but also temporal, like tumbling in time. Pacific Daylight Time is two hours earlier than Central Daylight Time, and I’m forever recalibrating my clock and the cultural assumptions separating Seattle and Houston. David Slavitt makes the sensation dizzyingly vivid in “Transatlantic Flight” (Crossroads, 1994):

“When it is now there, it will be then here,
but it is not now there yet.
Later it will be now there;
then it will be then there.
But then it will not be then here,
and then it will not be then there
or anywhere, ever again.”

Routines and rituals ground us, preserve us from midair dizziness. Some can be carried, like luggage; others, started only from scratch. My preference is for a slower pace (On a new job? Even an old new job?) and a realistic measure of predictability. I lived in Houston for four years and worked at the job I’m returning to for half of that time. I’m looking for the “sure and slow,” as May Sarton puts it in the closing lines of “In Texas” (Collected Poems 1930-1973, 1974):

“In Texas you look at America with a patient eye.
You want everything to be sure and slow and set in relation
To immense skies and earth that never ends. You wonder why
People must talk and strain so much about a nation
That lives in spaces vaster than a man’s dream and can go
Five hundred miles through wilderness, meeting only the hawk
And the dead rabbit in the road. What happens must be slow,
Must go deeper even than hand’s work or tongue’s talk,
Must rise out of the flesh like sweat after a hard day,
Must come slowly, in its own time, in its own way.”

`Or Beset Life with Supernumerary Distresses'

James V. Schall, S.J., has been reading Johnsonian Miscellanies, two of the most entertaining and instructive volumes in the language, and calls them “a regular treasure house of solemn, delightful, witty, and touching remembrances.” Largely because he was so thoroughly human, compromised by faults and flaws like the rest of us, almost anything written about Johnson makes for compelling reading. Of Johnson’s gift for conversation, as chronicled by Boswell and others, Schall writes:

“We must remember that truth ultimately exists in conversation, not in books. Johnson’s conversations, like Plato’s dialogues, are the closest we can come in writing to conversing with a man who has gone before us.”

True enough, but had Johnson not been a writer of genius – author of the Dictionary, the periodical essays, “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” Lives of the English Poets – no one would have bothered recording his talk. He would have been a nullity, like most of us; not so much forgotten as never remembered. Schall quotes a remark attributed to Johnson in a section of the Miscellanies titled “Dicta Philosophica”: “Every man who writes thinks he can amuse or inform mankind, and they must be the best judges of his pretensions.” Schall comments:

“The man who writes has no idea who, if any one of mankind’s membership, will read his words or laugh at his jokes.”

Johnson’s comment restates his famous dictum from the Soame Jenyns review: “The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.” Johnson would have understood and approved of David Slavitt’s “Youth, Age, Life, and Art” (Rounding the Horn, 1978):

“Innocent, young, I wove syntactical nets
to snare moments of joy, but when one gets
older, the trick is reversed, and, late at night,
to fend the beasts off—fear, rage, and despair—
that prowl the dark or hover in the air,
I sit in my circle of lamplight and I write.”

The writer, of course, counts as his own first reader, and ought to write in such a way as to please himself. Johnson knew his personal beasts intimately, and writes of them persuasively, in an unmistakably first-hand manner, as in The Rambler #126:

“Fear is implanted in us as a preservative from evil; but its duty, like that of other passions, is not to overbear reason, but to assist it; nor should it be suffered to tyrannize in the imagination, to raise phantoms of horror, or beset life with supernumerary distresses.”

`The Enabling Reader, the Recusant'

The word is an exotic mouthful but the meaning is familiar: haruspex. Geoffrey Hill uses it in Section Nine of Clavics (Enithatmon Press, 2011):

“Should benefit from this mixed blood and flame
Utterance known first to the haruspex”

For the Romans and Estruscans, a haruspex foretold the future by reading the entrails of sacrificed animals. A practitioner of this form of divination, Titus Vestricius Spurinna, warned Julius Caesar of the danger he faced on March 15. As recounted by Plutarch (in Sir Thomas North’s translation):

“Furthermore, there was a certaine Soothsayer that had geven Caesar warning long time affore, to take Caesars day heede of the day of the Ides of Marche, (which is the fifteenth of his death of the moneth) for on that day he shoulde be in great daunger.”

Twice in Act I, Scene 2, of Julius Caesar, Shakespeare has the Soothsayer tell the emperor: “Beware the Ides of March.” It’s not the first time Hill has used a form of “haruspex.” In Section 29 of Speech! Speech! (2000), he deploys it as a verb:

“The sanctuary hung with entrails. Blood
on the sackcloth. And still we are not
word-perfect. HARUSPICATE; what does that
say to you?”

Christopher Ricks answers Hill’s question in True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound: “Well (since you ask), what this says to me is that (among much else) the entrails of a poem by Eliot are being inspected.” Ricks cites an echo from “The Dry Salvages,” the third of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:

“To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behavior of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
Observe disease in signatures . . .”

“Scry” is a verb meaning to see the future in a crystal ball, and this reader of Clavics sometimes longed for such supernatural assistance, or at least a skeleton key (a word much punned upon in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake) to unlock some of its secrets. Start with the title. Hill’s epigraph is a bogus entry from the Oxford English Dictionary: “CLAVICS: The science or alchemy of keys – OED, 2012.”

We take “clavicle,” our word for the collarbone, from the Latin clavicula, “small key.” Clavics is ostensibly a poem about William Lawes (1602-1645), court composer to Charles I, so Hill is surely using “key” in its musical sense. However, as he says in a recent interview:

“I would describe myself as a sort of Ruskinian Tory. It is only Ruskinian Tories these days who would sound like old-fashioned Marxists. I read and re-read Ruskin, particularly Fors Clavigera and I am in profound agreement with William Morris’s Art under Plutocracy.”

Ruskin’s peculiar and irresistibly readable Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workman and Labourers of Great Britain was written between 1871 and 1884. The title is Ruskin’s coinage (though worthy of Hill), and combines elements of force (“club,” clava), fortitude (“key,” clavis) and fortune (“nail,” clavus). Hill has a long history of interest in the book. Here’s Section XXV of Mercian Hymns (1971), in which the poet juxtaposes his grandmother and Fors Clavigera:

“Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg.

“The nailshop stood back of the cottage, by the fold. It reeked stale mineral sweat. Sparks had furred its low roof. In dawn-light the troughed water floated a damson-bloom of dust --

“not to be shaken by posthumous clamour. It is one thing to celebrate the 'quick forge', another to cradle a face hare-lipped by the searing wire.

“Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg.”

For this reader, much of Clavics remains mysterious, perilously reminiscent of the life-sucking dedication to decryption demanded by Finnegans Wake. In particulars, it flashes with beauty, but I find the whole obscure, and I say this as a longtime admirer of Hill’s work. At the start of Section Six, Hill writes: “The enabling reader, the recusant / At my fingertips, for whom I write well.” Thank you, I think. The Recusants were English Roman Catholics who refused to attend services of the Church of England – a crime. Today, a recusant refuses to obey established authority of any sort, even poetic. I haven’t given up on Clavics, certainly not on Hill, and take heart that he rhymes “haruspex” with “paradox,” “meretrix” and “drab sex.”

