'Such a Homely and Useful Word'

Noah Webster famously scolded his fellow lexicographer, Samuel Johnson, for including “vulgar and cant words” in his Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Webster claimed “his work contains more of the lowest of all vulgar words than any other now extant.” Don’t rush to Johnson's big book looking for fuck. Among Webster’s examples of Johnson’s vulgarisms are jiggumbob, fishify and conjobble. Webster boasts that he has removed two-thirds of Johnson’s low-class words. Why not all of them, I wonder?

Johnson defines jiggumbob as “a trinket; a knick-knack; a slight contrivance in machinery.” Our counterpart might be thingumabob or thingamajig, meaning an object for which we’re unable to find a precise term.  Fishify, not surprisingly, Johnson defines as “to turn to fish: a cant word” and cites its use in Romeo and Juliet. Mercutio, playing off Romeo’s name, says: “Without his roe, like a dried herring. O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified.” A linguistically complicated insult. For conjobble, Johnson gives “to concert; to settle; to discuss. A low cant word.” The OED uses Johnson’s definition. It sounds to my ears like a verb meaning “to perpetrate a con job.”

Guy Davenport, in “More Genteel than God” (Every Force Evolves a Form, North Point Press, 1986), describes Wester’s An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) as “the Republic’s absolute arbiter of spelling and usage.” His essay begins as a review of Richard M. Rollins’ The Long Journey of Noah Webster, but as is usual with Davenport, he takes a sui generis approach to his subject. He makes clear that Webster was a crank, a religious fanatic and a thoroughly unpleasant human being, and that these qualities are reflected in his lexicography. Davenport reports Rollins was surprised to find Webster “so curmudgeonly a reactionary, so sanctimonious a fundamentalist, [and] so smug a pessimist.” Davenport objects to Webster turning lexicography into a hypocritical holy war:

 “Such a homely and useful word as piss, which was good enough for the King James Bible and Dr. Johnson, was cast by Webster into outer dark, along with other `low’ words known to everybody but henceforth banned by moral arrogance.” Here, by the way, is Johnson’s definition of the verb “to piss”: “To make water.” And the noun: “Urine; animal water.” Hot stuff.

On a shelf in my office at home is the broken-spined copy of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged I received as a gift in 1973. It contains piss as well as pissant, piss away, pissed (“angry, disgusted,” “drunk”) and pissed off. In other words, Webster’s lexical progeny bowed to common sense and common usage. I still find, however, a conspicuous lacuna between fuchsite and fucoid. Isn’t that still the first word you look up in a new dictionary?

'My Attachments Are All Local, Purely Local'

Like many things big, mountains are overrated. Sensible people prefer flat land or, at most, tastefully rolling hills. A grass-covered plain punctuated with groves of trees and a lazy river seems the friendliest of landscapes – perhaps an echo of our evolutionary past in Mother Africa. Landscape shouldn’t show off. I’ll take Nebraska over Switzerland any day. Charles Lamb agrees, as he tells Wordsworth on this date, Jan. 30, in 1801:

“Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead Nature.”

Lamb was the ur-urban dweller. One can’t imagine him retiring to pastoral sublimity. Some people feel swallowed by the city and its resident herd. They can’t breathe. Not Lamb, who assembles a Dickensian catalog of London delights:

“The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the very women of the Town; the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles; life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old Book stalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes - London itself a pantomime and a masquerade - all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power of satiating me.”

As we get older we prize familiarity, while the young fancy novelty. Lamb was very much a homebody. After his sister Mary murdered their mother in a fit of madness in 1796, Lamb remained a bachelor and spent the rest of his life caring for her. Home meant sanctuary, a place to be safe. The world would be a happier place if we adopted Lamb’s philosophy, though it’s less a philosophy than an expression of his idiosyncrasy. People happy at home don’t go looking for trouble:

“My attachments are all local, purely local.—I have no passion (or have had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering of poetry & books) to groves and vallies.—The rooms where I was born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a book case which has followed me about (like a faithful dog, only exceeding him in knowledge) wherever I have moved, old tables, streets, squares, when I have sunned myself, my old school,—these are my mistresses.”

'Terrible Things Can Happen to Good People'

“The best way to survive the Holocaust was not to be there.”

Monday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The observation above was made by Moshe Vardi, a mathematician and computer scientist at Rice University whose parents improbably survived the Hungarian Holocaust, a late addendum to the Nazis’ industrialized effort to kill every Jew in Europe. It started in May 1944. By December, thanks to German efficiency, some 565,000 Hungarian Jews had been murdered. Moshe’s lecture mingled family history with the abattoir of twentieth-century world history.

Moshe’s father, Rabbi Pinchas Hayim (Abba) Vardi (born in Rumania in 1927, he died in Israel in 2014), lost his grandfather, father, step-mother, six sisters and a brother in the Holocaust; his mother, Ziporah Eva (Imma) Vardi (born in Hungary in 1929, she died in Israel in 2019), her grandmother, mother, a brother and three sisters. Moshe writes:

“Imma survived Auschwitz by sheer will to live, lots of resourcefulness and a few miracles. When they arrived at Auschwitz, they had to jump off the train, helped by other prisoners. The prisoner who helped my mother, held her in the air, looked at her small size (she was then 150cm tall) and asked: ‘How old are you?’ ‘16,’ she answered. ‘Say 18,’ said the prisoner, and put her down. She was utterly confused by this, but when she arrived at the selection line the Nazi officer asked, ‘How old are you?’ ‘18,’ she answered, and was sent to the work camp. Unknown to them, those who were too old or too young to work were sent directly to the gas chambers.”

