I find nothing objectionable in the fact that the young scholar, as may be observed even in my retelling, was flirting a bit with erudition. Later on, scholars began to flirt with illiteracy and achieved in this regard a suspiciously natural effect.
– Fazil Iskander,
’The Story of the Prayer Tree’
(Sandro of Chegem, p. 162)
We were discussing the eternal struggle between age and youth in one of our classes, teenagers wanting to listen to loud music and choose their own friends, parents and teachers wanting very different things (homework to be done, for instance). The book referred to 86 being the average lifespan in some country and Tigran1 piped up: ‘Well in Abkhazia, the eighties are still considered young! Since they live to be over a hundred…’ Words cannot express how satisfying it was to hear a remark in class that was not mandated by a textbook or a mere expression of boredom or laziness. Even if it was in Armenian rather than English.
This chance remark also reminded me of two collections of stories that I’ve been reading: Fazil Iskander’s Sandro of Chegem and The Gospel According to Chegem.2 While not quite the rip-roaring picaresque I had hoped for, the stories had a wry, local-color charm.3 The picture of Caucasian life is very familiar – visiting, drinking, all moderated by tradition – but what I liked best about the interrelated stories is something one doesn’t see much in Armenia: interaction between different ethnic groups. The Abkhaz trick the Georgians and Russians – speaking in Abkhazian to work their conspiracies in plain sight and trick the foolish foreigners – the Georgians do the same to the Russians, and Armenians and Greeks and Turks and Azeris appear with naturalness and a sense of belonging, a nativeness, if you will. The stories are usually quite digressive, particularly in the second volume, and a wide range of personalities intrude on the reader’s notice, if only for a few paragraphs. One of my favorites is the coffee chef, Hakop-Agha, who insists that coffee must be made by burying the jezves in hot sand rather than on a stove.
It all began with Turkish coffee and a bottle of Armenian cognac, and then, well, things went on as usual. During the session Khachik photographed us about ten times from various angles, on one necessary condition, that the prince be at the center of the picture. Sometimes he had the coffee chef Hakop-Agha join us. Here’s a fuller description from the story ‘Uncle Sandro and the Slave Khazarat’:
This tall old man – his face a deep brown, as if cured by the coffee fumes and his long wanderings through the Near East, from where he had been repatriated – would sit down at our table from time to time and turn the conversation toward the Armenians. His fervent Armenian patriotism was touching and comic. From what he said it appeared that the Armenians were a terrible nation because they didn’t want to do anything good for Armenians. His bitter grievances began with Tigran the Second and ended with Tigran Petrosian, who from his point of view had flippantly frittered away the chess crown. This seemingly illiterate old man knew the history of Armenia like the biography of a neighbor down the street. (230)
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).
I remember being told by a
teacher not to read Jane Eyre, because I would be reading it in her class in the fall. Of course I read it that summer. Propped in bed, or curled in a corner, but finally finishing peripatetic. That’s how I remember it, anyway. I walked the three miles from Vineyard Haven to Oak Bluffs in the summer swelter. I walked slowly and slowly read, turning the thin foxed pages in their sweating dark green cloth, gravel underfoot. I walked and read and didn’t stop except for water and a bookstore. I walked until the road ended in a beach and then I sat on a stone and finished the last few pages. I remember looking at the sunburnt people ruddy against the white sand, the gray concrete, the gray ocean, the gray sky and feeling empty and complete and tired. I sat for some time. I remember looking at my watch. Then I stood and walked back to the ferry, scuffing my feet in the gravel and sand and thinking.
