'The Changing Year’s Successive Plan'

Walter Jackson Bate tells us in his biography of Dr. Johnson that as he aged, the crusty old man mellowed. “[I]n many ways,” Bate writes, “he was changing—not changing in his character but in what he said or admitted.” Previously, Johnson had denied the impact of the seasons on the emotions (“imagination operating on luxury”), what we call in some cases “seasonal affective disorder (SAD).” In 1784, the year he would turn seventy-five, Johnson spent July through November in Lichfield, the city of his birth. 

“As November came to Lichfield, which he could reasonably doubt that he would ever see again,” Bate writes, “he felt the poignance of autumn as never before. One of Horace’s odes (IV, vii) especially haunted him – the one in which the large revolving changes of nature, destroying and re-creating, are contrasted with the hopes and destiny of short-lived man.” Johnson’s translation of the ode, composed in Lichfield, is among the last things he ever wrote:

 

“The snow dissolv’d, no more is seen;

The fields and woods, behold! are green;

The changing year renews the plain,

The rivers know their banks again;

The sprightly nymph and naked grace

The mazy dance together trace.

The changing year’s successive plan

Proclaims mortality to man.

Rough winter’s blasts to spring give way,

Spring yields to summers sovereign ray;

Then summer sinks in autumn’s reign,

And winter chills the world again:

Her losses soon the moon supplies,

But wretched man, when once he lies

Where Priam and his sons are laid,

Is nought but ashes and a shade.

Who knows if Jove, who counts our score,

Will toss us in a morning more?

What with your friend you nobly share,

At least, you rescue from your heir.

Not you, Torquatus, boast of Rome,

When Minos once has fix’d your doom,

Or eloquence, or splendid birth,

Or virtue, shall restore to earth.

Hippolytus, unjustly slain,

Diana calls to life in vain;

Nor can the might of Theseus rend

The chains of hell, that hold his friend.”

 

Johnson would soon leave Lichfield, return to London and die on December 13. Bate writes of Johnson’s version: “Of the many translations of this famous ode, none catches the spirit of Horace more closely.” 

'Cherries, Nectarines, Apricots and Early Peaches'

Neighbors gave us a sack of golf-ball-size peaches from the tree in their front yard. I’ve been watching it for months through the front window. They covered it with gauzy white netting resembling an oversized shower cap to keep off the bugs and squirrels, and generally babied the tree. The fruit is fuzzy, blemish-free and sweet. Because they are smaller than the peaches you find at the grocery store, you’re tempted to eat two or three at a time. We’re trying to be strong. 

Yvor Winters was the pomologist among poets. Along with raising goats and Airedales, he tended a small orchard of fruit trees at his home in Los Altos, Calif. On November 16, 1958, he writes to Don Cameron Allen at Johns Hopkins:

 

“The frost finished my fig crop, but ripened my persimmons and pineapple guavas. The last of my Valencia oranges were picked recently, but we are still eating them (they ripen in May). My tangerines will ripen around Christmas. My strawberry guava crop has just come to an end, after about two months of heavy production. My pomegranates are ripe. Most of my olives are picked (a big cast-iron washtub full) and I am now engaged in putting them in rock-salt (for Greek olives) and in the lye-and-brine cure.”

 

A professor at Stanford, an active poet and critic, a husband and father – and Winters finds the time to tend and harvest, by my count, eight varieties of fruit. It was from Winters that I first heard of loquats, and this Northerner first saw the trees here in Houston some twenty years ago. He goes on:  

 

“In May my loquats will ripen (loquats are one of the finest fruits I know, but they deteriorate rapidly after picking and so are never marketed) and I shall have loquats for two months. In early June my cherries, nectarines, apricots and early peaches, and in mid-June my early figs (white) and my first crop of black mission figs. In July my late peaches and the end of the loquats. The black figs should continue through half of July and start their second crop late in August, at which time my late white figs and grapes will be starting. In addition to this we have quinces, limequats, and Meyer lemons. The lemons and limequats bear fruit straight through the year.”

