'Look Elsewhere for Recreation'

Rabbi David Wolpe wrote last week on Twitter: “Johnson said of Milton’s Paradise Lost ‘none ever wished it longer.’ What book would you have wished longer?” 

When someone poses a question like this, I usually have a ready response on tap, as though I had been waiting for a reader to ask. Not so this time. I can think of a hundred books, especially novels and biographies, afflicted with elephantiasis. A haiku by Joyce Carol Oates would be insufferably long. The given length of a book ought to be among its virtues. No reader would wish War and Peace were a novella or “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” a three-volume novel. Consider the context of Johnson’s observation in his “Life of Milton”:

 

“The want of human interest is always felt. Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions.”

 

I have some sympathy for what Johnson is saying. Reading Milton is work in a way that Shakespeare is not. I’m unlikely to read all of Paradise Lost again. But I come back to certain passages in the poem, especially when following up on allusions in other works, and find myself continuing to read for several pages. There’s never a doubt that I’m in the hands of a master.

 

After thinking about the rabbi’s question for several days, a worthwhile response occurred to me. Which book do I wish were longer? The Poems of John Keats. Dead at age twenty-five, Keats had hardly gotten started yet he earned his place among the immortals. Had he lived into Tennysonian old age, what might he have accomplished?

 

Even on Twitter one can pick up shiny nuggets of thought. On Sunday, Rabbi Wolpe wrote: “Life is not only lasting connections, but wondrous moments. Vladimir Nabokov wrote: ‘A soap bubble is as real as a fossil tooth.’ Celebrate the magic of this instant.” Some of you will know this passage can be found in Chap. 5 of Pnin:

 

“From a pavilion half smothered by locust trees came fragments of a heated exchange between Professor Bolotov, who taught the History of Philosophy, and Professor Chateau, who taught the Philosophy of History: ‘Reality is Duration,’ one voice, Bolotov’s, would boom. ‘It is not!’ the other would cry. ‘A soap bubble is as real as a fossil tooth!’”

[No, I am not on Twitter.]