Here Moshe describes the meeting of his parents in a displaced-persons’ camp in Germany: “On their first ‘date,’ Abba gave her a Talmudic lecture. ‘How did you like the date?’ I asked. ‘I realized that he was very learned,’ she said, ‘I liked it.’ Her brother also approved of Abba. Her brother decided to go to the U.S., hoping there he could rebuild his life. My mother, however, was an ardent Zionist, in spite of her Chasidic upbringing, and she was determined that she and my father should immigrate to Eretz Israel.” In late 1947 she moved to what was then known as Palestine. Moshe’s father joined her a few months later. In 1950 they helped found Nir Etzion, a religious kibbutz near Haifa. Moshe was born in Israel in 1954. Like me he first read William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) when he was about twelve years old.

At the end of his lecture, along with the axiom quoted at the top, Moshe gave three others:

“Terrible things can happen to good people.”

“Individual choice and action matter.”

“Human resilience is incredible.”

I remembered Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944), the Hungarian poet and Jew. Moshe and I have talked about him before. In May 1944, two months after the Nazis occupied Hungary, Radnóti was pressed into a Jewish labor gang to build roads in Yugoslavia. That fall, as the Germans fled the Balkans, the men in the work crews, already weak from hunger and exhaustion, were ordered to march back to Hungary and into Austria. Of the 3,600 men who left the camp in Yugoslavia, only 800 reached the Hungarian border. When Radnóti collapsed in November, possibly on the 8th, he was shot in the neck by his Hungarian guards and buried with 21 others.

Twenty months later, after the German surrender, the mass grave near a dam in Abda in western Hungary was uncovered and Radnóti’s body exhumed. In the pocket of his raincoat was found a blood-stained address book containing ten poems he had written in the Yugoslav labor camp and on the death march. Their worth is both documentary and poetic. They are great poems as well as emblems of the fierceness of art in the face of unimaginable inhumanity, and are almost impossible to read without tears.

These final poems are fragments titled Razglednicas – Serbian by way of Hungarian for “picture postcards.” The final one, dated Oct. 31, about a week before his murder, has been translated by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner (Foamy Sky: The Major Poems of Miklos Radnóti, Princeton University Press, 1992):

“I fell beside him and his corpse turned over,

tight already as a snapping string.

Shot in the neck. `And that’s how you’ll end too,’

I whispered to myself; `lie still; no moving.

Now patience flowers in death.’ Then I could hear

`Der springt noch auf,’ above, and very near.

Blood mixed with mud was drying on my ear.”

The translators gloss the German phrase this way: “these lines refer to Mikos Lorsi, a violinist comrade of Radnóti’s who was murdered at Cservenka by an SS man on a horse. Having been shot once, Lorsi collapsed; but soon after, he stood up again, staggering. `He is still moving,’ called the SS man, taking aim a second time, this time successfully.” The German phrase can be translated as “That one is still twitching.”

Ozsváth, in her biography of Radnóti, In the Footsteps of Orpheus (Indiana University Press, 2000), describes the scene of the poet’s death like this:

“One of the guards went to a nearby inn to borrow a hoe; another borrowed some tools and equipment from the dam-keeper’s wife. Upon their return, the guards started to dig the grave. They tried to beat the prisoners into helping them, but most of the men couldn’t even move at this point, an inconvenience for the guards, who were in a hurry to return to their column before nightfall. They succeeded in digging a grave, however, and forced a few of the prisoners to jump into it and flatten the ground. These were the first of the men the guards shot in the back of the neck: one guard using a revolver, the rest used rifles. The remaining servicemen were taken to the gravesite and shot in this fashion, one by one.

“After covering the grave. The guards returned both the hoe and the tools to the owners and found their way back to their units at Mosonmagyaróvár, arriving there before nightfall.”  

[Go here for a video of Moshe’s mother remembering her arrival at Auschwitz.]

'Not a Terribly Populated Premise'

An old reporting colleague reminds me of a column I wrote for our newspaper in 1990 after Iraq invaded Kuwait, during the prelude to the first Gulf War known as Operation Desert Shield. Hundreds marched down Central Avenue in Albany, N.Y., protesting President Bush’s “saber-rattling,” as the anachronistic cliché has it. I walked with the crowd, gauging the mood, which I recall was largely celebrative rather than sullen or angry, and talking to marchers about why they were protesting. I sensed that many of the older marchers were indulging in nostalgia for their younger days.

The reason my friend remembers the column is that I included lines from a W.H. Auden poem, a gesture that still strikes him as amusingly eccentric. “Who else would do that?” he asked. We can no longer remember which poem it was, and my clipping of the column is lost somewhere in a file cabinet, but I see no conflict between reporting and the use of an appropriate literary tag, especially in a column, a form in which you’re granted more stylistic flexibility. Obviously, the thing to avoid is pretentiousness, showing off one’s high-toned culture.