 

Throughout my life I have tended flower and vegetable gardens, never fruit trees. Few activities are so primally satisfying. In the summer before second grade (1959), I grew a small patch of watermelons beside the garage. At Christmas I gave my teacher, Miss Esson, the gift of a watermelon. The gift of peaches and Winters’ description of his orchard remind me of my favorite among his poems, “Time and the Garden,” including the opening lines:

 

“The spring has darkened with activity.

The future gathers in vine, bush, and tree:

Persimmon, walnut, loquat, fig, and grape,

Degrees and kinds of color, taste, and shape.

These will advance in their due series, space

The season like a tranquil dwelling-place.”

 

[See The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (ed. R.L. Barth, Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, 2000).]

'Acquainted With His Real Character'

We all do it, even the most sophisticated and open-minded among us: we draw conclusions about people based on their physical appearance. Sure, there’s pretty/handsome versus ugly/plain. Most men will pause when they see a beautiful woman. That’s natural, not depraved. But we read faces and bodies in ways other than aesthetically. In The Spectator on this date, June 8, in 1711, Joseph Addison writes: 

 “[E]very one is in some Degree a Master of that Art which is generally distinguished by the Name of Physiognomy; and naturally forms to himself the Character or Fortune of a Stranger, from the Features and Lineaments of his Face. We are no sooner presented to any one we never saw before, but we are immediately struck with the Idea of a proud, a reserved, an affable, or a good-natured Man; and upon our first going into a Company of Strangers, our Benevolence or Aversion, Awe or Contempt, rises naturally towards several particular Persons before we have heard them speak a single Word, or so much as know who they are.”

 

A parent will tell a child: “Stop staring.” It’s rude and can be interpreted as invasive or threatening. Most of us learn early to conceal our interest in another’s face. But Addison suggests we can glean useful information from observing the faces of strangers, though I was told before my first visit to New York City: “Don’t make eye contact.” It’s complicated and we can easily commit a faux pas. Addison writes: “I think we may be better known by our Looks than by our Words; and that a Man’s Speech is much more easily disguised than his Countenance.” He quotes Martial’s epigram 12.54:

 

“Crine ruber, niger ore, brevis pede, lumine lœsus:

Rem magnam prœstas, Zoile, si bonus es.”

 

Here is a translation:

 

“Red-haired, black-mouthed, lame-footed, squint-eyed;

it would be a miracle, Zoilus, if you were honorable.”

 

Poor Zoilus. His appearance condemns him to perpetual misunderstanding. He will seldom be judged an honorable man, despite what might be an honorable life. We’re no different. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Charles Darwin suggests facial appearance is important, and that certain expressions are likely an evolutionary inheritance.

 

“We are so familiar with the fact of young and old animals displaying their feelings in the same manner, that we hardly perceive how remarkable it is that a young puppy should wag its tail when pleased, depress its ears and uncover its canine teeth when pretending to be savage, just like an old dog; or that a kitten should arch its little back and erect its hair when frightened and angry, like an old cat. When, however, we turn to less common gestures in ourselves, which we are accustomed to look at as artificial or conventional,—such as shrugging the shoulders, as a sign of impotence, or the raising the arms with open hands and extended fingers, as a sign of wonder,—we feel perhaps too much surprise at finding that they are innate.”

 

Addison urges thoughtfulness as a antidote to prejudice:

 

“[A] wise Man should be particularly cautious how he gives credit to a Man’s outward Appearance. It is an irreparable Injustice we are guilty of towards one another, when we are prejudiced by the Looks and Features of those whom we do not know. How often do we conceive Hatred against a Person of Worth, or fancy a Man to be proud and ill-natured by his Aspect, whom we think we cannot esteem too much when we are acquainted with his real Character?”

