The adequacy of the cultural categories of, in this case, university England, to provide a frame of intelligible reasonings, creditable values, and familiar motivations for such oddities as poison oracles, ghost marriages, blood feuds, and cucumber sacrifices recommends those categories as of somehow more than parochial importance. Whatever personal reasons E-P may have had for being so extraordinarily anxious to picture Africa as a logical and prudential place – orderly, straightforward and levelheaded, firmly modeled and open to view – in doing so he constructed a forceful argument for the general authority of a certain conception of life. If it could undarken Africa, it could undarken anything.
– Clifford Geertz,
Works and Lives:
The Anthropologist as Author,
p. 70
The sweetest and most inoffensive path of life leads through the avenues of science and learning; and whoever can either remove any obstructions in this way, or open up any new prospect, ought so far to be esteemed a benefactor to mankind. And though these researches may appear painful and fatiguing, it is with some minds as with some bodies, which being endowed with vigorous and florid health, require severe exercise, and reap a pleasure from what, to the generality of mankind, may seem burdensome and laborious. Obscurity, indeed, is painful to the mind as well as to the eye; but to bring light from obscurity by whatever labour, must needs be delightful and rejoicing.
– David Hume
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
§I.6
To Mervyn Noseigh, M.A.
Dear Mr. Noseigh:
When you put the question to me so baldly – ‘What led you to become a writer?’ – I am momentarily nonplussed. On what level do you expect me to answer? The objective? If so, I became a writer because it looked like easy money. But that won’t look well in your PhD thesis, so let us try the subjective approach.On this level, I became a writer because I suffered the early conditioning of the Unconscious that makes writers. That is to say, my Oedipus Complex was further complicated by the Warmfläsche-reaktion.
You know how this works. Think of the Infantile World as a Huge Bed; on one side lies Mum, on the other side lies Dad, and in the middle is Baby Bunting. The normal thing, of course, is for B.B. to work out his Oedipus Complex; he wants to kill Dad and mate with Mum – thereby fitting himself for some normal occupation like the Civil Service. But sometimes B.B., for reasons still unknown to science, turns from Mum and snuggles up to Dad who quite understandably shoves B.B. down to the bottome of the bed and warms his feet on him as if he were a hot-water bottle (or Warmfläsche). Thus, in the very dawn of his existence, B.B. acquires that down-trodden cast of mind that marks the writer.
Very often Dad kicks B.B. right out of bed onto the bold linoleum, bringing about that sense of Utter Rejection which turns B.B. into a critic.
I can hardly wait to read your thesis.
Reverently,
Samuel Marchbanks (your topic)
– Robertson Davies
Samuel Marchbanks’ Almanack, p. 135
Of course what I am trying to do with that quotation is avoid introducing the following audio clip from a lecture by Jorge Luis Borges, about books:
It was a most comfortable house to visit. Gertrude Stein liked it, she could stay in her room or in the garden as much as she liked without hearing too much conversation. The food was excellent, scotch food, delicious and fresh, and it was very amusing meeting all of the Cambridge dignitaries. We were taken into all the gardens and invited into many of the homes. It was lovely weather, quantities of roses, morris-dancing by all the students and girls and generally delightful. We were invited to lunch at Newnham, Miss Jane Harrison, who had been Hope Mirlees’ pet enthusiasm, was much interested in meeting Gertrude Stein. We sat up on the dais with the faculty and it was very awe inspiring. The conversation was not however particularly amusing. Miss Harrison and Gertrude Stein did not particularly interest each other.
We had been hearing a good deal about Doctor and Mrs. Whitehead. They no longer live in Cambridge. The year before Doctor Whitehead had left Cambridge to go to London University. They were to be in Cambridge shortly and they were to dine with the Mirlees’. They did and I met my third genius.