The column reminds me of how much I enjoyed leaving the office and talking to people – old-fashioned street reporting. A.J. Liebling used to say that a good reporter reports with his feet. The notion of a journalist sitting at his desk all day rather than working his beat is repellent and doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. Another reporter at the same paper used to say when working his beat that he was “on the run from editors and creditors.” I’m reminded of an interview Murray Kempton did in 1994 on CNN’s Booknotes when he published Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events. The host, Brian Lamb, asks where he works, where he writes:

“I go to the office, yes. I usually go down to the street and try to find something to cover. The inside of my head is really not a terribly populated premise, so I usually try to go around and get a story about somebody else, not me, and then feed off – I’ve often said I’ve never written a good piece that didn’t have a quote from somebody else, even if it was only in a book, so that I do like to get around. I think that’s the fun of journalism.”

[In the comment below, a resourceful reader finds the column in question. Thank you, TSI. I see that I misremembered the date and have no memory of that drunk.]

'Without Any Sense of My Old Pain'

Two weeks ago a colleague was feeling ill around lunch time. He’s no hypochondriac, though not so much brave as stoical. He rightly assumes that no one, including himself, wants to listen to him complain. He figured it was flu, and only reluctantly agreed to see his doctor. Diagnosis: kidney stone. He passed one some years ago and swears it was more painful than labor, a condition he knows from close, painless observation. The doctor gave him pain meds and told him not to drive, just wait. He stayed home for a week, waiting, and nothing happened. Then last Thursday he went in for a second CT-scan and, voila, the stone was gone. Had it not passed he was booked for surgery Friday morning.

From a young age, Samuel Pepys, like his mother, brother and uncle, was plagued by kidney and bladder stones. When the pain flared, he called his condition “fits of the stone.” Finally, on March 26, 1658, at the age of twenty-five, he consented to have the bladder stone removed. Without anesthesia, in an age ignorant of sepsis, Dr. Thomas Hollier performed a lithotomy, removing a stone reported to be the size of a billiard ball through a three-inch incision between Pepys’ scrotum and anus. Just writing about it gives me the willies. Pepys was fully recovered in five weeks, though the operation appears to have left him sterile. He celebrated each subsequent March 26 with what he called a “stone feast.” Pepys began keeping his diary almost two years later. In the first sentence of the first entry, Jan. 1, 1660, he refers obliquely to his stone:

“Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain, but upon taking of cold.”

Pepys lived until 1703. He suffered pain at the site of the old incision during the final three years of his life. A month before his death, Pepys wrote to his nephew: “It has been my calamity for much the greatest part of this time to have been kept bedrid, under an evil so rarely known as to have had it matter of universal surprise and with little less general opinion of its dangerousness; namely, that the cicatrice [OED: “scar of a healed wound”] of a wound occasioned upon my cutting for the stone, without hearing anything of it in all this time, should after more than 40 years’ perfect cure, break out again.”

A post-mortem found seven stones weighing four and a half ounces in Pepys’ left kidney. My father had a friend, a retired police officer, who carried his stones in a small glass bottle and would rattle them at children when he had had enough to drink.

'An Almost Silly Gratitude'

One doesn’t expect maturity among the young and certainly not among the middle-aged and old, but finding it is always a happy revelation. Take Sarah Ruden. She is reported to be fifty-seven but her mingling of learning and joie de vivre, scholarship and celebratory sensibility, suggests a youthful but grownup prodigy. She has translated St. Augustine, Virgil, Homer and others among the ancients. She has published a poetry collection, two volumes of Scriptural commentary and now has a column at National Review. The title of her latest, “Living Virtuously and Writing Well,” might be autobiographical if she were less self-effacing. Her subject is Charles Lamb:

“A card-playing old lady, a spark of his own wit in literary society, an inanity of Fleet Street opportunism could each satisfy his pinched hunger for delight and become a generous gift to readers, a gift wrapped in the exquisite, playfully archaic Lamb style.”

Ruden doesn’t mention it but much of Lamb’s charm is rooted in his immunity to politics, unlike his hot-headed friend William Hazlitt who finished his career with an adulatory four-volume biography of Napoleon. Politics was hot stuff, very fashionable in Lamb’s post-French Revolution age, not unlike our own. The appeal of politics, of course, in addition to it being a convenient excuse for self-righteous rage, is the simplicity of its appeal: “I’m right. You’re wrong. Go to Hell.” Lamb could never take himself that seriously. I remember having a rare revelation when I was about thirteen and riding the bus to school: Everything, potentially, is laughable. Our vanity says otherwise but we too are jokes waiting to be told. Ruden writes:

“[I]nstead of outrage, Lamb deals in complex irony; instead of sentimentality, in — there is no better word for it — joy. Countless times, he shows the cause of the difference: an almost silly gratitude.”

Lamb was an extraordinary character but no saint. He was often drunk and occasionally indulged in anti-Semitism, the default mode of morons everywhere. But Ruden distills a tincture of Lamb when she observes his “silly gratitude.” Here he is in “Grace Before Meat”:

 “I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the day besides my dinner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, these spiritual repasts—a grace before Milton—a grace before Shakspeare [sic]—a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the Fairy [sic] Queen?”