`Her Way Is Mine'

I like other people’s dogs, as I like most animals except deer ticks and Chihuahuas. I had a dog when I was kid, though it felt like part of my self-conscious striving to be an All-American Boy. Cats are my pet of choice, so babysitting my brother-in-law’s yellow Lab is an exercise in charity and patience. As I write, the dog lies on my feet under the desk, farting and snuffling, and the cat sleeps on the leather chair behind me, silent and self-contained – a ready-made illustration of my preference. I admire diffidence and dignity. Dogs are needy, cats don’t care. David Slavitt seems to agree in “Walking the Dog” (Rounding the Horn, 1978; collected in Change of Address: Poems New and Selected, 2005):

“A dog will sniff at bushes, newel posts,
a familiar ivy bed, track his own scent,
and lift his leg wherever it seems right
to sign his claim. In pride of place he boasts,
`My territory!’ And we pay our rent
and use the pot (until then, it’s not quite
home). I walk the dog at night and think
of spots he’s liked, his map of the good places.
He minds his cues and pees. `Good dog!’ I praise,
Uncomfortable. For us, smell turns to stink;
we are unhappy with our bodies’ traces.
He does his business. I avert my gaze,
who can’t return to my good places, shun
reminders that indict me, cannot say—
as I take him to be saying--`Life is fine!
I like it here.’ A cat, when she is done,
will cover it over and then go on her way,
fastidious, ashamed. Her way is mine.”

Mine, too. It’s the fawning of dogs I can’t take, the abject eagerness to please. It’s the same with people. “Don’t perform,” I want to say. “Forget about me. Be yourself.” It’s especially true of writers. When they work hard to ingratiate themselves, they become as repellent as those who work hard to offend. Both are dogs. Cats don’t care.

`These Occasions of Special Grace'

Almost anything will do – a cool breeze on a warm day, butter melting on toast, a good haircut, J.V. Cunningham rhyming “estrange” and “change.” All are moments of no momentous consequence, gifts ignorable, what David R. Slavitt calls “occasions of special grace” in “Chicago Art Institute, after Lunch” (William Henry Harrison and Other Poems, 2006):

“Not the foreshortened ice-cream cone as it first
seemed but a `Glass of Beer,’ 1914,
by Juan Gris. Yes, I see it now, and my thirst
was slaked not ten minutes ago with the cold clean

“taste of a beer that I hadn’t, it now appears,
appreciated sufficiently. The small
pleasures of life that, over the course of years
one comes to take for granted…These are all

“there is, as these artists testify: fruit, flowers,
a view of a field or mountain, a striking face.
What more could one want or need? The painters’ powers
Recall to us these occasions of special grace.”

Slavitt’s poems are often like this -- art as reminder, as goad to gratitude and heightened awareness. They resemble light verse in their refusal to take themselves too heavily, but are seriously crafted, never slipshod or pretentious. His poems are light the way a feather or snowflake is light, functionally elegant and strong, enabling flight.

`Only As Children Do, But With Less Wonder'

In the downtown park two fritillaries flitted by the daisies growing at the edge of the playground. They were among the first butterflies I learned to identify, by genus if not species. What I saw Thursday, according to the field guide, were hydaspe fritillaries (Speyeria hydaspe). One of the collateral benefits of the sun’s rare appearances in the Pacific Northwest is the simultaneous arrival of numerous butterflies. In a parking lot earlier in the day I watched an anise swallowtail flitting futilely over pavement.

David Slavitt’s “Fritillaries” (William Henry Harrison and Other Poems, 2006) is at once playful and laced with gentle regret, memoir masquerading as “nature poetry”:

“The fluttering of the fritillary is…what?
Tutelary? Instructive: the liliaceous
Plant with which it shares its name and to which
I like to think it might be attracted was called that
by Noel Capperon, an Orléans druggist,
because of its checkered leaves he thought resembled
a painted dice box—fritillus in Latin.
And the common fritillary—the plant, I mean,
the Guinea-hen flower, Turkey-hen flower, or sometimes
Pheasant or Leopard’s Lily, or Checkered Lily,
or even the Checkered Daffodil—has indeed
a drooping dull red flower with pink and purple
squares and blotches. (Bees like it; butterflies,
not so much.) The Chinese use the bulbs
to make a tea for loosening phlegm, but avoid
the heart of the bulb which is poison (wouldn’t you know?).
But, no, I wouldn’t. This is all swotted from books,
while real learning comes from walking the woods,
spotting the plants, seeing the butterflies,
and recognizing that what I’m watching fly by
is not a Monarch, say, but a Variegated
Fritillary looking for nectar it likes
from the butterfly weed, common-milkweed, dogbane,
peppermint, red clover, swamp milkweed,
and perhaps the tickseed sunflower—of which
I might know how to pick out maybe the milkweed.
There is also the Great Spangled Fritillary
that is partial to violets, and the Regal Fritillary,
endangered now…I’ve never seen one, or never
known if I did, which is worse. There are several others,
even in Massachusetts, whose names I write down,
Silver-bordered, Atlantis, and Aphrodite,
each of them pleasant enough to indict the flighty
inattention of misspent days and years
that seem to have been my life. Trees, birds, the flowers
underfoot, and the stars overhead I know
only as children do, but with less wonder.
Their names are words I ought to have been alert to…
The Niobe, the Queen of Spain Fritillary…
How could I not have responded to such sweet
Blandishments, such fritiniency (the next
word in the lexicon, the chirping of locusts
or cicadas)? And butterflies, I’m pleased to say,
are prettier and blissfully, blessedly silent.”

We understand Slavitt’s self-deprecation. There’s so much we should have learned long ago, instead of squandering time as though it had no end. Ignorance abounds: “I know / only as children do, but with less wonder.” But there’s still time, and the will is renewed. “Fritiniecy,” I learn, was coined by Sir Thomas Browne in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, that compendium of "vulgar errors."

`In This Scene Nothing Serious Can Go Wrong'

My brother is the family aficionado of garage sales – yard sales, tag sales, junk sales, rummage sales, choose your American idiom. Normally I frequent them only in his company, when we trawl Cleveland subdivisions for promising stacks of books, DVDs, CDs and LPs. We’re both hunters but he’s the gatherer. I’m looking for new ways to get rid of stuff, not old ways to accumulate more.

Wednesday morning I passed a garage sale that appeared to have a table devoted exclusively to books, a rare event, so I stopped. The proprietor was a woman, sixty-five or a little older, in floral shorts and a fluorescent-green top, seated in a lawn chair on the driveway. She greeted me, we both approved of the sunshine, and I scanned the volumes, mostly paperbacks, spines up, heavy on thrillers and self-help. At the ends of the table were stacks of hardcovers serving as bookends. More thrillers, a few old college textbooks – and Stylists on Style (1969), edited by Louis T. Milic, once the chair of the English department at Cleveland State University (go here and scroll down to read his obituary). I bought it for fifty cents.

The dedication page reads “For Pamela and my other students,” followed by a tag from Horace’s Ars Poetica: “ne pueros coram populo Medea trucidet” (“you will not let Medea slay her sons before the people”). One senses a story here, one we’ll never read. The book is an anthology of prose selections by one-hundred English and American writers, from the fifteenth century through the nineteen-sixties (Tom Wolfe). In his “Introductory Essay,” Milic writes:

“The book is based on the belief that there is such an entity as style despite the doubts that have sometimes been cast on its existence and the difficulty of defining it precisely.”

I’ve never had such doubts. Milic’s text is a generous confirmation of prose style’s primacy. Here are Jonson and Johnson, Hazlitt, Milton, Hobbes, Swift, Hume, Dryden and Ford Madox Ford. The Americans are less distinguished, but among them are Thoreau, Twain, Lionel Trilling and Henry James. The Thoreau selection is a gem from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers beginning:

“A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure. The most attractive sentences are, perhaps, not the wisest, but the surest and roundest.”