It was a pleasant dinner. I sat next to Housman, the Cambridge poet, and we talked about fishes and David Starr Jordan but all the time I was more interested in watching Doctor Whitehead.*
– Gertrude Stein
(The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. p. 145)
The passage is remarkable in the prose of Gertrude Stein for its use of commas, on which:
He did however plead for commas. Gertrude Stein said commas were unnecessary, the sense should be intrinsic and not have to be explained by commas and otherwise commas were only a sign that one should pause and take breath but one should know of oneself when one wanted to pause and take breath. However, as she liked Haweis very much and he had given her a delightful painting for a fan, she gave him two commas. It must however be added that on rereading the manuscript she took the commas out (132).
* And now for a note, for your amusement. On reading Toklas’ What is Remembered, one finds a different version:
The Mirrlees were giving dinner parties for Gertrude and at one of them I sat next to A.E Housman. He said to me, Since you are from California, tell me about your great ichthyologist, Dr. David Starr Jordan. Oh, I said, he was a friend of my grandfather. So I told him all I knew about the president of Leland Stanford University (83).
Also, Dr. Whitehead was not at that particular dinner, but at a later one. Doubtless, however, someone has already done a careful comparison of the differences in their accounts, so I will say no more.
After about two hours of reading or discussion, we would go for a walk and then have tea at Lyons, or in the restaurant above the Regal cinema. Sometimes he came to my house in Searle street for supper. Once after supper, Wittgenstein, my wife and I went for a walk on Midsummer Common. We talked about the movements of the bodies of the solar system. It occurred to Wittgenstein that the three of us should represent the movements of the sun, earth, and moon, relative to one another. My wife was the sun and maintained a steady pace across the meadow; I was the earth and circled her at a trot. Wittgenstein took the most strenuous part of all, the moon, and ran around me while I circled my wife. Wittgenstein entered into this game with great enthusiasm and seriousness, shouting instructions at us as he ran. He became quite breathless and dizzy with exhaustion.
– Norman Malcolm
Ludwig Wittgenstein: a Memoir
(p. 51f.)
Postcard (from the editor of the text to his godmother)
found in a copy of ‘Urne Buriall’
and ‘The Garden of Cyrus’
… according to the notion I have of reason, neither the written treatises of the learned nor the set discourses of the eloquent are able of themselves to teach the use of it. It is the habit alone of reasoning which can make a reasoner. And men can never be better invited to the habit than when they find pleasure in it. A freedom of raillery, a liberty of decent language to question everything, and an allowance of unraveling or refuting any argument without offence to the arguer, are the only terms which can render such speculative conversations any way agreeable. For to say truth, they have been rendered burdensome to mankind by the strictness of the laws prescribed to them and by the prevailing pedantry and bigotry of those who reign in them and assume to themselves to be dictators in these provinces.
|
Vladimir Nabokov. Pnin. New York: Knopf, 2004 (1953). [extract from Lodge’s intro] |
Asked to sum it up in one word, I would unhesitatingly say ’sweet’; by which I probably do not mean what you think I mean. It is not sweet in the manner ascribed to human infants and other small mammals; it is not cute, or precious, or fluffy. This is no asinine candy-coated scribble to delight the many and appall the few. Well, perhaps it is. At the very least, it introduces an unprepossessing character who might describe himself as follows:
I am not handsome, I am not interesting, I am not talented. I am not even rich. But, Lise, I offer you everything I have, to the last blood corpuscle, to the last tear, everything. And, believe me, this is more than any genius can offer you because a genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do (ch. 6).
N. gives every indication that this is an accurate appraisal and, since the story of such a one could so easily be ponderous, one reads with amazement the sustained lightness of the prose. Moreover, it is impossible to scorn Pnin, just as one cannot fully pity him; rather, in reading it is as though one unfolds him carefully and peruses him like a misdirected letter.