'Wandered Out of Life'

When I was young and occasionally willing to take advice from my elders, a high-school teacher suggested I select courses in college based more on their instructors than on their ostensible subject matter. I saw two problems with this. First, how could I choose a professor if I knew nothing about the faculty? For me, an incoming freshman, they were all blanks. Was word-of-mouth reputation reliable? Second, what if I ended up taking too many classes outside my major? Would I have to spend twelve years as an undergraduate?

Serendipity was on my side. As a freshman at Bowling Green State University I took classes with two professors with whom I became a serial student. The first was in English, my major. She was an eighteenth-century specialist who passed on that enthusiasm to me. The other taught history and was one of the few functional eccentrics I have known. He looked like Robert Benchley. You could count the hairs in his mustache. He wore the same brown, three-piece tweed suit the entire time I was enrolled in his classes. The heels of his shoes were scuffed flat. He was given to reveries. He spoke plummy Italian and loved to say Cimabue, stretching every vowel. He was, naturally, absent-minded. In his Renaissance class he assigned only one text: Swiss historian Jacob Burkhart’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1867). In a subsequent class (one of three I took with him) he had me write a paper on the fate of the Jews under Napoleon. He said it was a subject he wanted to know more about. This was Prof. John F. Oglevee, a memorable if unorthodox teacher.

I dropped out after three years without a degree. A few years later I heard Dr. Oglevee had committed suicide. It didn’t make sense. I had no details about what had happened. For decades I was left with fond memories of a man who was just that -- a memory. Periodically, I looked for information about him online without realizing I was misspelling his surname. Finally, after many alternate spellings and combinations of search terms, I found a brief article on Page 5 of The BG News dated May 24, 1977: “History Professor Oglevee dies.” His wife, Imogen, whom I met several times at various campus events, had died on May 19. The following day he took his life by carbon monoxide poisoning. I’m surprised to learn he was only fifty-eight years old at the time of his death. I had assumed six or seven years earlier that he was close to seventy. As Dickinson puts it, Dr. Oglevee “wandered out of Life.”

'The Full Gibbonian Roll'

I understand the intimidation posed by lengthy works of literature. People are busy. They have commitments. Between job and family, reserving time to read can be tough, and never have we been so tempted by so many distractions. I have no advice to offer. I know a man who recently finished reading the twelve volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time. I know what certain books mean to me and have no regrets for the time I devoted to reading them. Proust will always be more important, a more loyal companion, than any television show I ever watched (and I watched a lot – McHale’s Navy? Outer Limits? – when I was a kid).

A reader wants to want to read Gibbon but is afraid of two things: 1.) Devoting a large amount of time to reading 2,000 pages of Roman history. 2.) Feeling defeated and ashamed if unable to read the entire book. About the latter I’m less than helpful: “That’s your problem, buddy.” About the former, I might suggest something I’ve never practiced myself. Formalize reading time. Be consistent. Set the alarm and read for an hour, replace the bookmark, put the book back on the shelf and do the same thing tomorrow. It may take a year, but who cares? Here is George Saintsbury, an Olympic-class reader (and writer), in A History of English Prose Rhythm (1912):

“Once more, one would not like all literature to be Gibbon; but one may be very well satisfied with that part of literature which is. . . . I have admired and enjoyed his style for at least half a century, and I have more than once or twice endeavoured to give critical account of it; but its secret, though perfectly easy to feel, is very difficult to describe precisely.”

I like a critic who admits defeat. That’s humble and human. When I return to a previously read book, it’s usually because of the style. Admittedly, that word covers a lot of ground. I mean more than word choice or filigree. The best books are suffused with their authors’ sensibilities. That’s style. Few people today read A History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as their first text on Rome. Some of Gibbon’s conclusions have been usurped by later research and historical understanding. But I’m usually lured not by a book's hard information but by its style when I return to a writer, whether Sir Thomas Browne or Whitney Balliett. With Gibbon I’m attracted by what Saintsbury calls “the full Gibbonian roll—the flux and reflux of that majestic wave that kept time with the revolutions of more than a millennium.”

'Beauty Fades as a Tree in Winter'

A woman among my readers has been “dipping into,” as she says, The Anatomy of Melancholy, and finding treasure. “Under all the learning and the Latin quotations,” she writes, “is a lot of insight into human behavior. [Robert Burton] was like an intelligent psychologist.” She’s right. The book is more than a quaint and heavily learned curiosity. Overlook the theory of humors -- black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, blood – and you discover an anatomist of our nature (especially our ruling passions, vanity and folly). My reader savors this lovely metaphor from the Third Partition, Member V, Subsection III:

“[T]heir beauty fades as a tree in winter.”

A good metaphor is immediately understood and delights us with its precision and wit. Burton’s prose is so dense with information and poetry that we find this little beauty easy to miss, flanked as it is by a passage from Drayton and another from Seneca. He is writing of women but men are hardly immune. Keep in mind Burton titles this subsection “By counsel and persuasion, foulness of the fact, men’s, women’s faults, miseries of marriage, events of lust, &c.” A few paragraphs earlier he writes:

“This beauty is of the body alone, and what is that, but as Gregory Nazianzen telleth us, a mock of time and sickness? or as Boethius, as mutable as a flower, and ’tis not nature so makes us, but most part the infirmity of the beholder.”

