'The First Test of Greatness for a Book'

Since the time change it gets dark earlier – always, ridiculously, a surprise – and I stepped outside after dinner for a brief walk in the neighborhood. The air in the evening in Houston is cooler and less oppressive, like an autumn day in the North. The moon was in its waning gibbous phase with a soft yellowish haze around it. Without thought I remembered the opening of Henry Vaughan’s “The World”: 

“I saw Eternity the other night,

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

All calm, as it was bright . . .”

 

Long-time serious readers will recognize the phenomenon. You’re going about your quotidian business, not doing anything especially literary, and a line or phrase or scene from a book, often years-old, will bubble to the surface of the mind. Vaughn’s poem has always reminded me that the simplest commonplace things can be charged with wonder. The moon is a rock in the sky. The moon is a dazzling gift to any conscious soul who sees it. Joseph Bottum wrote on Twitter the other day:

 

“The first test of greatness for a book: Once read, it has the power to recur to the mind, unbidden. And the equivalent is true for any work of art, isn't it? Great art — once heard, once seen, once encountered — has the power to recur to the mind, unbidden.”

 

The neighborhood a few miles to our north turns semi-rural with vegetable gardens and chicken coops, no sidewalks and few streetlights. On the north-south street we occasionally see someone, usually a young woman, riding a horse. I’ve never ridden a horse and have never spent much time around them. Among the cars they look vulnerable and somehow noble, and I remember the scene in Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov dreams of a peasant beating to death an old horse with an iron bar.

 

I shop at Wal-Mart only occasionally, to buy a new pair of blue jeans. I don’t like shopping anywhere but Wal-Mart manages to offend on multiple levels. Invariably, I remember Eric Ormsby’s “Microcosm” (Daybreak at the Straits and Other Poems, Zoo Press, 2004), which concludes:

 

“There are double stars in the eyes of cyclonic

Spuds shoveled and spaded up. The dance

Of Shiva is a cobbled-soled affair –

Hobnails and flapping slippers on the disreputable stair.

Yggdrasils

Germinate on Wal-Mart windowsills.”

Being a reader turns memory into an obliging literary rolodex.