This would be the sentimental approach. Reason dictates I observe that Pnin is a very fine example of the ‘campus novel’, a genre which includes the likes of Pictures from an Institution (whose title I can never remember), The Lecturer’s Tale (one of the rare books I am actually ashamed to have finished reading – as opposed to the many books I blush to admit sits on a shelf, bookmark midway through), and Lucky Jim (which I dislike). Pnin quite tops them all, for university life is acutely observed and concisely captured (cf. ‘lightness’) in descriptions sadly familiar fifty years on:
Again the marble neck of the homely Venus in the vestibule of Humanities Hall received the vermilion imprint, applied in lipstick, of a mimicked kiss. Again the Waindell Recorder discussed the Parking Problem. Again in the margins of library books earnest freshmen inscribed such helpful glosses as ‘Description of nature,’ or ‘Irony’; and in a pretty edition of Mallarmé’s poem, an especially able scholiast had already underlined in violet ink the difficult word oiseaux and scrawled above it ‘birds.’ […] And still the college creaked on. Hard-working graduates, with pregnant wives, still wrote dissertations on Dostoevski and Simone de Beauvoir. Literary departments still labored under the impression that Stendhal, Galsworthy, Dreiser, and Mann were great writers (ch. 6, again).
For the words and facts of the ancients are as bricks, from which we build the fortresses of our arguments, ever quarreling over the lines of the walls. These walls are torn down and rebuilt with such haste and such fury, that it does not seem strange when they are torn down again, or prove useless for defense. For that is the point, is it not? That is why we build these walls, to have some sort of defense—to collect the little commonality of mankind into some semblance of order…
And for this I sit in my room, walled round with books, and play with smaller blocks, culled from one work rather than a corpus, as toys. Is it any wonder, then, that being used to playing at construction, when called upon to handle mortar I find myself at a loss? Why expend the labor on a wall to be torn down, even if one does see how the bricks might go?
From the streets seep the sounds of the football fans, set free from the evening’s match; I do not know who won.
Gainful toil + useful work = wasted time. No reading. Only joy in Monteverdi & a bit of Horace and Pindar and Epicurus (‘Send me a little pot of cheese so that I can indulge in extravagance when I wish’, as per Diogenes Laertius) and Epictetus (Τῶν ἡδέων τὰ σπανιώτατα γινόμενα μάλιστα τέρπει – Those of our pleasures which come most rarely are especially delightful).
Ineffably charming, oozing good humor & politic attention; I listen & ask questions—then run to the library and hide among my friends, their dusty spines bristling at imagined indignities.
People sat or sprawled on the lawns, soaking in the sunshine or lolling in the shade. I, meanwhile, was content to walk along the river bank and admire the scene, the hum of bees, &c. The rest of the morning passed amid thoughts of the ancient Greek aristocracy, kaloikagathoi, the beautiful and the good. Have been pondering my reading lately and am sad to note that I haven’t really been pursuing literature as I should — oh, I am reading Philostratus & Demosthenes & Lysias & things, but those just aren’t the same as James & Woolf & Geo. Eliot, & co, nor has there been an exhuberent loss of self, a deliberate rendering of one’s mind to subtle manipulation so common in modern writing. Began the afternoon with drinks at the principal’s house: near twenty undergraduate and graduate students standing awkwardly on the sun-struck lawn, holding glasses of tepid champagne, orange juice, and elderflower water at all angles, whilst attempting to mingle for the sake of appearances.
Up, tea, email, breakfast, library (kinship diplomacy), coffee, room, read, idleness, bed.
Up, email, breakfast, library (kinship diplomacy), coffee, museum, bookstore, post-office (stamps for letter & forms), room, read, St. John’s Passion, tea, read, Ninth, read, email, dinner, room, bed.
Up, coffee, Women in Ancient Persia…, email,
breakfast, letters, Athenian Culture, library (kinship diplomacy), library II (return book, renew books on Greek cults & borrow book on Roman Rhetoric), coffee, bookstore, bread & milk, room, settle, lunch, write letters, tea, Bach, Ulysses, &c., talk (dreadful and dull), room, bed.
Up, coffee, Baroque, Women in Ancient Persia (559 — 331 bc), Brahms, tea, notecards, Elgar, African Civilizations, brunch, groceries, room, Omeros, tea, continue reading, call M, Bach, bed.