We’ve all known young people already anxious about losing their looks, what Dr. Johnson refers to as “the fortune of a face.” Such vanities fuel vast industries. Burton continues:

“[L]et  her use all helps art and nature can yield; be like her, and her, and whom thou wilt, or all these in one; a little sickness, a fever, small-pox, wound, scar, loss of an eye, or limb, a violent passion, a distemperature of heat or cold, mars all in an instant, disfigures all; child-bearing, old age, that tyrant time will turn Venus to Erinnys; raging time, care, rivels her upon a sudden; after she hath been married a small while, and the black ox hath trodden on her toe, she will be so much altered, and wax out of favour, thou wilt not know her.”

Burton is just getting warmed up:

“One grows to fat, another too lean, &c., modest Matilda, pretty pleasing Peg, sweet-singing Susan, mincing merry Moll, dainty dancing Doll, neat Nancy, jolly Joan, nimble Nell, kissing Kate, bouncing Bess, with black eyes, fair Phyllis, with fine white hands, fiddling Frank, tall Tib, slender Sib, &c., will quickly lose their grace, grow fulsome, stale, sad, heavy, dull, sour, and all at last out of fashion. . . . Those fair sparkling eyes will look dull, her soft coral lips will be pale, dry, cold, rough, and blue, her skin rugged, that soft and tender superficies will be hard and harsh, her whole complexion change in a moment.”

Thanks to my reader for reminding me of the delights packed into Burton’s Anatomy.

'His Cursory Mode of Reading'

I spent my younger years reading to the finish every book I started. My motives were mixed, pride being the prime mover. I didn’t like the idea of a book defeating me. I took it personally. The advantage of this strategy is reading a lot of books that might in some way be good for me if not particularly enjoyable, like eating kale. It also hones one’s ability to distinguish gradations of quality on a scale ranging from the essential to abysmal wastes of time. The disadvantage is losing time that might be spent on better, more interesting books. Now I feel no compunction over permanently closing a volume even after reading only a page or two. It helps that I’m no longer impressed by reputation or take lousy books as personal affronts.

A reader writes to complain that I’m not giving writers a chance. Closing a book prematurely is unfair, he says: “An author works hard writing a book. You should work hard reading it.” Although it’s true, as Dr. Johnson put it, that “What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure” (Johnsonian Miscellanies, ed. G.B. Hill, 1897), intensive labors by a writer guarantee nothing. There’s nothing fair about art. Life is too short to squander it on dullness and stupidity. Boswell reports this exchange taking place on April 19, 1773:

“Mr. Elphinston talked of a new book that was much admired, and asked Dr. Johnson if he had read it. JOHNSON: ‘I have looked into it.’ ‘What,’ said Elphinston, ‘have you not read it through?’ Johnson, offended at being thus pressed, and so obliged to own his cursory mode of reading, answered tartly, ‘No, Sir, do you read books through?’" [Italics in the original.]

[See “I Can’t Afford These First Editions, but I Buy Them Anyway” by Stephen Marche: “The bookish are a tribe in resistance now; this is the most essential change to our way of life as a people. Every person who picks up a book is consciously turning away from a screen.”]

'An Interesting Self to Express'

Here’s a thought experiment, one rooted in immediate experience, nothing theoretical. Think over your last twenty-four hours. Recall all of the people with whom you had a conversation, anything exceeding “Good morning!” with spouses, parents, children, other relatives, neighbors, friends, co-workers, strangers. Factor in telephone calls, emails, texts. Now, how many of those exchanges were interesting? How many did you only reluctantly conclude? How many do you wish could have been longer? How many will you wish to resume if the opportunity presents itself? How many will you avoid? How many do you regret? Now, the tougher question: In how many of those conversations were you the duller partner, or at least as dull as the other?

None of us shines all the time. Mundane pleasantries have their place. Each morning, walking across campus to my office in the dark, I greet custodians, faculty, students, strangers. That represents a minimal gesture of courtesy and respect. Civility can soothe an unhappy sensibility or at least not exacerbate the unhappiness. I enjoy the small opportunities for wit presented to us throughout the day. What a pleasure to make another person laugh, if only politely. Some days what I remember best since waking that morning is someone’s wisecrack, joke or pun, cherished all the more because utterly gratuitous.

True conversations, the rich, stimulating sort, are rarer. Michael Oakeshott puts it like this in “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind” (Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, 1962): “Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, nor is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. It is with conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering.” In other words, conversation is more like dance than debate. It works best when one’s partner is limber, energetic and conversant with all the moves. In an interview I discovered on Monday, the late Sir Roger Scruton says:

“Self-expression is fine if you’ve got an interesting self to express. But what makes a self interesting is precisely that it’s gone through a rigorous process of discipline and order and self-understanding of a kind that, for instance, Milton went through. Self-expression that hasn't done that is just embarrassing.”

'Boisterous or Arrogant Language, Boastful Assertion'

Occasionally I discover a new word precisely when I need it most and no other is quite appropriate. Take fanfaronade. Jonathan Swift was a prolific writer and though much of his work is judged minor, in my experience everything I have ever read by him was worth reading at least once, if only for the quality of the prose. About how many writers can we say that? In 1713, Swift published a preface to the third volume of Gilbert Burnet’s The History of the Reformation of the Church of England in which he writes:

“I was debating with myself, whether this hint of producing a small pamphlet to give notice of a large folio, was not borrowed from the ceremonial in Spanish romances, where a dwarf is sent out upon the battlements, to signify to all passengers what a mighty giant there is in the castle; or whether the bishop copied this proceeding from the fanfaronade of monsieur Boufflers, when the earl of Portland and that general had an interview.”