So I was reading Paul Fussell’s book about travel, Abroad. Of course it’s not just about travel, though he does spend some thirty-odd (or more or less, I’ve returned it to the library and cannot refer to it now) pages lamenting the impossibility of true travel1 in this degraded age of tourism, it’s about literary responses to travel and literary traveling between the two World Wars.2 This much one might have gathered from the subtitle. To Fussell this means observing that D.H. Lawrence glimpsed the infinite no matter where he was, Evelyn Waugh probably best traveled solo, and that Robert Byron was very clever and died too young. All this I dare not dispute, nor wish to. It also means mentioning Rebecca West only three times (in passing)3 and rather snottily saying, some two-thirds of the way through, that he would not be discussing Freya Stark because she was insufficiently literary.4
However, I do not want to discuss the false nostalgia for a lost age of the British (imperialist) ‘traveler’, which has all the authenticity and moral clarity of a bus-tour ’round the famed sites of a defunct civilization; well, I do, but I cannot think of a way to do it in which I do not circumnavigate (and circumvent) my own arguments by thinking that after all it is Fussell’s book and that is how he wrote and it’s not his fault if I wanted to read a different one. What I want to get at, though, is that I am glad that The Road to Oxiana is readily available because of it.5
I wish I were rich enough to endow a prize for the sensible traveller: £10,000 for the first man to cover Marco Polo’s outward route reading three fresh books a week, and another £10,000 if he drinks a bottle of wine a day as well. That man might tell one something about the journey. He might not be naturally observant. But at least he would use what eyes he had, and would not think it necessary to dress up the result in thrills that never happened and science no deeper than its own jargon.
What I mean is, that if I had some detective stories instead of Thucydides and some bottles of claret instead of tepid whisky, I should probably settle here for good.
– Robert Byron,
The Road to Oxiana, p. 238f.
Once again, why Spinoza?
When I was talking to Dime T. from Ohrid, Macedonia, one afternoon about parapsychology, he asked me: ‘Why do you think you are writing about Spinoza?’ Had it been a conversation with a philosopher, I would have said something like: ‘Because of his unique philosophy, because of his divergence from Descartes’ doctrine about God’s free will, and the body-soul dichotomy.’ Had I talked to a literary theoretician, I would have answered her: ‘I have long wanted to try a new narrative approach – to write a novel as a conversation taking place between the reader and a character.’ But I knew I was talking to someone who knew the truth even before I said anything. So I chose not to say anything (I later learned that he knew the truth even when I had forgotten it). I felt I had to answer his question honestly, but I did not know the answer. ‘You’ve been so lonely, Goce. Why?’ Dime T. said, answering the query, and carried me back to the time I seemed to have forgotten, where there still existed ‘the subdued sickness of pain’ (Kristeva).
‘A writer,’ says Vladimir Nabokov, ‘is born in solitude.’ He is not only born in solitude – he also exists in solitude. Writing itself is an act of solitude. Or perhaps a need to overcome solitude. A need for conversations. Hence this Conversation with Spinoza.
Hence Spinoza.
– Goce Smilevski, Conversation with Spinoza, pp. 135f.
It was a book I enjoyed, partially because it engaged absorbingly with Spinoza’s philosophy (which I should perhaps mention that I have never read and know nothing about), but also because it asks the questions historians and literary critics are always asking about individuals in the past, without presuming that the most seductive answer is any more true than another. For me, the lapses (lapsus) were situational – i.e. those moments (some three or four) when the author placed the composition of the novel (not of the life of Spinoza) in a historical context.
Since selling off most of the books earlier this year, I’ve been trying to avoid purchasing more, which has led to increased, or perhaps simply more self-conscious library usage. The following are the books I have most recently checked out of the public and local university libraries (including three interlibrary loans):
There are twenty long days before me in which to read (or decide not to read) these books, and I am filled with boundless hope.
The houses between which the action uncertainly scuttles have the ungenial impersonality of the re-used backdrop, and at the corner of the garden one feels the outlines of a gazebo, lattice white, meant to suggest gentility to less subtle minds. Finally, it is shocking – so to fall off as precisely to say that this person loves that one. But the thing is done: the child is dead and she killed it, with motives so explicitly brought forth that the reader quavers between amusement and disgust. Above all, the absolute lack of anyone hanging fire, even when it would do them good. It seems not at all like Henry James, not even a dramatic Henry James, but perhaps some hitherto unknown second cousin (perhaps called Clarence) or failing that, Wilkie Collins.