Up, coffee, essay, breakfast, email, essay, snooze, deliver essay, room, bed, A Room with a View, talk to Mama, mint tea, drift in & out of wakefulness, sleep.
Up (after a night broken by coughing), coffee, Ulysses,
e-mail, breakfast, Bodley, coffee, pick up tickets, room, rest, lunch, room, read,
essay, rest, bed.
Up (after a night broken by coughing), coffee, Ulysses,
email, breakfast, library, coffee, pick up tickets, room, rest, lunch, room, read, essay, rest, bed.
Up, coffee, essay, email, breakfast, library, essay, tutorial, buy books,
coffee, purchase tea, room, tea, Ulysses, meet to arrange Latin, room, Ulysses, library (return books), dinner, room, bed.
Up (after a night of heated sleep, not tossing and turning, but trapped in
the stillness inimical to rest), coffee, Ulysses, email,
breakfast, library (return books & borrow Greek Prose Style), Athenian Culture, museum (return & borrow books), bookstore (check on religion books in cheap paperbacks), library (translations & TLS), email, lunch, room, tea, Ulysses, Bach, Tragedy and the Tragic, essay, bath, Ulysses, bed.
Up, coffee, languish (a sleepy stupidity tucked amongst the blankets, watching the light seep across the wall and hiding from the sharpness of out-of-doors), laundry, email (a process which, with some manipulation, can be made to consume an hour and half), room, coffee & sandwich, grocery store (for the purchase of weekly necessaries such as bread and jam), room, essay, idleness, bed.
Up, coffee, bath, Love in a Cold Climate (it troubles
me somewhat, being clever and charming and not especially brilliant, the characters remain, as intended I suppose, card-board cut-outs — Cedric, for instance, is an insult to one’s intelligence — though it is entertaining to ponder the actual schedule of the narrator), library (Greek Religion, etc.), brunch, e-mail, room, coffee, Fathers and Sons (I have at last actually set my mind to it and finished the thing, and find it is much more intriguing than I remember from my last attempt four years ago), dabble, Athenian Religion, Bach Mass in B minor, room, bed.
Up, coffee, email, breakfast, library (return book), library II (read), library III (return book & photocopy), coffee & sandwich, room, read, class, which put in mind of Meredith:
…one is not altogether fit for the battle of life who is engaged in a perpetual contention with his dinner…
…which holds true for Thucydides as well; the reason it being generally so wretched is a matter of digestion, not lack of cogitation; even managed an exquisite civility to the disagreeable personages), library, check books, room, read, tea, bread, Bach, bed.
Up, coffee, email, breakfast, library (return book), bookstore, coffee, library (request books), Greek religion (the importance of myth!), lunch, bread & milk, room, read, dinner, room, bed.
Up, coffee, Greek historiography, email, breakfast, library, coffee, milk, room, Thucydides Mythistoricus, lunch, Euripides as social critic (‘question authority’ — I can’t believe I skipped two hours of discussing the Boeotian elements of Pindar to attend), room, generally well-disposed to world and lacking any desire to indulge in excessive criticism (this state being induced by the lecture, Puccini, two slices of buttered bread and a cup of milky tea), Thucydides reading, more reading, the vague inclination (though not enacted) to bathe, bed.
Up, coffee, At Swim-Two-Birds, email, breakfast, library (return books), coffee, museum (periodicals, course reading), library (Thucydides, etc.), The Blessing, lunch, room, The Blessing, bread, Thucydides, bed.
Up, coffee, Greek historiography, Kagan YCS 24, send letters, breakfast, library (return books), Athenian culture (the oikos, the womens’ sphere, pederasty), coffee, library (return books, renew, and borrow Arethusa 11), groceries (bread, milk, etc., no honey), room, At Swim-Two-Birds, email, lunch, package, treats, novel, bath, At Swim-Two-Birds, bed.
