'About As Approachable As a Porcupine'

The large bay window facing the garden in front of our house is better than television. No commercials, no dependency on internet whims, no bills to pay. That’s where I do most of my reading (best lighting in the house). From the couch I watch the show in the garden. Butterflies, moths and skippers. The occasional Northern mockingbird or cardinal. Squirrels, hummingbirds and this year a bumper crop of lizards – green and brown anoles. Not to mention the occasional human neighbor. Ten-thousand little comedies and dramas. 

One of the qualities I most admire in Theodore Dalrymple’s writing is the pleasure he takes in observing commonplace things. That’s a virtue I associate with curiosity and evenness of temper, a mature sensibility, one immune to more fashionable distractions. His latest essay is “On the Preservation of Wonderment,” and as usual he covers a lot of ground in a small space, beginning with Byron Rogers’ biography of the Welsh poet-priest R.S. Thomas, The Man Who Went Into the West (Aurum, 2006). I bought the book eighteen years ago after reading Dalrymple’s review in City Journal. The biography is an often amusing account of a difficult, notably humorless man who happened to be a brilliant poet. In a 1962 letter to Robert Conquest, Philip Larkin referred to him as “our friend Arsewipe Thomas.” Dalrymple writes in the new essay:

 

“He was both an impossible and a perfect subject for a biography: impossible because he was so secretive and prickly, and perfect for the very same reason. Thomas was about as approachable as a porcupine, but Rogers, who met him several times, manages to pluck out, if not the heart, at least the pericardium of his mystery.”

Thomas detested the modern world and preached a harsh asceticism (no central heating – in Wales). “Thomas was more interested in birds than in his fellow-humans,” Dalrymple writes. “They were for him a consolation for the ugliness of life, especially in its modern, suburbanised form.” After many digressions (all interesting) along the way, Dalrymple gets to the subject of wonder and quotes lines from “Swifts,” a poem in Thomas’ 1966 collection Pietà:

 

“The swifts winnow the air.

It is pleasant at the end of the day

To watch them. I have shut the mind

On fools. The ‘phone’s frenzy

Is over. There is only the swifts’

Restlessness in the sky

And their shrill squealing.

Sometimes they glide,

Or rip the silk of the wind

In passing. Unseen ribbons

Are trailing upon the air.

There is no solving the problem

They pose, that had millions of years

Behind it, when the first thinker

Looked at them.

Sometimes they meet

In the high air: what is engendered

At contact? I am learning to bring

Only my wonder to the contemplation

Of the geometry of their dark wings.”

 

Dalrymple finally settles on the subject of wonder vs. scientific observation and study, a subject close to my professional heart:

 

“To study [swifts and other birds] scientifically, according to Thomas, would be to dilute or soil our wonderment, to make what is marvellous prosaic. . . . As on many questions, I face both ways. I know what they mean: we need to maintain our wonderment at Creation, and it is terrible if we lose it or never have it in the first place (a condition that social media promotes).”

 

All true. Dalrymple is close to identifying a primal division among people. My thoughts? Science complements wonder. The more I learn about the family Dactyloidae (anoles, and check out that etymology) the more wondrous they seem.

Dalrymple concludes:

 

“On the other hand, to know more about the nature of reality can merely push the wonderment one question further back. A child at a certain stage of development asks an adult Why? and, on receiving an answer, asks again Why? How many questions does it take to reach the stage of unanswerability, and therefore of wonderment? No doubt Thomas would say, then, why bother to find out why? Why not just stop at the wonderment evoked by mere observation?

 

“I am glad that there are poets who ask this question, as I am glad that there are people who did not stop to ask it.”