It happens when I’m not paying attention. Or not careful enough attention. The other day, for instance: I was reading around in Personae because someone twanged my nerves by observing that I don’t read poetry (which is true, but not something I like to admit to) and read the following, which I rather liked:1
I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman –
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is the time for carving.
We have one sap and one root –
Let there be commerce between us.
Then it happens: the question both beside and to the point – irrelevant to daily living, unanswerable in literary history, and ungovernable in a tangled brain. ‘A grown child/Who has had a pig-headed father’: the grown child is presumably Ezra (ca. 191-), but who’s the father? Two options:
 |
 |
| Mr. Whitman | Mr. Pound |
I’m of the opinion that when you are making a pact with someone, it is not a very nice thing (or indeed a very useful thing if you wish that someone to take the pact seriously) to call them pig-headed. Of course Mr. Pound, although renowned for ferreting out, supporting, and lauding to the heavens whatever talent he found among his contemporaries (providing, of course, that you, my dear, would not properly understand it, unless you too had met Gaudier-Brzeska), was not known for being ‘nice’. Setting that for the moment aside – an alternative: Pound sees Pound as pig-headed. I spoke about this to someone who has read more Pound (and poetry) than I have, and he seemed to think this improbable.
I sputter, I stutter, I disagree. Privately, of course. Partly because I think Pound is pig-headed. It takes a certain pig-headedness to yowl about big ideas when people only care whether the trains run on time. But that is not why I disagree, really.
I disagree because I would like to think (vain dream!) that self-knowledge is possible. That’s not what I mean to say. Rather – I would like to think that a man as clever as Pound undoubtedly was would be clever enough to sense his porcinities – would have moral as well as intellectual sense. This hope reaches out of the poem, takes me by the hand and leads me towards my meaning of the poem’s sense.
But surely Pound here accepts the vast similitude, acknowledges Whitman as an influence, a forbear, a poetic father. Perhaps. An echo and my own inclinations tell me otherwise. The child is father to the man.2 I am too tired and lazy to untangle it.
* * *
I was going to write a response clever obscure & convoluted to this poem, but I lost heart after looking at just one article on JSTOR (David Simpson. ‘Pound’s Wordsworth; or Growth of a Poet’s Mind’. ELH, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Winter, 1978), pp. 660-686) which seemed to say that at first Mr. Pound did not like Wordsworth, and then he did, via Hegel.3 That was too much for me – I have lost my faith in such things.
So I’ll stick to my prejudicials and leave poor enough alone.
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
Which makes me think of two things:
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
– and –
And for the youth, quick, let us strip for him
The thyrsus, that his watching eyes may swim
Into forgetfulness; and, for the sage,
Let spear-grass and the spiteful thistle wage
War on his temples. Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine –
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.
If you want the bibliographicals, well, you know where the library is. [↩]
A rather irrelevant picture.
Views of London labor and the London poor in The Pilgrims of Hope and Princess Casamassima; views of London in general. Architectural bleakness, blackness from coal fires, lack of greenery. Access to nature belongs to idealized agricultural workers (who never go hungry) and wealthy persons.
Cf. Beatrice Webb (amusing how V. Woolf does not like her – compares her to a desiccated spider at the center of a Fabian ‘web’), Dickens & Mayhew.
Finish Fiction and the Reading Public. See also Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain: 1914–1950; search brain for lingering memories of The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, which is a much better book than The Intellectuals and the Masses.
* * *
From Medieval Iceland: Society, Sagas, and Power:
Death overtook him just as he was working his way to a lucrative discovery after spending several years at scientific research. He was trying to find a cure for all kinds of gout. Gout is a rich man’s disease, and rich men will pay any price to recover their health once lost. And so, among all the problems which had given him subject for meditation, he had singled out this one for resolution.
– Honoré de Balzac
Lost Illusions (Penguin, 20f.)
