'Of the Mind or of Memory or Invention'

What’s to become of the mildly introverted, privacy-loving, non-aligned personality? He has no taste for soapboxing. Perhaps he doesn’t vote and likely has never joined a political party, a church or even a bowling league. He is happiest reading, enjoying the company of family and friends, and pondering (often mistaken for doing nothing). He has no social media presence and is the diametric opposite of an “influencer.” 

Such thoughts are prompted by Irwin Edman (1896-1954), a name unknown to me until Sunday when Isaac Waisberg sent me a link to Edman’s book Under Whatever Sky (1951).  Isaac is among the internet’s quiet benefactors and asks for nothing in return. His IWP Books publishes volumes long out of print, including titles by Desmond MacCarthy, Jacques Barzun and John Jay Chapman. Edman was a prolific writer and throughout his adult life taught philosophy at Columbia University. Under What Sky collects the columns or brief essays he wrote for The American Scholar, starting in 1945.

 

Edman takes the title of his volume from George Santayana, whose The Philosophy of Santayana (1936, enlarged 1953) he edited for the Modern Library. Like the Spaniard, Edman seems to have been one of nature’s spectators, happiest when observing, not joining the swelter. In his first column, “All Time, All Existence,” he writes:

 

“‘Under whatever sky I had been born, since it is the same sky, I should have had the same philosophy.’ Nothing could better express than this sentence of Santayana’s the ambition and the illusion of the philosophic mind, the aspiration to survey the scene of nature and of life with such candor and exactness that the prejudices of time, place, and temperament will vanish and that the thoughts one speaks will be the thoughts of Nature herself. I have no such illusion.”

 

Edman tells us he will try to attain “the philosophical ambition to see even contemporary things under the aspect of eternity.” He writes “familiar essays” and usually avoids academic sententiousness. In the column titled “Dial Tone,” he describes the reassurance he feels when hearing a dial tone on the telephone, “a pleasure in the recognition, a sense that all is well.” This he likens to the pleasure he sometimes takes in a book:

 

“I have long cherished the belief that in reading one has a similar experience. In the first page, sometimes in the first paragraph, of a writer whom one has never read before, one is aware, in the tone and cadence of the sentences themselves, that one has the dial tone, or, perhaps, that the connection has been made. There will doubtless be a good deal about the book that will be a disappointment: perhaps the tone will be lost or the connection broken. But what a thrill it is to come upon it, if for the moment only.”

 

In the final column, “Conclusion,” Edman refers to his essays as “meditations, these incidental causeries” [OED: “an informal piece of writing, typically humorous and published as a short essay or newspaper column”]. That’s about right. A column written by an academic philosopher today would likely be pretentious, jargon-ridden, vogueish, preoccupied with politics and unreadable by a person outside a university. Edman fashions himself an Everyman, a sort of mid-twentieth-century Montaigne with a hint of Santayana. In “Conclusion,” Edman speculates about the world in 1994 and reveals himself as something of a prophet:   

 

“We are by all the signs moving into an era of standardization, of suffocating order, not altogether caused by external threats of tyranny. Soon play of mind and freedom of imagination may be completely suspect. . . . and tolerance may come to be the sign not of a just but of an empty mind. Only such literary works may be permitted as teach a wholesome doctrine, such as equality or justice, dogmatically defined by government edict. Only such treatises may be permitted as communicate facts it is considered urgent and timely to know. The reflective essay may be forbidden by public opinion if not by law. The merely playful exercises of the mind or of memory or invention may be regarded as truancy from rational behavior. The book that is merely harmless may be judged by that time the most harmful of all.”