'Among the Essential Text-Books of Our Schools'

A reader in North Dakota tells me he has acquired Donald Frame’s translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford University Press, 1957) and asks for recommendations among them. Really, he can’t go wrong starting anywhere, and he already has his eyes on “Of Sleep,” “Of Books” and Montaigne’s longest essay, “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Almost randomly I would suggest “Of Idleness” (his shortest essay: one page) and “Of Cruelty.” A sample from “Idleness”: 

“Just as we see that fallow land, if rich and fertile, teems with a hundred thousand kinds of wild and useless weeds, and that to set it to work we must subject it and sow it with certain seeds for our service; and as we see that women, all alone, produce mere shapeless masses and lumps of flesh, but that to create a good and natural offspring they must be made fertile with a different kind of seed; so it is with minds.”

 

Typical Montaigne: homely, readily understood metaphors and a sort of punchline bringing it all together. Here’s the next sentence, which amounts to common sense on minds: “Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination.”

 

In 1934, the English literary critic F.L. Lucas (1894-1967) published in the journal Studies French and English an essay, “The Master-Essayist.” Lucas gives us a charming profile of the Frenchman:

 

“That a gaily self-indulgent old gentleman in Perigord once loved scratching his ears is and will be remembered where lives, by the thousand, of desperate industry and devoted idealism leave not a ripple on the inky waters of oblivion. Such is justice.”

 

Montaigne was the first to make the first-person singular a worthy subject, and he is seldom tedious, unlike Rousseau and a thousand imitators. Here is Lucas’ conclusion:

 

“Today Montaigne would rather have lived in a garret, alone with his own thoughts, than have earned his living in many of our occupations, or joined many of the movements of the modern world. After all, would he be wrong? If only we were wise, I believe that among the essential text-books of our schools, and of our schoolmasters, would be the Lives of Plutarch and the Essais of Montaigne.

 

[Find Lucas’ essay and many others in the “Articles” section of Isaac Waisberg’s essential IWP Books.)

'Pain an Evil'

I was seated in the waiting room of the physical therapy center with the rest of the human wreckage. Two men were seated to my right, speaking Spanish. Both were in street clothes with no obvious signs of injury or disease. To my left was a black man about my age, dressed all in black. He had a prosthetic right leg beneath the knee and was drinking a cup of coffee. He uses a walker to navigate. We chatted, indifferent stuff at first, before I asked him how he lost the leg. “Fuckin’ diabetes,” he said. He still occasionally feels his foot, the so-called “phantom limb” phenomenon. 

He goes to PT hoping to ease other pains – knees, hips, back. Edema is an ongoing problem. He spoke clinically, without complaint, and I appreciated his apparent absence of self-pity. When he stood, he groaned softly. It sounded familiar. He had noticed my cane and I told him about the arthritis. As he moved toward the PT room he said, “Life’s a bitch, ain’t it?” and laughed.

 

To read while waiting I brought along Santayana’s The Life of Reason, originally published in five volumes in 1905-06. I haven’t read it in years and I’m luxuriating in the prose. Can you think of another writer whose English prose is as fluent as Santayana’s? Perhaps Ruskin. Or Evelyn Waugh. No academic nonsense or stiffness, little jargon, philosophical or otherwise. In the first volume, Reason in Common Sense, in the chapter titled “First Steps and First Fluctuations,” he devotes an extended digression to the subject of pain:

 

“[T]o deny that pleasure is a good and pain an evil is a grotesque affectation: it amounts to giving ‘good’ and ‘evil’ artificial definitions and thereby reducing ethics to arbitrary verbiage. . . . A man who without necessity deprived any person of a pleasure or imposed on him a pain, would be a contemptible knave, and the person so injured would be the first to declare it, nor could the highest celestial tribunal, if it was just, reverse that sentence.”

'A Mission to the University Extension Scheme'

I have a typically human taste for taxonomy, classifying things, sorting them into categories. There’s comfort in order. A friend in Los Angeles shares my bent and proposes three classes of books as outlined by Oscar Wilde in his essay "To Read or Not to Read" (1886):

 

1. Books to read.

2. Books to reread

3. Books not to read at all

 

Makes sense. Most of us probably follow a similar scheme without having formalized it. Here are Wilde's entries in the first category: Cicero’s Letters, Suetonius, Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Sir John Mandeville, Marco Polo, the Duc de Saint-Simon’s Memoirs, Theodor Mommsen and, “till we get a better one,” Grote’s History of Greece.