The garage-sale proprietress told me, “You enjoy that book now,” and I have. I sense Karl Shapiro’s reputation has faded badly since his death in 2000, but some of his poems lovingly document the American scene. He wrote of Buicks, manhole covers, drug stores and “Girls Working in Banks.” In “Garage Sale” from Adult Bookstore (1976) he writes:

“This situation, this neighborly implosion,
As flat as the wallpaper of Matisse
Strikes one as a cultural masterpiece.
In this scene nothing serious can go wrong.”

`They Are Strange Because They Are Solid'

“The flower is a vision because it is not only a vision.”

“Vision” fills a vast human need. We get it from the Latin videre, “to see,” a word that mutates across dozens of languages and shares roots with words meaning “to know.” In Polish, widzieć is “to see,” wiedzieć “to know.” By implication, to truly know something we must see it.

I fly to Houston in a week and I’ve resolved to consciously pack memories specific to the Pacific Northwest – shredding cedar bark, scrambled-egg slime mold, dark-eyed juncos, lawns of moss, wooden fences rotting but still upright. We took the boys to the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks and watched sailboats drop in their concrete troughs. The walls and water are dazzlingly green with algae. The scent of the water is briny but not strongly so – a mingling of fresh and salt water. In the fish ladder viewing room we stood inches from migrating salmon – chinook, coho, sockeye and steelhead. They looked strangely impassive in the green murk.

Adjoining the Ballard locks is the Carl S. English Jr. Botanical Garden, named for the Army Corps of Engineers horticulturalist who created it. The rhododendrons and magnolias are in blossom. So are the thistles and roses. The flowers reminded me of the extended riff, part rhapsody, part metaphysics, that constitutes the third paragraph in Chapter 8 of G.K. Chesterton’s St. Thomas Aquinas (1923). That’s the source of the sentence quoted at the top of this post. Read the whole thing but here’s the context for the quote:

“That strangeness of things, which is the light in all poetry, and indeed in all art, is really connected with their otherness; or what is called their objectivity. What is subjective must be stale; it is exactly what is objective that is in this imaginative manner strange. In this the great contemplative is the complete contrary of that false contemplative, the mystic who looks only into his own soul, the selfish artist who shrinks from the world and lives only in his own mind. According to St. Thomas, the mind acts freely of itself, but its freedom exactly consists in finding a way out to liberty and the light of day; to reality and the land of the living. In the subjectivist, the pressure of the world forces the imagination inwards. In the Thomist, the energy of the mind forces the imagination outwards, but because the images it seeks are real things. All their romance and glamour, so to speak, lies in the fact that they are real things; things not to be found by staring inwards at the mind. The flower is a vision because it is not only a vision. Or, if you will, it is a vision because it is not a dream. This is for the poet the strangeness of stones and trees and solid things; they are strange because they are solid.”

To see, to know: “things not to be found by staring inwards at the mind.”

`Not Even His Own Homelessness Was at Home'

A morning in the company of “health-care professionals.” At 7 a.m., to the dentist for a cleaning and checkup. The hygienist is chatty and wants to know about Houston. “Don’t they have hurricanes there?” My mouth is full of polishers, spritzers, suction tubes and those metal hooks useful dissecting walnuts. I’m not chatty.

Then to the doctor for the annual physical and its indignities, and prescription renewals. The doctor is new to me, the only male in the practice, and suffers from CHD (chronic humor deficit). Prognosis: hopeless.

My G.P. in Houston for four years has retired. He was elderly, precisely the reason I liked him. He was also chatty – “voluble” is a better word, but interestingly so, with tales of Texas and medical horror stories. His nephew has taken over the practice but he’s too young, almost my age. I find myself sympathizing with Will Barrett, the title character of the novel I was rereading in the waiting room –Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman:

“The old itch for omniscience came upon him—lost as he was in his own potentiality, having come home to the South only to discover that not even his own homelessness was at home here.”

`What They Have a Word For'

One hundred fifty-three years ago today, after reporting on the bird nests and eggs he found in Holden Swamp, and on the sound a pickerel makes striking the underside of a lily pad, Thoreau notes in his journal:

“Walking in the white pine woods there, I find that my shoes and, indeed, my hat are covered with the greenish-yellow pollen of the white pines, which is now being shed abundantly and covers like a fine meal all the plants and shrubs of the forest floor. I never noticed it in such abundance before. My shoes are green-yellow, or yellow-green, even the next day with it.”

Our chief pollen-shedder is the Western red cedar. Two stand in the yard, and the one beside the driveway sifts greenish-yellow powder on our cars each spring. My wife’s Toyota is parked closer, so the body is also textured with bumps of sun-baked pitch, hundreds of them. Pollen, pitch and the cedar’s scale-like leaves have given her car a Pacific Northwest camouflage finish, though the pollen is nothing compared to the post oak’s in Houston. Imagine half an inch of finely milled flour on your windshield each morning, kneaded into a doughy mess by the wipers after you spray the window cleaner.

Now the cedar’s reddish pollen cones are falling, covering the driveway and lawn with rust-colored drifts. They stick to our shoes and end up in every room, even in the beds. I sweep them out of the gutter so the sewer isn’t plugged. I enjoy the spectacle of natives and transplants lauding the region’s natural beauty and complaining about how filthy the trees are.

A typical woods or fringe of trees along a road here includes Western red cedar, Douglas fir, alder and big-leaf maple – a lovely bouquet of mixed colors, shapes and sizes. Thoreau writes later in the same June 20, 1858, passage:

“I see that the French have a convenient word, aunaie, also spelt aulnaie and aulnage, etc., signifying a grove of alders. It reminds me of their other convenient word used by Rasle, cabanage.”

I can’t think of a collective noun in English referring to groves of any specific species of tree, only generic words -- “grove,” “copse,” “spinney,” “orchard,” “stand,” “thicket.” Cabanage means hut, campsite or slave quarters. “Rasle” is Sébastien Rasles (1657-1724), a French Jesuit missionary who compiled a dictionary of the Abenaki language. In his journal for March 5, 1858, Thoreau writes:

“Father Rasle’s dictionary of the Abenaki language amounts to a very concentrated and trustworthy natural history of that people, though it was not completed. What they have a word for, they have a thing for. A traveller may tell us that he thinks they used a pavement, or built their cabins in a certain form, or soaked their seed corn in water, or had no beard, etc., etc.; but when one gives us the word for these things, the question is settled,--that is a clincher.”

Few things are so deeply satisfying – so pleasurably a clincher – as fitting a new word to an old thing, and filling in yet another hole in the world.

`His Business is His Pleasure'

My car, mounted on a trailer with eight other vehicles, left our driveway Friday afternoon and is bound for Houston, twelve days ahead of me. A suitcase of dress shirts, pants and neckties, and a box of essential books, are stowed in the trunk. The driver, Sergei, will deliver the Olds to a former neighbor’s house next Thursday or Friday, and I’ll claim it the following Wednesday. It’s an unsettling sensation, giving car and keys to a stranger and trusting him to haul it safely across the continent.

Sergei emigrated last year from Russia. His father was an officer in the Soviet and Russian armies, and the family moved all over the former U.S.S.R. His English is heavily accented, and he works earnestly at speaking in complete sentences, not fragments. He lost me when I spoke too rapidly or used an unfamiliar American idiom. Sergei, however, passed my Russian test. When I asked if he liked Chekhov’s stories, he answered in the affirmative: “Ah, Chekhov.” The “Ah” was a long sigh of recollected pleasure.