Up, coffee, essay, email, breakfast, room, read, lunch, class (‘You’ve stunned them,’ this following a long silence when I’d read my essay; no constructive comments thereafter — no comments at all, in fact), sulk, room, tea, Ulysses, dinner with company, room, bed.
Up, coffee, ΑΝΑΓΚΗ in Thucydides, email, breakfast, coffee, museum, read periodicals, Greek religion (also, womens’ festivals…), lunch, room, essay, read, dinner, room, bed.
Up, coffee, Greek historiography, email, breakfast, coffee, museum, lunch, Greek literary dialects, room, out for dinner, room, bed.
Up, coffee, essay, breakfast, library, translate, tutorial, lunch, room, read,
bed.
Up, coffee, breakfast, Athenian culture and society (paideia),
library (return books, browse periodicals, etc.), lunch, room, read, essay,
bed.
Up, coffee, laundry, email, room, read, coffee, cudgel poor brain about grad school, muddle, read, essay, bed.
Up, coffee, read, library, coffee, bookstore (Die
Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, vol. 2), brunch, talk, room, snooze, movie, room, relax, coffee, socialize, room, bed.
Up, coffee, breakfast, library, read, coffee & lunch, bookstore, class room, smirk, read, bed.
Up, coffee, breakfast, library, coffee, Greek religion, lunch, room, read, bed.
Up, coffee, Momigliano, breakfast, library, museum, essay, room, lunch, Greek literary dialects, library, essay, room, bed.
Up, coffee, Momigliano, breakfast, library, coffee, groceries, room, Athenian Religion, lunch, read, library, room, Satie, German, read, dinner, lecture, room, bed.
Up, coffee, email, breakfast, library (return book), Athenian culture and society, library, coffee, groceries, lunch, room, tidy, bath, Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography,
Mozart, Athenian Religion, tea, snooze, bed.
Up, coffee, laundry, library (return books), coffee & sandwich, groceries (orange juice & instant soup), room, nap, idleness.
Snooze, up, coffee, library, J. E. Harrison (couldn’t
even manage a full hour…), coffee, bookstore (Themis), lunch, library (Divinity and History: the Religion of Herodotus; OCM), apple-mango juice, room, much sneezing & coughing &c., Chopin, read, tea, snooze, read, Satie, bed.
Up, coffee, breakfast, room, Herodotus, bath, Herodotus, library, lunch, library (return book), race to → class, room, bed & sleep & sleep & sleep.
Breakfast, library, J. E. Harrison, coffee, Historical
Methods of Herodotus, postmodern critical article on palm-trees in Attic vase painting, Greek Religion, lunch, room, bath, computer, Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World, email, dinner, room, bed.
Up, coffee, essay, e-mail, breakfast, Hellenistic History with the public-school man – post-imperialist and orientalist subtexts in Greek literature after Alexander! – pretend not to suffer from nerves, lunch, Thucydides and Rhetoric (i.e., nearly two hours of sitting, staring at the floor and attempting to conjure an innovative opinion about Pericles’ funeral oration; also, if one lacks explicit proof that Athens was the new Persia one will only seem a fool for saying so), celebration, dinner, bed.
Up, coffee, email, breakfast, library, Greek Religion – what role do the Greek gods play in everyday life? From whence and how did they evolve? What is structuralism? Are you a structuralist? Is Gallic subtlety any match for the brute force of History? – lunch, essay, read, breathe, bed.
Up, email, breakfast, coffee, read, library, chinaware (the only truly silent reading room available), room, books, lunch, library, Greek Literary dialects (using words such as ‘aposeosis’ – is that an anachronistic Doric sigma? – and phrases such as ‘this text goes in for unnecessary iotas every so often’ and ‘it would be syntactically cruel of Alcman…’), a good-humored walk through the streets at dusk, tofu, coffee, The Invention of Athens, essay, Rousseau, bread & jam, bath, read, bed.
::
ego hoc feci mm–mmx
© 2000–10 M.F.C.