 

Little to argue with here, though I’ve not read Mandeville, Marco Polo and Grote. Here is the second category, the books to reread:

 

Plato and Keats. “In the sphere of poetry,” Wilde writes, “the masters not the minstrels; in the sphere of philosophy, the seers not the savants.” That’s a little vague but leaves plenty of room for nominations. I have an extensive list. In fact, it may be the second-largest category, topped only by the third, the books not to read at all:

 

“[James] Thomson’s Seasons, [Samuel] Rogers’s Italy[: A Poem], [William] Paley’s Evidences [of Christianity], all the Fathers except St. Augustine, all John Stuart Mill except the essay “On Liberty,” all Voltaire’s plays without any exception, [Bishop Joseph] Butler’s Analogy [of Religion], [Sir Alexander] Grant’s Aristotle, [David] Hume’s [History of] England, George Henry Lewes’s [Biographical] History of Philosophy, all argumentative books and all books that try to prove anything.”

 

So far, I’m safe from most of these titles, though I have read Thomson and a lot of Hume but not his History. I want to endorse that final phrase, which Wilde expands on here:

 

“The third class is by far the most important. To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for, the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching . . . But to tell people what not to read is a very different matter, and I venture to recommend it as a mission to the University Extension Scheme.”

 

Such negative endorsements are unenforceable, of course. People are free to read any tripe they fancy. The best we can do is share our experience of books and trust that a few readers out there will follow the suggestion, read the book and conclude that we knew what we were talking about.

[A note to readers: the comments section at Anecdotal Evidence is reserved strictly for readers. I’ve had my say. If you have a question, send it to me via email: Patrick.kurp@gmail.com. Otherwise, I’m unable to reply.]

'All Sit in Sullen Silence and Await'

My middle son has a friend, a fellow Marine, who had questions about Russian literature. He asked about Andrei Platonov and Leonid Andreyev. I’ve never read the latter but told him what little I knew about the former. I recommended Vasily Grossman, and he said he intends to read Stalingrad. Previously, he had suggested Michael read The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, one of my favorite novels. This Marine, whom I have never met, has an interest in colonial Algeria and I was able to recommend Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (1977), which he subsequently read. 

This is one of the ancillary pleasures of reading good books. Suggestions, of course, are made to be ignored but occasionally one takes hold and one’s pleasure is doubled. I don’t remember anyone recommending a book to me when I was young. That probably contributed to me becoming a semi-secretive reader. I assumed no one was interested in the books I loved. That began to change at the university when I met a few students and faculty members who shared my enthusiasm. There’s an informal underground out there of adventurous readers, those who eschew bestsellers and often contemporary books and indulge in our inheritance.

 

D.A. Cooper is a poet who, I’m told, lives here in Houston. This is his poem, “To Read”:

 

“There are so many books to read; they fill

the shelves of libraries and stores across

the world, as well as every empty space

inside my house. The stacks grow year by year;

they rise like zombie corpses on my desk,

my couch, and all across the floor. Each begs

to sink its dusty claws into my brain.

I crack their spines, flip through their crumbling pages,

and try to pick which ones I’ll give new life.

There are too many books to read. I see

those volumes and I know I’ll never have

the time I need to finish even just

the ones I own. They cry out from my shelves—

collected poems and stories of the dead—

entreating me to resurrect their souls.

And that is just the famous literature.

Great forests have been razed so I could buy

large piles of science fiction, fantasy,

detective novels, politics, and physics.

Selections of the best known -ologies,

a sampling of the most loved -ographies,

and sprinkles of my favorite -osophies,

all sit in sullen silence and await

the hoped for yet unlikely future date

when I will find the time I need to read.”

 

Cooper describes an anxiety I once suffered from: too many books looming over my head. How would I ever be able to read all of them? With time, I turned that around. Now it’s reassuring to know such bounty awaits me. Even better, I know precisely which books I will soon reread.