Sergei spends his days on the road studying English on CD. I asked for a sentence from his current lesson and he said: “Even children speak English in this country.” Well, some do.

Sergei seems like a legitimately happy man, unworried and content. He makes good money and enjoys driving a truck. He’s visited forty-three states in fifteen months, more than I have in fifty-eight. “Your country is big like mine,” he said. “Very big country.” Sergei is among the rare exceptions to Dr. Johnson’s observation in The Idler #102:

“It very seldom happens to man that his business is his pleasure. What is done from necessity is so often to be done when against the present inclination, and so often fills the mind with anxiety, that an habitual dislike steals upon us, and we shrink involuntarily from the remembrance of our task. This is the reason why almost everyone wishes to quit his employment; he does not like another state, but is disgusted with his own.”

`The Unutterable Muddiness of Mud'

“In a landscape that is nearly totally urban, just by the freeway, a pond, rushes, a wild duck, small trees. Those who pass on the road feel at that sight a kind of relief, though they would not be able to name it.”

I think I can name it. Part of the relief is negative; that is, a passing pocket of the natural world is not a strip mall or used-car lot. It is not gratuitously ugly, an insult to the senses of passersby, and not a reminder of human obligations. It demands nothing of us. It is what it has always been, a small patch of creation going on about its business of being. Some of us envy its self-containment.

A ditch I passed on the way to and from school recently turned purplish-red with a species of grass I can’t name. The effect is like a Cezanne landscape with an unexplained dash of orange among the greens. Its oddness is not discordant but pleasing. I also passed a marsh dense with cattails and phragmites, and heard the insistent call of red-winged blackbirds. This is not a diversion from the cares of the day but a call to self-forgetting and gratitude.

Maisie Ward in Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1943) says the writer took “a fierce pleasure in things being themselves,” without wishing to change them or demanding anything of them. Chesterton was pleased and excited by “the wetness of water, the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud.”

The passage quoted above is “In a Landscape” from Roadside Dog by Czesław Miłosz.

`I Am the Past, and That Is All'

The last day of school – magical words, like “Christmas morning.” Summer meant liberation, twelve hours every day outdoors, in the fields, woods and creek. We grew up in a Cleveland suburb, in the nineteen-fifties and –sixties, and had no idea of our good fortune. No summer camp, summer school, calendar or itinerary. Every kid, we assumed, played Army and chess, chased butterflies and learned the names of flowers and trees. We couldn’t imagine a kid unable to keep himself amused. That was a malady for grownups. But even the pleasures of childhood are mutable.

Kids in my school seem to value summer less for what it is than for what it isn’t – that is, school. They go to camp because – well, because they have to be somewhere. They join leagues and classes, with little anticipation of pleasure. I have no grand theory to explain it or solutions to fix it. The wonder of summer, as I remember it, seems faded. Chesterton writes in Tremendous Trifles, “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.”

School yearbooks arrived Thursday. Kids clamored for autographs. Most I signed “Mr. Patrick,” as most of them know me. We’re encouraged not to pick favorites, but that’s a discipline I’ve never mastered. Almost daily since the start of the school year, a kindergartener has hugged me each time she saw me. She’s a naturally loving child, but seems inexplicably fond of me. She was born in Chicago, of middle-aged parents newly arrived from Rumania. I have three boys, no girls, and she allowed me to imagine what it might be like to have a daughter. I signed her yearbook at length, telling her I would miss her but would always remember her, and that she should take good care of her parents, who always take good care of her. She taught me something new about Yvor Winters’ “At the San Francisco Airport,” dedicated “To my daughter, 1954,” in particular this stanza:

“And you are here beside me, small,
Contained and fragile, and intent
On things that I but half recall—
Yet going whither you are bent.
I am the past, and that is all.”

`The Heavier Has My Equipage Grown'

Boxing and moving one’s library is a rare mingling of tedium and pleasure. The lifting, dusting and packing can be tiresome, but I enjoy creative culling, the opportunity to learn what’s no longer precious, which of the five-thousand or so volumes deserve another deserving reader, what’s worth selling. With this move, logistics are complicated, choices easy.

I fly to Houston in thirteen days but the long-distance hauler will take my car this weekend. By their rules, I’m permitted to pack one-hundred pounds of belongings in the trunk, though I’d be surprised if the driver carries a scale. With my suitcase and spare tire I’ll pack a cardboard shipping box holding 4.5 cubic feet of books – fifty pounds or more -- constituting the core of my personal library in Houston. No surprises in that collection: Shakespeare, Aldo Buzzi, Ronald Knox, Boswell, Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets, the Bible, Flann O’Brien, Winters, Pinkerton, Étienne Gilson, Melville, Beckett, Bowers, Geoffrey Hill, Zbigniew Herbert and so forth.

Here’s the complicated part: Our landlord has agreed to put new carpet in my office/library, probably when I’m already in Texas. I have to strip the shelves, box the books and haul them to our storage unit. That’s a lot of lifting, but with each volume culled, the load grows lighter and my wallet a little fatter. In his classic essay on reducing a library, “Books Won’t Furnish a Room,” Joseph Epstein reads my mind:

“Getting rid of most of my personal library comported nicely with my long-held fantasy of traveling light, existing with minimal encumbrance, living simply. A fantasy it has always been, for the longer I have lived, the heavier has my equipage grown."

Unlike Epstein, the only thing I’ve accumulated to guilt-inducing proportions is books. After this latest move to Houston, where I’ll again have daily access to a first-rate university library, I anticipate feeling cleaner and lighter, without sacrificing bookish sustenance. Last week, my brother mailed an almost-mint-condition copy of Czesław Miłosz’s Roadside Dog he bought for almost nothing at a flea market. It arrived Tuesday. On one side of the shipping box he wrote in red marker: “OH BOY, Another Book.”

`Every Word Counted'

“[Samuel Beckett was] very attentive to what everyone said, sometimes to their discomfiture; made me realize again how people aren’t used to being listened to so literally—because they themselves don’t listen, but discount half of what’s said and extract the general tenor. Not Sam. There was no general tenor and every word counted.”

So writes Beckett’s friend of thirty-five years, Anne Atik, in How It Was (2005). Her Beckett is a thoughtful, attentive, doting companion to children and adults, fond of reciting Dante, Johnson, Keats and Yeats, but it’s Beckett’s literal listening that impresses and shames me. In his Dictionary, Johnson defines “to listen” as “To hearken; to give attention.”

Life is lost nodding my head to choruses of talk. Not everyone deserves to be listened to. We’re obliged to ignore the pompous and self-impressed, but boredom, manners and selfishness get in the way of always listening as though “every word counted.” Some words don’t, depending on speaker, eloquence and honesty.

Tuesday we attended our almost-eleven-year-old son’s “graduation” from the fifth grade. A slide show, funny hats, a rousing hymn to “diversity, with unity,” a principal whose commencement speech quoted Dr. Seuss at length. Seated in the gymnasium bleachers, I worked hard at listening and keeping my mouth shut, and mostly succeeded. Beckett writes in The Unnamable:

“Listening hard, that’s what I call going silent.”

`Let Us Be Ocular Athletes'

“Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of the utterance. A political speech may be, and sometimes is, literature; a sonnet to the moon may be, and often is, trash. Style is what distinguishes literature from trash.”

Evelyn Waugh is among the supreme prose stylists of the last century, as even this excerpt from a 1955 pen-for-hire article (collected in Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, 1983) suggests. At their best, his sentences are orderly and elegantly concise, without flab. Every word is alive and suffused with his sensibility; none is inert. Style is not veneer; it is the solid wood.

