'The Capacity for a Sort of Luminous Brooding'

A reader scratches his head and asks: “How can you possibly like both Tristram Shandy and George Eliot? That makes no sense.” Spoken like a true graduate student. When younger I asked similar questions. Consistency seemed important. Without quite realizing it, I was looking for a rigorous and universal set of criteria to judge all books. I also assumed literary quality was binary -- good or bad – and that I should be prepared to defend my choice of reading matter. In my late teens and early twenties, omnivorousness never bothered me. There was no pattern to my reading, unless pleasure is a pattern. Then I grew self-conscious and defensive. I wanted the approval of some imaginary über-critic, but with maturity comes indifference to most judgment.

My reader’s choice of examples – Sterne, Eliot – is prescient. This Saturday, Nov. 24, is Sterne’s 306^th birthday. And Eliot was born two-hundred years ago today, on Nov. 22, in 1819. To be human is to be contradictory at the genetic level. I feel no urge to reconcile my tastes, whether Beerbohm and Oakeshott or Nabokov and Richard Yates. I remember Henry James describing George Eliot’s “deep, strenuous, much-considering mind of which the leading mark is the capacity for a sort of luminous brooding” – a writer’s ideal and a reader’s.