“I am afraid my subject is rather an exciting one; and as I don’t like excitement I shall approach it in a gentle, timid, round-about way. I am all for a quiet life. That is a deplorable confession, I suppose.”
Some of us thrive on
adrenaline, the rush of current events, melodramatic entanglements and a Wagnerian
soundtrack. Others by nature are spectators, content to watch and listen and
let others carry on as they wish. I rank myself among the latter. When young, I
would have found such an identification shameful. Life is meant to be
swashbuckling. One embodies a “can-do,” “change-the-world” spirit. A life spent
pondering is not worth enduring. These are a young man’s delusions.
The tone of muted irony in
the passage quoted above is the give-away. Max Beerbohm was constitutionally
incapable of being strident. The words are drawn from his September 18, 1942,
broadcast on the BBC, “Advertisements,” collected in Mainly on the Air
(1946; rev. 1957). The worst of the Blitz in London was over and the V-1 and
V-2 rocket attacks would come in the future. Having returned to England from
Italy at the start of the war, Beerbohm broadcast talks and readings on the
BBC. After Churchill, this neo-Victorian was the nation’s most popular
broadcaster, with millions of listeners. Of his radio talks Rebecca West wrote:
“I felt that I was listening to the voice of the last civilized man on earth.
Max’s broadcasts justify the entire invention of broadcasting.”
The sensibility described
by Beerbohm is today dismissed as apathy, an indifference to the world. Rather,
it suggests an acceptance of one’s limitations. What can one realistically
accomplish? Little beyond our tiny concentric world. Many of our troubles today
are encapsulated in a single word: “activist,” and not only in the political
sense. Useful synonyms include “busybody” and “scold.” The best we can
hope for is a revision in our own behavior, a little more kindness and
tolerance. Writers work best when they accept their limits and
leave the world-changing to others. Michael Oakeshott wrote in a 1922 notebook:
“To produce great literature we must have within us that spirit of quiet, that
‘central peace subsisting at the heart of endless agitation.’" Oakeshott quotes Wordsworth's “The Excursion.”
In his biography of
Beerbohm, N. John Hall writes of the essayist/broadcaster: “His tone is
fatherly, or rather grandfatherly; he champions the good old days. Occasionally
he can sound a bit of a crank, an old man lamenting change and new machinery.
But even when he is complaining, his mood is soft, modest; and so he gets away
with it.”
[The Oakeshott passage is taken from Notebooks, 1922-86 (Imprint Academic, 2014).]
3 comments:
"They say that living is the thing, but I'd rather be reading." - Logan Pearsall Smith
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, my religious denomination, and Samuel Johnson lived during roughly the same period. They knew and respected each other, but Johnson complained good-humoredly about Wesley's ceaseless activity, or what we might today call "activism." "John Wesley's conversation is good, but he is never at leisure. He is always obliged to go at a certain hour. This is very disagreeable to a man who loves to fold his legs and have his talk out, as I do."
Wesley's activism is best summarized by these words: "Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can."
When activism is "good trouble" (such as in the late Congressman John Lewis's sense) it leads to needed change, such as civil rights. I am thankful for that kind of "trouble".
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