I thought of Waugh’s article (“Literary Style in England and America,” in which he also writes: “[Ronald Knox’s] Enthusiasm should be recognized as the greatest work of literary art of the century.”) as I read Tremendous Trifles (1909), a gathering of newspaper columns G.K. Chesterton wrote for the Daily News between 1902 and 1909. They were conceived as workaday journalism, the least likely source of literary worth, and their ostensible subjects include chalk, railroads and “What I Found in My Pocket” -- hardly promising raw material. Rather, the sort of folksy stuff that encourages group hugs among facile writers and undemandingly sentimental readers.

Yet Chesterton, who died seventy-five years ago today, regularly transmutes dross into literary precious metals with verve, wit and imagination. He honors the writer’s obligation to present readers with something interesting, and thus turns himself into one of literature’s great pleasure givers. Of how many writers of literary worth can the same be said today? In his preface to Tremendous Trifles (a title distilling GKC’s style, philosophy and life), Chesterton writes, without apology:

“But trivial as are the topics they are not utterly without a connecting thread of motive. As the reader’s eye strays, with hearty relief, from these pages, it probably alights on something, a bed-post or a lamp-post, a window blind or a wall. It is a thousand to one that the reader is looking at something that he has never seen: that is, never realised.”

For Chesterton, creation trembles with significance, much of it cause for joy. Nothing is too insignificant to merit our inattention. He continues:

“None of us think enough of these things on which the eye rests. But don’t let us let the eye rest. Why should the eye be so lazy? Let us exercise the eye until it learns to see startling facts that run across the landscape as plain as a painted fence. Let us be ocular athletes. Let us learn to write essays on a stray cat or a coloured cloud. I have attempted some such thing in what follows; but anyone else may do it better, if anyone else will only try.”

Chesterton would have made a superb blogger.

`My Mind Is Hands and Feet'

The summer of 1975 was exceedingly hot in Cleveland and we lived on the second floor of an old building without air conditioning. The halls and rooms were long and narrow, with high ceilings and uneven wooden floors, and the walls were whitewashed, cracked and swollen. It smelled of must and bus exhaust, and the only way to cool off and shed the city stink was to soak in the bathtub, usually with a book.

One Sunday afternoon I was rereading Walden in the Princeton University Press edition edited by J. Lyndon Shanley and published in 1971. It was a beautiful piece of bookmaking I lost during some long-ago move. The cool water, clean type and softness of the paper merge in memory with a sentence, one I haven’t forgotten, from the final paragraph of Chapter 2, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”:

“My head is hands and feet.”

What makes the sentence memorable apart from its lovely iambic concision is Thoreau’s refusal to write it as a simile: “My head is like hands and feet.” That sentence is forgettable. For context, here’s the surrounding passage:

“The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.”

This is not the Thoreau of vaporous Transcendentalism. “The intellect is a cleaver” suggests the start of a conventional Romantic assault on the rigors of reason, but Thoreau follows an unexpected path. The intellect, fortunately, is master of our hands and feet, a sovereign master. Guided by our “best faculties,” our lives are not aimless wanderings. The mind is “an organ for burrowing.” The technological term that comes to mind is “data mining,” just as I’ve always linked Thoreau’s sentence to one by A.J. Liebling, the source of which I no longer remember: “A journalist reports with his feet.”

Thoreau’s sentence came back to me while I was reading “A Glimpse of My Country,” an essay in G.K. Chesterton’s Tremendous Trifles (1909):

“It is the same with the voters. The average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or with a hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of himself as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet.”

`A Goyim Naches'

On June 5, David Myers reminded us that “174 years today Houston was incorporated. May not be fashionable to say so, but I love it—that great sweaty sprawling transient monstrosity.”

The operative word is “transient.” Even to speak of Houston’s incorporation – being given a body – is misleading. It’s a rare city that has no good geographical reason for being where it is, no port or confluence of rivers. It’s flat, hot and surprisingly green, and portions of the city remain marshy. Its excuse for a river is the muddy Buffalo Bayou, home to the occasional transient alligator. Houston attracts transients. We lived there four years, reluctantly at first, with all of our slowly shed Northern prejudices, moved North again for three years, and now I’m going back.

Having lived in five states, and soon to return to No. 4, my sense of “home” is densely layered, like those transparent sheets in anatomy texts – Circulatory, Reproductive and Skeletal Systems – laid one atop another to form a whole. My pre-rational image of “home” is compounded of Cleveland, the Capital District of New York and Houston (with a cameo appearance by Winesburg, Ohio). Indiana and Greater Seattle are not part of the picture. Going “home” to Houston is a transient’s return, not a terminus.

Patrick Leigh Fermor died on Friday, age ninety-six. Better than most writers, he understood the importance of home, of leaving it and returning. In the second of two volumes devoted to his walk across Europe in 1933-34, Between the Woods and the Water (1986), Fermor describes a chance meeting with a group of Jewish loggers in Transylvania:

“My interlocutors looked bewildered when I tried to explain my reasons for not staying at home. Why was I travelling? To see the world, to study, to learn languages? I wasn’t quite clear myself. Yes, some of these things, but mostly—I couldn’t think of the word at first—and when I found it--`for fun’—it didn’t sound right and their brows were still puckered. `Also, Sie treiben so herum aus Vergnügen?’ The foreman shrugged his shoulders and smiled and said something to the others in Yiddish; they all laughed and I asked what it was. `Es ist a goyim naches!’ they said. ‘A goyim naches’, they explained, is something that the goyim like but which leaves Jews unmoved; any irrational or outlandish craze, a goy’s delight or a gentile’s relish. It seemed to hit the nail on the head.”

`The Pure Style of Grave Intelligence'

“I repeated to myself the awkward formula: it is and I am, and the vast expanse of time separating the dates of our birth contracted, vanished. We were contemporaries.”

The writer is Zbigniew Herbert in “Acropolis,” from his third essay collection, Labyrinth by the Sea (The Collected Prose 1948-1998). This most tradition-minded of poets is describing his first sight of the Parthenon in Athens, but with a single change of pronoun he might be describing the affinity, unbounded by space or time, I know with a small clutch of writers: “We were contemporaries.” I adore Shakespeare but have never mistaken him for my contemporary (despite Jan Kott). What I’m describing is covert kinship, a resonance with the voice one hears in a writer’s life and work. I hear it in Dr. Johnson, of course, and in Melville, Henry James, Chekhov, Herbert and in the newest member of this exclusive little club, Yvor Winters. Only the last two (born in 1900 and 1924, respectively) were alive during my lifetime.

Winters’ hold took me by surprise. When the student is ready, I’ve heard, the teacher appears, and only recently have I become ready for Winters. When I was young, he seemed too austere. The failing was mine. I mistook passion and rigor – virtues rarely coupled -- for austerity and closed-mindedness. He scared me, a useful quality in a teacher, though not sufficient unto itself.

Among Winters former colleagues at Stanford University was David Levin, described to me by Helen Pinkerton as a “longtime professor of American literature at Stanford.” Included in Poems in Memory of Yvor Winters on the Centenary of his Birth (edited and published by R.L. Barth, 2000), is a sonnet by Levin, “To a Moral Navigator, Observed on His Way to Class,” written “For Yvor Winters”:

“Solemn as Queequeg, porting an old harpoon,
You march in sunshine, stepping forth to teach
Young navigators how to haul, to reach
The mystery of Melville, whale, typhoon.
You have not flung your quadrant at the moon,
Or thrown away your pipe, or scorned the beach,
Or, with some captains of demonic speech,
Followed dumb feeling to a blind lagoon.

