Properly, we shd. read for power. Man reading shd. be man intensely alive. The book shd. be a ball of light in one’s hand (55).1
Reading Pound’s Guide to Kulcher, I was perplexed; partially because it is an odd book, aimed at those who don’t mind attending the university of the brain of Ezra Pound (which is a strange place, of many prejudices). Mostly, though, I just wasn’t (and ain’t) sure what to make of it, how to reconcile those parts I can (reservedly) agree with and those which strike me as outcroppings of the fashion of the times or mere idiosyncrasies.2 It jumps here and there, following a logic which I don’t quite see (and am too lazy to look for),3 and digresses on subjects with a force not quite necessary to the task of guide – as though Virgil cracked wise at every opportunity, and made opportunities to do so where none were before.
When I can agree with him, though, I find that generally agree pretty whole-heartedly. Some notes:
I suspect that the error in educational systems has been the cutting off of learning from appetite […] Real knowledge goes into natural man in titbits. A scrap here, a scrap there; always pertinent, linked to safety, nutrition or pleasure (98f).
Then there is education as apart from learning. By learning I assume in some measure that he means learning how to think about things, rather than being educated into a brittle edifice of apparent understanding. It’s impossible to force-feed knowledge; one gets prescient indigestion.
About thirty years ago, seated on one of the very hard, very slippery, thoroughly uncomfortable chairs of the British Museum main reading room, with a pile of large books at my right hand and a pile of somewhat smaller ones at my left hand, I lifted my eyes to the tiers of volumes and false doors covered with imitation bookbacks which surround that focus of learning. Calculating the eye-strain and the number of pages per day that a man could read, with deduction for say at least 5% of one man’s time for reflection, I decided against it. There must be some other way for a human being to make use of that vast cultural heritage (53f.).
Also how ideas of things become mixed up with the things themselves. There is the vast cultural heritage as an idea and then there is the representation of it, locked behind imitation bookbacks. There is the thing that is and the thing that seems and, though it seems that one can grasp it by a diligence of buttocks, that is the idea of an ass.
If the affable reader (or a delegate to an international economic conference from the U.S. of A.) cannot distinguish between his armchair and a bailiff’s order, permitting the bailiff to sequester that armchair, life will offer him two alternatives: to be exploited or to be the more or less pampered pimp of exploiters until it becomes his turn to be bled. ¶ The bailiff’s order may be openly such, or it may be a bailiff’s order heavily camouflaged, but homo not completely sap-head will smell, divine or see clearly the difference between his roof and a mortgage (244).
***
The supreme evil committable by a critic is to turn men away from the bright and the living. The ignominious failure of ANY critic (however low) is to fail to find something to arouse the appetite of his audience, to read, to see, to experience (161).
Men in the decline of life have in all ages declaimed against a passion which they have ceased to feel, but with as little reason as success. Those who from coldness of constitutional temperament have never felt what love is, will surely be allowed to be very incompetent judges with regard to the power of this passion to contribute to the sum of pleasurable sensations in life. Those who have spent their youth in criminal excesses and have prepared for themselves, as the comforts of their age, corporeal debility and mental remorse may well inveigh aginst such pleasures as vain and futile, and unproductive of lasting satisfaction. But the pleasures of pure love will bear the contemplation of the most improved reason, and the most exalted virtue. Perhaps there is scarcely a man who has once experienced the genuine delight of virtuous love, however great his intellectual pleasure may have been, that does not look back to the period as the sunny spot in his whole life, where his imagination loves to bask, which he recollects and contemplates with the fondest regrets, and which he would most wish to live over again. The superiority of intellectual to sensual pleasures consists rather in their filling up more time, in their having a larger range, and in their being less liable to satiety, than in their being more real and essential.
– Thomas Malthus,
An Essay on the
Principle of Population
|
Jane Collier An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting ed. A. Bilger, 2003 (1753) |
…it is from suffering, and not from inflicting torments, that the true idea of them is gained (130).
A satire in the manner of Swift’s Directions to Servants,* Collier’s Essay is neither so light nor so sharp a piece of prose, though it possesses a certain sardonic weariness. I am reminded of Woolf’s criticism of Jane Eyre – one feels the author’s indignation and, more importantly, lack of control so much that the work itself is weakened. Such criticism is not quite appropriate in this case, not least because the sections dealing with Collier’s own experience as an unmarried dependent female or any of the common perversities of friendship are the most powerful in the work:
When a person so thoroughly loves his friend, that it is one his greatest pleasure, to serve, to please, or to amuse him; he cannot, it is true, want thanks for every thing he does; nay, he will be so far from it, that nothing could be more unpleasant to him, than to receive such perpetual acknowlegements for his kindness; yet there is a manner of overlooking such constant endeavours, which is not only mortifying, but very grating, and which I would have you, my good pupil, not fail to practise. But if ever it has been in your power to do the least service to your friend, you may puff and blow; you may magnify the trouble you have taken; and you may praise your own friendly disposition and good-nature, till you have forced from your friend thanks and acknowlegements enough to repay you for having conferred the greatest favour in the world (100).
Although it is possible to read the Essay looking for humor, as I did, I wonder now whether it wouldn’t be more appropriate to consider it as an anatomy of psychological abuse, an approach that might reconcile a reader the occasional broken and limping passages.
There is one mistake which people have often run into, in their choice of a dupe; namely, in thinking, that the principle qualification to be insisted on is, his having a soft place in his head; whereas the chief thing to seek after is, the man who has a soft place in his heart. Many a disappointment has arose, from fixing your choice on a fool; for frequently will you find such a want of affection, such a thorough selfishness, so much cunning and obstinacy, annexed to folly, that all your labour will be thrown away (94).
* The Broadview edition contains an excerpt from Swift’s satire, as well as passages from Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and Maria Edgeworth’s An Essay on the Noble Science of Self-Justification (1795).
Agfa Silette. Agfa Ultra 100, 3.4/30
8 May 2004
locus ille animi nostri stomachus ubi habitabat olim concalluit. privata modo et domestica nos delectent, miram securitatem videbis; cuius plurimae mehercule partes sunt in tuo reditu. nemo enim in terris est mihi tam consentientibus sensibus.1
Incidentally, does it worry anyone else that most of the Greek phrases C. uses in his letters only occur very rarely in the entirety of the extant Greek corpus and usually in authors dating after the second century CE? Far be it from me to insinuate from silence, but it does look a bit odd.
Shackleton Bailey’s translation:
That place in my mental anatomy which used to contain my spleen grew a tough skin long ago. Providing only that my private and domestic circumstances give me pleasure, you will find my equanimity quite remarkable. It largely depends, believe me, on your return. There is no one in the world with whom I hit it off quite so happily.
[↩]
To my great embarrassment, I mistook this overview of William Blades’s Enemies of Books (via) for a poem1; e.g.:
Bagford the biblioclast.
Illustrations torn from MSS.
Title-pages torn from books.
Rubens, his engraved titles.
Colophons torn out of books.
Lincoln Cathedral
Dr. Dibdin’s Nosegay.
Theurdanck.
Fragments of MSS.
Some libraries almost useless.[...]
The care that should be taken of books.
Enjoyment derived from them.
Incidentally, I am still amused by The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac, though its table of contents is nowhere near so … poetical:
My First Love
The Birth of a New Passion
The Luxury of Reading in Bed
The Mania of Collecting Seizes Me
Baldness and Intellectuality[...]
The Pleasures of Extra-Illustration
The Odors which My Books Exhale.
::
ego hoc feci mm–mmx
© 2000–10 M.F.C.