'They Never Shun the Man of Sorrow'

Part of me resists the notion of books as medicine, as one-dose cures for life’s pains and disappointments. Too often, volumes touted for their therapeutic qualities are accompanied by nasty side effects: lousy writing, including clichés and soft-headed reasoning. Such books risk exacerbating symptoms already present in the patient. A reader asks me to identify some “uplifting” books. “I don’t mean psychology or self-help,” she writes, “but books that make you feel better, make you more hopeful or optimistic. Books that work for you.” I think first of George Crabbe’s The Library (1781), which begins by stating the problem: 

“When the sad soul, by care and grief oppress’d,

Looks round the world, but looks in vain for rest;

When every object that appears in view,

Partakes her gloom and seems dejected too:

Where shall affliction from itself retire?”

 

In the twenty-first century, when literacy itself is threatened with extinction, Crabbe’s proposed solution probably sounds hopelessly old-fashioned, a waste of time and wonderful:

 

“But what strange art, what magic can dispose

The troubled mind to change its native woes?

Or lead us willing from ourselves, to see

Others more wretched, more undone than we?

This books can do; -- nor this alone; they give

New views to life, and teach us how to live;

They soothe the grieved, the stubborn they chastise,

Fools they admonish, and confirm the wise:

Their aid they yield to all: they never shun

The man of sorrow, nor the wretch undone.”

 

To adapt my reader’s words, it works for me. I think first of the English writer Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011). In 1933, at age eighteen and with Hitler already poised to ravage Europe, Fermor walked from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. Half a century later, after rediscovering the diaries he kept during his journey, Fermor wrote A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986). He embodies youthful hope and ambition. His friend the American poet David Mason notes that Fermor composed “some of the richest English prose we have” and praises its “exuberance” -- travel writing as revery. Fermor takes the title of his first volume from the final stanza of Louis MacNeice’s “Twelfth Night” (Holes in the Sky, 1948):

 

“For now the time of gifts is gone –

O boys that grow, O snows that melt,

O bathos that the years must fill --

Here is dull earth to build upon

Undecorated; we have reached

Twelfth Night or what you will . . . you will.”

 

MacNeice is another writer I would prescribe as an antidote to dreariness and tedium. Take this from Canto VI of his Autumn Sequel: A Rhetorical Poem (1954):

     

“Everydayness is good; particular-dayness

Is better, a holiday thrives on single days.

Thus Wales with her moodiness, madness, shrewdness,

lewdness, feyness,

Daily demands a different color of praise.”

 

Joseph Epstein once wrote that he relies on three writers to “lift one out of gloom, and away from the valley of small and large woes” – Montaigne, Justice Holmes (in his letters) and H.L. Mencken. No argument here. And then I think of Charles Lamb writing in his essay “New Year’s Eve”:

 

“A new state of being staggers me. Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself—do these things go out with life?”