“Yet reason must be brought to your defense.
You reach a faith too brave for dogmatists.
Unable to receive the Holy Ghost,
And knowing what your unbelief has cost,
You use dead reckoning, and meet white mists
In the pure style of grave intelligence.”

In a nice stroke, Levin likens Winters to Queequeg, the master harpooner, not mad Ahab. In “The Quadrant,” Chapter 118 of Moby-Dick, Ahab curses the navigational instrument and smashes it on the deck, vowing to navigate the Pequod with “the level ship's compass, and the level deadreckoning, by log and by line” -- typical self-destructive bravado. Instead, Winters shares with Queequeg “the pure style of grave intelligence.”

In 1978, ten years after Winters’ death, Levin published a remembrance of his teacher, “Yvor Winters at Stanford,” in the Virginia Quarterly Review. Levin confirms that Winters each year carried a harpoon to one of his lectures on Moby-Dick. Levin writes:

“Just as the intensity of his passion must sometimes have moved his fingers over keys that expressed more anger than the occasion deserved, so his perfect ear for the language and his scorn of circumlocution must occasionally have brought reasonable indignation closer to the sound of fury.”

`To Be Able to Procure Its Own Entertainments'

Most days, I eat alone in the staff room. Mine is the last scheduled lunch of the day – 1:10 p.m. – and I enjoy the customary quiet. I read, make notes, call my wife. On Thursday, I was joined by two teachers who sat at the far end of the table and recounted loudly and in harrowing detail the plot of the television show they had watched independently the night before. They agreed on little and argued over hair color, chronology, dialogue and the makes of automobiles: “I know a Saab when I see one.” This went on for twenty minutes and both teachers had a grand time.

So did I. To be so unselfconsciously tedious is a gift, one too seldom appreciated, like double-jointedness and whistling in key. My mind is helplessly associative, so everything reminds me of something else, and though the teachers offered me entrée, and I could seamlessly have joined the conversation, even without having watched the show, I remained a spectator. Tedium on this scale, pursued with such gusto, is a spectacle, and perhaps no longer tedium. That’s my point: the boring can be remarkably interesting -- a paradox akin to finding much in the human world tiresome, while possessing almost ironclad immunity against boredom. In the June issue of Commentary, Joseph Epstein is typically amusing on the subject:

“Unrequited love, as Lorenz Hart instructed us, is a bore, but then so are a great many other things: old friends gone somewhat dotty from whom it is too late to disengage, the important social-science-based book of the month, 95 percent of the items on the evening news, discussions about the Internet, arguments against the existence of God, people who overestimate their charm, all talk about wine, New York Times editorials, lengthy lists (like this one), and, not least, oneself.”

One list invites another: “social media,” anything written by a Marxist, Gertrude Stein, fish as pets (not food), the Grateful Dead, David Foster Wallace and John Ashbery, rock lyrics printed as poetry, “bourgeois,” and any talk of sports, politics and e-books. All are boring, none bores me. Dr. Johnson writes in The Rambler #135:

"To be able to procure its own entertainments, and to subsist upon its own stock, is not the prerogative of every mind. There are, indeed, understandings so fertile and comprehensive, that they can always feed reflection with new supplies, and suffer nothing from the preclusion of adventitious amusements; as some cities have within their own walls enclosed ground enough to feed their inhabitants in a siege. But others live only from day to day, and must be constantly enabled, by foreign supplies, to keep out the encroachments of languor and stupidity."

`All Children Can Learn and Do Learn'

On Wednesday I submitted my resignation from the school district, effective June 17, the last day of the school year. It was another piece of paperwork, with little emotion attached. I worked for the district as a substitute for a year and a half, and fulltime in a grade school for another year. I’m not leaving education. In Houston, I’ll return to Rice University as a science writer, and will continue working with and for young people, but that’s a different population, largely self-selected for learning. What I’ll miss are the younger children, especially that fraction who somehow remain thoughtful, affectionate and enthusiastic.

Working in schools has been an education. I’ve enjoyed myself and have no complaints about my treatment, but I’ve learned I’m not cut out for social work. In my experience, public schools are a vast laboratory dedicated to a misbegotten experiment. Enormous amounts of time and money are spent preaching the “guidelines for success” – right-sounding platitudes – while the staff mollifies indifferent, distracted, self-absorbed young people and their parents. Almost a century ago, on Jan. 31, 1914, G.K. Chesterton wrote in The London Illustrated News:

“I do not think the modern elementary school spreads enlightenment. I do not think it spreads anything—except occasionally mumps.”

Enlightenment, bringing light to children, sounds quaint, but how can there be success without failure? We’re instructed to praise students for any effort, no matter how paltry or dishonest. No one fails, so everyone fails by succeeding. Successes are incremental and rare. I’ve taught math to a fourth-grader since the start of the year. She knows her multiplications tables, at last. She can divide and juggle fractions. When I told her I would not be returning to her school next year, when she’s in fifth grade, she asked: “Can you help me by email?”

In Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning (1991), Jacques Barzun writes:

“All children can learn and do learn. By the time they first go to school they have learned an enormous amount, including a foreign language, since no language is native to the womb. So if they stop learning when in school, it must be because the desire to learn is killed by protracted non-achievement and non-teaching…

“For the normal and healthy, it is the very character of the school that seems to stop learning, and this at a point of no great difficulty: simple reading, writing, and arithmetic. The fifth grade is for many too many the stopping place.”

`I'll Tickle Your Catastrophe'

My eighth-grade “tutoree” (an ugly neologism, though pleasingly reminiscent of the Italian tutore: “guardian”) gave me a pleasant surprise: Shakespeare. His class is performing one-hundred fifty lines from Act II, Scene 2, of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, starting with Helena’s first words: “Stay, though thou kill me, sweet Demetrius.” We reviewed the passage word by word, and the one my student didn’t know (besides “wash’d”) was “surfeit,” though he liked and understood the context. Lysander says:

“For as a surfeit of the sweetest things
The deepest loathing to the stomach brings,
Or as tie heresies that men do leave
Are hated most of those they did deceive,
So thou, my surfeit and my heresy,
Of all be hated, but the most of me!”

After I defined “surfeit,” he said: “Oh, you mean like eating too much candy.” Today, the word means any excess or overabundance, though in his Dictionary, Johnson defines it as “Sickness or satiety caused by overfulness.” My student had about him a surfeit of knowingness, so I knew he was withholding something, until he informed me he had learned to swear “like they did in Shakespeare.” The teacher had photocopied a list of words and these instructions: “Combine one word from each of the three columns below, prefaced with `Thou.’” Below are sixty Shakespearean adjectives and thirty nouns. A sample, chosen strictly for its linguistic exuberance:

“Thou gorbellied beef-witted hedge-pig!”

“Gorbellied,” not surprisingly, is spoken by Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1 (Act II, Scene 2):

“Hang ye, gorbellied knaves, are ye undone? No, ye
fat chuffs: I would your store were here! On,
bacons, on! What, ye knaves! young men must live.
You are Grand-jurors, are ye? we'll jure ye, 'faith.”

Thersites in Troilus and Cressida (Act II, Scene 1) says:

“The plague of Greece upon thee, thou mongrel
beef-witted lord!”

And the Second Witch in Macbeth (Act IV, Scene 1) says:

“Thrice and once the hedge-pig whined.”