Thirteen years later Swift would memorably return to the theme of dwarfs and giants. The mention of Louis François de Boufflers, Duke of Boufflers, and Hans William Bentinck, 1st Earl of Portland, refers to a 1695 incident during the Siege of Namur in the Nine Years’ War. Fanfaronade, appropriately, is French in origin. The OED defines it as “boisterous or arrogant language, boastful assertion, brag; ostentation.” What word could be more applicable to public life today? The Dictionary also refers to a rare use of the word as a verb: “to bluster, swagger.” I’m reminded of an observation a newspaper colleague once made about an editor much given to fanfaronade: “He’s the first guy I’ve ever known who could swagger while sitting down.”

'A Desirable and Enviable Existence'

I welcomed the undergraduate into my office and had her take a seat. She was well-dressed by campus standards, polite and attentive, and appeared eager to please. The word “wholesome” came to mind. She was an engineering major and I wanted to know what influences had gone into that choice of education and future career. I got the usual boilerplate about wanting to change the world and make a difference, so I probed a bit deeper but she didn’t seem to fit the customary engineer profile.

She hadn’t played with Legos as a kid, solved math puzzles, played chess or built her first computer by age ten. STEM didn’t seem to engage her intellectually. I asked if any books had influenced her. She said she didn’t read much and had never been in the university library except during the orientation tour. I asked what she did for fun. “Hang out with my friends.” Any complaints about life at the university? “It’s kind of boring. There’s nothing to do.” She's clearly intelligent and didn’t appear depressed.

That pretty much finished our conversation. She remains a cipher, though it seems significant that she checked her smartphone several times during our interview. I’ve never understood being bored. There are boring people and boring situations, but there’s never a good reason for me to be bored. I felt sorry for this undergraduate. She has the privilege of getting a first-rate education and access to much of the world’s knowledge and art, most of it free of charge, and that seems not to interest her much.

Rereading the late Clive James, I came across this in his introduction to Cultural Amnesia (2007): “There is too much to appreciate.” Mozart, he notes, never heard all of Bach. “We can hear everything by both of them.” He writes:

“It would be a desirable and enviable existence just to earn a decent wage at a worthwhile job and spend all one’s leisure hours improving one’s aesthetic appreciation. There is so much to appreciate, and it is all available for peanuts. One can plausibly aspire to seeing, hearing and reading everything that matters.” 

'Purely Personal Modesty, Shyness and Asceticism'

I borrowed Edouard Roditi’s Dialogues on Art (Horizon Press, 1961) from the library mostly to read his interview with Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), the painter whose work I would most like to own, if I ever had the money. Though he painted some landscapes, Morandi concentrated on still lifes (natura morta) devoted to the humblest of objects – vases, bottles, cups, bowls, jugs and boxes; on rare occasions, flowers or fruit but never people. His typical palette is narrow and muted – pale yellows, beige, light gray. Unlike many interviewees, Morandi shuns self-promotion. Like his paintings he is modest and straightforward. He gives the impression of hiding nothing while remaining diffident. He is less evasive than genuinely humble and never wishes to say more or less than he intends:

“I have always avoided suggesting any metaphysical implications. I suppose I remain, in that respect, a believer in Art for Art’s sake rather than in Art for the sake of religion, of social justice or of national glory. Nothing is more alien to me than an art which sets out to serve other purposes than those implied in the work of art in itself.”

Roditi then asks if he disapproves of such painters as Rouault, Renato Guttuso and Mario Sironi. Morandi replies, not taking the bait: “I have never devoted any thought to this kind of problem and have never set out to illustrate anything at all programmatic in my work.”

Another interesting observation from Morandi: “I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all that we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. Only we can know that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree.”

In his introduction, Roditi describes Morandi as possessing a “touch of purely personal modesty, shyness and asceticism,” and adds: “Like the French Impressionists, he remains committed to the standards and tastes of a stable middle-class, a firm believer in the aurea mediocritus of the poet Horace.” The Horatian tag, “the golden mean,” is from the fifth line of Ode 2.10, flanking quisquis (“whoever”). David Ferry translates the line as “That man does best / Who chooses the middle way.”

In a brief passage following the interview, Roditi says he is reminded of another passage from Horace: Integer vitae scelerisque purus. Roughly: “The man who is pure in his way of life / And is uninjured by wickedness.” This is the first line of Ode 1.22.  Here is David Ferry’s translation of the first stanza:  

“The upright man whose conscience is perfectly clear

Can journey anywhere, unarmed, untroubled,

Whether it be the burning sands of Sidra,

Near where the quicksand waits for you under the sea . . .”

'Happy, Courageous, and Honourable Thought'

“The ages suggested for the Scholars of this little School were ten to fourteen. These are long, long years of youth, equal to ten of the older, twenty of the aged: not only in effectiveness, but also in the sensation of time.”

