“VLADIMIR:
Well? Shall we go?
ESTRAGON:
Yes, let's go.
They
do not move.”
Velleity
is a self-conceived, delusive trick of the mind – wishing something were so but
doing nothing to realize it. We all do it, and some make a career of it. Here’s
what brought the word to mind:
“He
writes of failure, or insufficiency rather, or rather of velleities and second
thoughts, of dubious buses not too bitterly missed, of doubts about doubts, and
there is a gentleness, even a dry sweetness, to his tone of voice.”
The
author is the late poet and critic D.J. Enright in “Down Cemetery Road,” a
review of Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun
Weddings collected in Conspirators
and Poets (Chatto & Windus, 1966). The Larkin volume was published in
February 1964 and contains some of his best and best-known poems – “Dockery and Son,” “Days,” “Mr Bleaney,” “MCMXIV,” “An Arundel Tomb” and the title poem. Enright
understands Larkin’s “homespun melancholy,” makes no excuses for it and knows it’s more than that, more
than a bad attitude or chemical imbalance. “Dockery and Son” (“Why did he think
adding meant increase?”) looks back at “I Remember, I Remember” (The Less Deceived, 1954) and forward to “This Be the Verse” (High Windows, 1974).
Of all this wry grimness, Enright rightly concludes that “perhaps it is not
ridiculously out of order to feel a degree of impatience at the sight of so marvellous
a skill in conveying the feel of living joined with such a valetudinarian
attitude toward life.”
2 comments:
You can see the career of this word in chart form here, and click on the dates at the bottom for book excerpts containing it.
Have to say that 'valetudinarian' is also a wonderful word and accurately describes Larkin. Seamus Heaney rightly scolds his failure to affirm life, which Heaney sees as a poet's duty. Enright seems to concur with his 'degree of impatience' at the way in which Larkin uses his undoubted gift.
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