To get a fourteen-year-old laughing at Shakespeare’s language, even at the level of gimmickry, is a worthwhile, albeit minor, accomplishment. The word list also provided a homework idea. I called my student a “fustilarian,” and his assignment was to decide whether I had insulted him. The word, spoken by the Page, appears in Henry IV, Part 2 (Act II, Scene 1):

“Away, you scullion! you rampallian! you fustilarian!
I'll tickle your catastrophe.”

In his Dictionary entry for the word, Johnson writes:

“[from fusty.] A low fellow; a stinkard; a scoundrel. A word used by Shakespeare only.”

`Judge of Words'

“Or should I gird myself, and bravely beard
Death in its den with nothing but a pen
In hand, and scribble like a harmless drudge?
Sir: failing this, I could go cobble words
Again—that charmless work of crippled men
Who see the world…and wish it unabridged.”

The words are Samuel Johnson’s, translated from the Latin by Len Krisak. The poem is “Γνώθι σεαυτόν [Gnothi Seauton] (Post Lexicon Anglicanum Auctem et Emendatum)” – “Know Thyself (After the Revision and Correction of the English Dictionary).” In his translation, Krisak titles it “Know Yourself.” The six-line stanza above is the last of twenty in Krisak’s version, collected in Samuel Johnson: Selected Latin Poems Translated by Various Hands (edited by Bob Barth, 1987).

In 1771-72, Johnson prepared a revised edition of A Dictionary of the English Language (1755). He turned sixty-three while editing the work that assured his eminence in literary history – a bittersweet task. W. Jackson Bate writes in Samuel Johnson (1977):

“In concluding this revision—for there was very little likelihood he would ever make another—he was giving a final farewell to the only thing he had done, as he himself viewed his life, that no one else in the English language had done…”

Johnson composed his poem in December 1772, after a visit to Lichfield, his birthplace. Bate calls it “a very private poem, for which he instinctively fell back on Latin to give himself formal distance.” “Know Yourself,” like Tristram Shandy and much of Beckett, is built on the conceit of writing as a stay, ultimately futile, against mortality.

Krisak uses “beard” in the archaic sense of confront or stand up to. In his Dictionary, Johnson defines it as “to oppose to the face” – in this case, the face of Death. “Harmless drudge,” of course, is Johnson’s self-deprecating definition of “lexicographer”: “A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge.” Krisak uses “cobble words” to mean write or revise what is already written – a Johnsonian turn, suffused with the writer’s humility in the face of his craft. Johnson defines this sense of “cobble” as “To mend anything coarsely; to do or make clumsily.” This most learned of men proposes self-knowledge as a corrective or antidote to pride in learning (in Krisak's translation):

“All the scholar’s sweet rewards
Have passed me by, and I myself forbid
Myself the happy fruits of life. I am
My own stern Justice—Judge of Words.”

`Ape All the Bricklayers that Babel Built'

Ignorance – an honest, incomplete ignorance – can be a beguiling virtue, especially in someone deeply knowledgeable. I used to think I wanted to know everything. At age twenty-four, I resolved to learn Chinese history, a notion quickly frittered away, and today I can’t keep the dynasties straight. Ignorance can be a comfort, a truth reconfirmed when, for three dollars, I bought a previously owned, almost-mint copy of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary: Selections from the 1755 Work that Defined the English Language, edited by Jack Lynch.

In his introduction, in a paragraph devoted to Johnson’s occasional lapses, Lynch notes the lexicographer’s “frank admissions of ignorance” and cites the definition of stammel:

“Of this word I know not the meaning.”

The echo of “stammer” is strong but misleading. Go here for a thorough definition that amounts to a rich digression into textiles and religious practice. In his note, Lynch reports the Oxford English Dictionary defines stammel as "A coarse woolen cloth" and "The shade of red in which the cloth was commonly dyed." Johnson cites a passage by his homophonic namesake, Ben Jonson, the source of which I’m unable to identify (more ignorance):

“Reedhood, the first that doth appear
In stammel: scarlet is too dear.”

Browsing through Lynch’s edition, I happened upon another example of Johnson’s refreshing ignorance, his entry for skilt:

“A word used by Cleaveland, of which I know not either the etymology or meaning.”

Lynch's note tells us skilt does not appear in the OED. “Cleaveland” is the poet John Cleveland (1613-1658), and Johnson cites this usage from his poem “Smectymnus, or the Club-Divines”:

“Smectymnus! ha! what art?
Syriack? Or Arabick? Or Welsh? What skilt?
Ape all the bricklayers that Babel built.”

About skilt I remain ignorant and find little enlightenment in the excerpt from Cleveland’s poem, which seems to have something to do with mutual ignorance and incomprehension. Lynch says "the editors of Cleveland's poetry" suggest skilt means "signify" and interpret "What skilt?" to mean "What does it matter?" I’m reminded of Guy Davenport’s insight into human psychology included in “Pergolesi’s Dog” (Every Force Evolves a Form, 1987): “We are never so certain of our knowledge as when we’re dead wrong.” There’s small solace in lines from Cleveland’s “Epitaph on the Earl of Strafford,” lifted ignorantly out of context:

“Riddles lie here, or in a word --
Here lies blood; and let it lie
Speechless still and never cry.”

Review: `Unseen Hand' by Adam Zagajewski

My review of Unseen Hand by Adam Zagajewski appears in Issue 24 of The Quarterly Conversation.

`Wisdom and Wilderness'

“Joy to him was experience transformed to language, both mysteries to probe, both joys to encounter with the fullness of one’s powers.”

Henry C. Ramsey is writing of Yvor Winters but he might be describing any writer for whom arranging words is more than a parlor game or strictly utilitarian. Winters probably would have agreed with Dr. Johnson: “The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.” Both impulses are born in joy (the writer’s) and give joy (to the right reader).

Around 1930, Winters famously changed his poetic style. “Simplex Munditiis” dates from this period. We might call it late early Winters or early late Winters. The title is from Horace’s Ode I, 5, rendered by Milton as “Plain in thy neatness.” One of Winters' great poetic models, Ben Jonson, also used the tag as the title of a poem. I like “artful elegance.” Here is the poem, one of the two I can find in which Winters uses the word “joy”:

“The goat nips yellow blossoms
shaken loose from rain—
with neck extended
lifts a twitching flower
high into wet air. Hard
humility the lot of man
to crouch beside
this creature in the dusk
and hold the mind clear;
to turn the sod,
to face the sod beside his door,
to wound it as his own flesh.
In the spring the blossoms
drown the air with joy,
the heart with sorrow.
One must think of this
in quiet. One must
bow his head and take
with roughened hands
sweet milk at dusk,
the classic gift of earth.”

Winters’ poems often are autobiographical, but not in the banal sense. The poet kept and milked goats, and raised and showed Airedales. For so formidably intellectual a man, he had an earthiness about him. He was drawn to the elemental, in language and life, suggested by the intermingling in his poem of joy and sorrow. Here is my favorite line, the most evocative, implying the fear of madness or “The Brink of Darkness” (the title of his only published fiction), an anxiety he shared with Johnson: “One must think of this / in quiet.” The bowing of the head when milking, leaning against the goat’s flank, suggests prayer and the “Hard / humility” cited earlier. Elsewhere in “Yvor Winters and Janet Lewis 1929-1932” (Sequoia, Autumn 1989), Ramsey writes:

“Arthur [Winters’ given first name], like many of us, was a person of paradox and `mighty opposites’ [Hamlet, Act V, Scene 2], but within his capacities, disciplined, sound, kind, generous, and brilliant. He was, as he characterized Herman Melville, one of his heroes, `wisdom and wilderness.’”