It’s reassuring to recall a time when children were still respected, when their emotional and intellectual capacities weren’t patronized or ignored by adults. The very notion of titling a poetry anthology for young people The School of Poetry is admirable and wouldn’t be tolerated today. Its editor is Alice Meynell (1847-1922), a once-popular English poet and mother of eight. The collection was published in 1923, shortly after Meynell’s death at age seventy-five. She continues in her introduction:

“I have taken some poems for their happy, courageous, and honourable thought, some for the very poetry of poetry. . . . The size of the book was, of course, limited; there would have been matter, from the stores of past and present, for fifty such books.”

The chronologically arranged anthology contains not a trace of “children’s poetry,” the cute, treacly stuff that fills volumes today. Nor is Modernism represented. In its first forty pages we find Drayton, Shakespeare, Dekker, Jonson and Herbert. She includes Herrick’s “A Thanksgiving to God, for his House,” with these charming lines:

“Lord, I confess too, when I dine,

         The pulse is Thine,

And all those other bits, that be

         There plac’d by Thee;

The worts, the purslain, and the mess

         Of water-cress,

Which of Thy kindness Thou hast sent;

         And my content

Makes those, and my beloved beet,

         To be more sweet.”

Meynell provides no trigger-warnings for Milton’s “On His Blindness,” Cowper’s “On the Loss of the Royal George” or Laurence Binyon’s “For the Fallen.” Introducing the Binyon, she writes: “These grave lines sound as though they had cost tears, and our tears answer them. Nothing simpler could be written, and nothing greater.” Meynell is not afraid of rousers or barn-burners. Here a lines from a poem by Allan Cunningham I had never heard before:

“And white waves heaving high, my lads,

  The good ship tight and free—    

The world of waters is our home,

  And merry men are we.”

I’m surprised Meynell includes only one of Kipling’s poems, the mandatory “Recessional” (“Lest we forget—lest we forget!”). Of it she writes:

“A recessional hymn is one that is used after a ceremony—it is the sequel to a processional hymn. Rudyard Kipling, the soldier’s poet, has written many an inspiring and inspiriting processional poem, but nothing finer than this poem, hymn, and prayer—this afterthought of a patriot. Surely, while unhappily there is war in the world, every patriot, every soldier, should have an afterthought like this.”

'Lived Upon Fiddle-Strings Instead'

There’s pleasure in watching anyone perform a difficult task while making it look effortless. The first example who comes to mind is Sonny Rollins. I saw the tenor saxophonist perform three times at the Troy Music Hall when he was already in his early sixties (he’s now eighty-nine). His energy, discipline and undiminished gift for improvisation allowed him to perform without an intermission for three hours, often while playing solo. Rollins is one of the reasons I retain a little hope for our species.

To extend the logic of that admiration, there’s no one I envy so much as a gifted musician. My former boss’ husband is a guitarist and has a separate building at their farm for his music. My younger sons and I followed Simon into this barn-like structure. He walked directly over to one of his many guitars, strapped it on, plugged it into an amplifier and, without prompting, performed a loud, note-perfect version of “Voodoo Chile.” Then he started taking requests. All of this was done as casually as I might brew a pot of coffee.

    

On this date, Jan. 16, in 1786, William Cowper wrote a letter to his cousin and confidant Lady Hesketh. Cowper was emerging from what he called a “pit” – yet another episode of severe depression:   

“Occasionally I am much distressed, but that distress becomes continually less frequent, and I think less violent. I find writing, and especially poetry, my best remedy. Perhaps had I understood music, I had never written verse, but had lived upon fiddle-strings instead. It is better however as it is. A poet may, if he pleases, be of a little use in the world, while a musician, the most skillful [sic], can only divert himself and a few others.”

'You Begin to Know What Life Means'

Since late November we have lost Clive James, John Simon, Gertrude Himmelfarb and, on Sunday, Sir Roger Scruton. None was young – Himmelfarb was ninety-seven – and all lived long, productive lives we wish could have been longer. Their productivity is some consolation. By rough count, the quartet published 130 books, almost half of which were written by Scruton. The truest act of literary criticism any reader can perform is to read or read again a dead writer’s books. A friend who died a few years ago once told me that gratitude as an emotion is a fine thing but fleeting and easily faked. More important – more solid and lasting – is an act of gratitude. Time to reread Cultural Amnesia, The Sheep from the Goats, Lord Acton: A Study of Conscience and Politics, and England: An Elegy, not to mention the shelves of Scruton’s books I haven’t yet read.

On the day Scruton died, the Spectator reprinted his final published work, a sort of diary of his life in 2019. About his troubles – slander, disease – Scruton is cool and gracious. His final words:

“Falling to the bottom in my own country, I have been raised to the top elsewhere, and looking back over the sequence of events I can only be glad that I have lived long enough to see this happen. Coming close to death you begin to know what life means, and what it means is gratitude.”

'The Only Fault of It is Insipidity'

“Mine, you are to know, is a white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholy for the most part; which though it seldom laughs or dances, nor ever amounts to what one calls Joy or Pleasure, yet is a good easy sort of a state.” 

I know Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” the way I know King Lear and Rasselas but I haven’t ventured much deeper into his life and work. I was probably warned off by Johnson’s verdict as reported by Boswell: “Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull every where. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him GREAT. He was a mechanical poet.”