`Versed in Country Things'

One of my wife’s colleagues invited us to dinner at her renovated farm house in the country. She lives in a clearing in the woods, reached by an unpaved road. We ate on a table in the backyard as chickens ran about, ignored by the dog. One of the birds rolled on its back and kicked up dirt in the flower bed. By sight or sound I recognized eight bird species, including spotted towhee and Say’s phoebe, not counting chickens. I smelled cedar and a scent as cloying as honeysuckle, unidentified. Swallows dipped in arcs above the cedars.

I walked around the perimeter of her land, admiring the tall rotting cedar stumps, spider webs, buttercups and blackberries, the latter now in flower, a month from fruit. I came upon a wicker table and two wicker chairs, once white, now gray, sunken like stumps in the ground. Nearby, I almost missed two old farm buildings obscured by brambles and second-growth trees. The wooden-shingled roofs had collapsed inward and were upholstered with moss. Through a gap in the impassable underbrush I spied a rusted automobile chassis, baling wire and a stack of tractor tires. An empty bird’s nest sat on a pile of rotting wood. Frost writes:

“For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.”

`A Whole New Capacity for Thinking and Writing'

“I cannot remember a time when I did not want to read as much as possible. Since my family did not have many books, my main sources were school books, gifts from relatives, and books borrowed from neighbors until I was old enough to check them out of the Butte Public Library, which I did as often and as many as possible.”

The thirst for printed matter and the resulting inability to live without books defies demographics. The speaker of this passage is female and born in Montana in 1928. I was born in Ohio in 1952. But for the place name, I could echo her words in every detail. David Myers asked this week in an email if I thought “the codex is dead.” Without theories I can only answer from experience: I can’t imagine such a thing happening – losing the Bible I was given in 1960, my copy of Taken in Faith: Poems signed by Helen Pinkerton, the Ulysses I’ve read and annotated since 1967 – but that may only betray the limits of my imagination.

The passage quoted above is from an interview with Pinkerton in the Winter 2011 issue of Think Journal. The interviewer is James Matthew Wilson, poet, teacher, author of a fine essay on Pinkerton, and an editor at Front Porch Republic. Think Journal arrived on Thursday in my latest package of gifts from Pinkerton, and with it came:

Samuel Johnson: Selected Latin Poems Translated by Various Hands (1995), a chapbook edited and published by Bob Barth.

Poems in Memory of Yvor Winters on the Centenary of his Birth (2000), another chapbook edited and published by Barth.

A photocopy of “Yvor Winters and Janet Lewis 1929-1932” by Henry C. Ramsey from the Autumn 1989 issue of Sequoia.

A photocopy of Pinkerton’s poem “Metaphysical Song” from the April 2006 issue of First Things.

A photocopy of Pinkerton’s “Coronach for Christopher Drummond” from the June 2003 issue of The New Compass: A Critical Review.

In the email cited above, Myers describes Pinkerton as “one of my favorite poets,” and I easily endorse the sentiment. That we have a master in our midst will surprise dedicated followers of poetic fashion. It’s a bleak time in American letters and probably elsewhere, but good and great work is still being written, almost sub rosa, far from the mills of fashion and promotion. In her Think Journal interview, Pinkerton speaks of the importance of Yvor Winters to her thinking and work, starting almost seventy years ago when she became his student at Stanford University:

“Winters’ level of teaching, the kinds of topics he expected us to write about, the seriousness of his consideration of literary and philosophical questions of all sorts simply brought out in me a whole new capacity for thinking and writing. My temperament, which was already inclined toward critical judgment as essential to the growth of the mind, fell in with his and enabled me to profit immensely from his teaching.”

`Series of Harsh, Short, Rasping Notes'

What I’ll miss most about the Pacific Northwest are the trees, the preponderance of conifers, Douglas firs in particular, and two bird species. Both of the latter – dark-eyed junco and Steller’s jay – are indigenous to this region, and I had never seen them before moving here three years ago. As I write, I’m listening to the tick tick of a junco pair working the front yard for seeds and ants, and perhaps the slugs we almost flattened on the sidewalk.

Last week, while I tutored a middle-school student at his house, two Steller’s jays made their usual abrupt, brassy appearance in the back yard. They landed on the roof of the gazebo, inspecting the gutters, and then moved to the algae-covered fountain, lingering as though it were a buffet. My student grabbed his binoculars and we watched the feeding frenzy in detail. Later I took a closer look and found worms, ants and bits of beetle in the bowl of the fountain.

As a swan song to Washington, so to speak, I’ve been reading American Museum of Natural History Birds of North America Western Region (2011) by François Vuilleumier, curator emeritus of ornithology at the museum. Good reliable field guides are among the best-written books in the world – concise, precise, as well-organized as a sonnet. About the dark-eyed junco Vuilleumier writes:

“VOICE: Loud smacking tick and soft dyew calls; flight call a rapid, twittering, and buzzy zzeet; song a simple, liquid, 1-pitch trill.”

Birdsong is notoriously difficult to capture with human language, but this is a valiant, recognizable attempt. Here’s the Steller’s jay, also notably accurate:

“VOICE: Series of harsh, short, rasping notes, shek, shek, shek; single longer pitch-changing shuhrrrr.”

I never climbed Mount Rainier, and have no desire to do so, but was always pleased to see it, glowing unexpectedly in the afternoon sun like an iceberg lit from within. My pleasure grew after learning Marianne Moore spent two days in 1922 exploring Nisqually Glacier on its southern slope, and based “An Octopus” on the experience. Louise Bogan knew the mountain too. Go here to see a marvelous photograph of Moore, age thirty-four, climbing Rainier. She’s third from the right.

There are few mountains in Texas, where I’ll be returning later this month. I’m going back to my old job as science writer for the engineering school at Rice University in Houston, land of lizards, live oaks, loquats and lichens. I start July 1, the one hundred forty-eighth anniversary of the start of the Battle of Gettysburg, and my middle son's eleventh birthday.

`An Infinitesimal Point'

We can ask James Russell Lowell’s question or we can ask the same question in a darker, more meditative tone as posed by Thoreau, his contemporary, in the journal for June 6, 1857:

“This is June, the month of grass and leaves. The deciduous trees are investing the evergreens and revealing how dark they are. Already the aspens are trembling again, and a new summer is offered me. I feel a little fluttered in my thoughts, as if I might be too late. Each season is but an infinitesimal point. It no sooner comes than it is gone. It has no duration. It simply gives a tone and hue to my thought.”

For almost twenty years I lived at Thoreau’s latitude, three hours to the west, in upstate New York. His trees and flowers were mine. By synchronizing my reading of the journal with the calendar, I could see through Thoreau’s eyes, wearing corrective lenses while observing the natural world. He tutored me in attentiveness.

In the passage above Thoreau captures precisely the nagging anxiety I’ve felt each summer since childhood: “as if I might be too late.” Summer was almost too elusively precious to be enjoyed, and knowing this intensified the enjoyment – an early insight into human longing. June was a consummation and the Fourth of July signaled decline, the waning of summer and coming of fall. One knows winter most deeply in summer, December in June.

Seasons, Thoreau assures us, have “no duration,” but that’s hardly a surprise. We know June’s perfection not for thirty days but for moments, sometimes retrospectively, as we know happiness. What is so rare? Any other day.

[ADDENDUM: A reader in New Hampshire notes: "My aunt used used to say, `After the Fourth of July, we're on a toboggan ride to Christmas.'"]