I picked up R.W. Ketton-Cremer’s monograph Thomas Gray (Duckworth, 1935) hoping to reevaluate Gray. My impression is unchanged and I think Gray will largely remain a one-poem poet for this reader. Ketton-Cremer paraphrases the passage quoted at the top without naming the source. Leucocholy is new to me and I wondered what it meant. I traced it to the letter Gray wrote to his friend Richard West on May 27, 1742. The OED defines it simply as melancholy and gives Gray’s usage as its sole citation: “Apparently an isolated use.” In modern parlance, depression. The prefix leuc- is from the Greek for "white," as in leucocytes (white blood cells). The Dictionary lists forty-five combining forms, mostly scientific or medical. Gray was accomplished enough in Greek and Latin to write poems in those languages, so his neologism amounts to a learned play on words which he has already defined: “white Melancholy.” He continues in his letter to West:

“The only fault of it is insipidity; which is apt now and then to give a sort of Ennui, which makes one form certain little wishes that signify nothing. But there is another sort, black indeed, which I have now and then felt, that has somewhat in it like Tertullian’s rule of faith, Credo quia impossibile est; for it believes, nay, is sure of every thing that is unlikely, so it be but frightful; and, on the other hand, excludes and shuts its eyes to the most possible hopes, and every thing that is pleasurable; from this the Lord deliver us! for none but he and sunshiny weather can do it.”

West died of consumption four days after Gray wrote his letter, prompting his friend to write the sonnet “On the Death of Richard West.”

'As a Drop of Dew Contains the Sky'

"A beautiful face, a beautiful flower, a beautiful melody, a beautiful colour – all these are indeed objects of a kind of sensory enjoyment, a relishing of the sight or sound of a thing. But what about a beautiful novel, a beautiful sermon, a beautiful theory in physics or a beautiful mathematical proof?”

We’ve all known people indifferent to beauty. The capacity for perceiving and appreciating it seems to be absent or vestigial. To liken this condition to blindness or deafness is mistaken because beauty is too elusive and various a quality to be limited to a single sense. The blind and deaf can know beauty. Perhaps its more like deadness of sensibility, something essentially human that goes missing.

Aquinas reasoned that beauty must meet four standards: actuality, proportion, radiance and integrity. In my experience (I’m no philosopher), radiance is primary. A beautiful phrase in a poem that is not in itself especially beautiful seems to shine from the page. So too, a beautiful pair of eyes in an otherwise undistinguished face. Or a singer’s small gesture (the way Sinatra pauses for a beat between “You lie awake . . .” and “. . . and think about the girl”). Beauty, for those open to its unexpected mystery, is a great consolation.

“[I]t becomes obvious that we are not describing a property like shape, size or colour, uncontroversially present to all who can find their way around the physical world. For one thing: How could there be a single property exhibited by so many disparate types of thing.”

To his credit, Roger Scruton never lets the difficulty of defining beauty, of pinning down its essence, inhibit his hunger for the beautiful. The passages quoted above, from Beauty (Oxford University Press, 2009), suggest Scruton’s lifelong engagement with so powerful a gift. He pursues his toughest example, the novel, the beauty of which cannot be reduced exclusively to its sound. In fact, a novel of pure sound (not even Finnegans Wake meets that definition) would not be a novel at all but a freakish stunt, probably unreadable in the conventional sense. Scruton continues:

“In appreciating a story we certainly are more interested in what is being said than in the sensory character of the sounds used to say it. . . .a novel is directed to the senses – but not as an object of sensory delight, like a luxurious chocolate or a fine old wine. Rather as something presented through the senses, to the mind.”

The distinction is crucial and convincing. And which writer of fiction does Scruton select to bolster his case?

“Take any short story by Chekhov. It does not matter that the sentences in translation sound nothing like the Russian original. Still they present the same images and events in the same suggestive sequence. Still they imply as much as they say, and withhold as much as they reveal. Still they follow each other with the logic of things observed rather than things summarized. Chekhov’s art captures life as it is lived and distills it into images that contain a drama, as a drop of dew contains the sky. Following such a story we are constructing a world whose interpretation is at every point controlled by the sights and sounds that we imagine.”

Sir Roger Scruton died Jan. 12 at age seventy-five.

'A Term Implying Some Slight Contempt'

“Many useful and valuable books lie buried in shops and libraries, unknown and unexamined, unless some lucky compiler opens them by chance, and finds an easy spoil of wit and learning.”

The “lucky compiler” in this case is me. On the way home from work, with a small balance remaining on the gift card my oldest son gave me for Christmas, I stopped at Half-Price Books. I’ve learned from experience to keep my expectations minimal. You’re largely at the mercy of fellow readers who have unloaded unwanted books, usually with good reason. I’ve found treasure over the years but usually I leave empty-handed. On Friday I was lucky: Hilary Spurling’s Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time (Knopf, 2018) and Johnson’s Dictionary: A Modern Selection (eds. E.L. McAdam Jr. and George Milne, Pantheon, 1963).

In the latter, Johnson defines bookful as “full of notions gleaned from books; crouded [sic] with undigested knowledge”; bookish as “given to books; acquainted only with books. It is generally used contemptuously”; and booklearned as “versed in books, or literature: a term implying some slight contempt.”     

The sentence quoted at the top is from Johnson’s Idler essay published on this date, Jan. 12, in 1760.