Balzac’s novel focuses on a young poet losing his way in the tinseled Parisian publishing world, the quotation above, about the poet’s father, drew my notice. Admittedly it does appear early in the book, before I’ve settled – when my attention is still at its sharpest. It reminded me of this passage in a book published almost thirty years later:
Lydgate’s hair never became white. He died when he was only fifty, leaving his wife and children provided for by a heavy insurance on his life. He had gained an excellent practice, alternating, according to the season, between London and a Continental bathing-place; having wrritten a treatise on Gout, a disease which has a good deal of wealth on its side.* His skill was relied on by many paying patients, but he always regarded himself as a failure: he had not done what he once meant to do.
– Middlemarch, (OUP, 920)
Gout is the point of failure for both men; Monsieur Chardon fails to enrich his family because he dies before registering his cure in Paris. Tertius Lydgate, meanwhile, fails in his humanitarian mission to provide medical treatment for the poor of Middlemarch. Although Lydgate succeeds as Chardon would have liked, but his interests are no longer individual – his success is a greater failure. I cannot think of any other literary examples of doctors succumbing to the temptation of gout, so I can’t tell whether the difference between Chardon and Lydgate is a matter of national temperment, of genre (between society and social novels)†, or entirely of character. Perhaps I should consult a book such as Gout: The Patrician Malady‡ or some other texts on the subject, but at present I think I’d rather let the matter rest in the mire of suggestive speculation.
* See, e.g. Bleak House (Penguin, 271):
Sir Leicester receives the gout as a troublesome demon, but still a demon of the patrician order. All the Dedlocks, in the direct male line, through a course of time during, and beyond which the memory of man goeth not to the contrary, have had the gout. It can be proved, sir. Other men’s fathers may have died of the rheumatism, or may have taken base contagion from the tainted blood of the sick vulgar; but, the Dedlock family have communicated something exclusive, even to the levelling process of dying, by dying of their own family gout. It has come down, through the illustrious line, like the plate, or the pictures, or the place in Lincolnshire. It is among their dignities. Sir Leicester is, perhaps, not wholly without an impression, though he has never resolved it into words, that the angel of death in the discharge of his necessary duties may observe to the shades of the aristocracy, ‘My lords, and gentlemen, I have the honour to present to you another Dedlock certified to have arrived per the family gout.’
Less literary documents should probably have been appended here, but my interest in gout does not extend so far.
† Not that I dismiss Balzac as a ‘mere’ society novelist, but his intention seems documentary rather than didactic.
‡ Another review appeared in that gouty rag the NY Times.
A sleepless night, drowsing over Samson Agonistes. Dalila dandled forth, almost more specious than Helen among the Trojan Women, and the blind man missing his apotheosis, but not heroization. And then there are certain beautiful infelicities; I hesitate to say Milton loses his tone, but perhaps he clings rather too fiercely:
Chorus. But we had best retire, I see a storm?
Samson. Fair days have oft contracted wind and rain.
Chor. But this another kind of tempest brings.
Sam. Be less abstruse, my riddling days are past (1061–4).
Also:
Sam. Boast not of what thou wouldst have done, but do
What then thou wouldst, thou seest it in thy hand.
Harapha. To combat with a blind man I disdain,
And thou hast need much washing to be touched (1104–7).
It is a comfort to find I am not the only one nodding.1 One feels a certain sympathy with Bentley at such passages (forgoing, however, all ‘happy Conjectures’).
ἦ καὶ κυανέῃσιν ἐπ’ ὀφρύσι νεῦσε Κρονίων·
ἀμβρόσιαι δ’ ἄρα χαῖται ἐπερρώσαντο ἄνακτος
κρατὸς ἀπ’ ἀθανάτοιο· μέγαν δ’ ἐλέλιξεν Ὄλυμπον.
[↩]
Relics of the book trade; but see also a more impressive collection.
O. W. Holmes, The Poet at the Breakfast Table:
Joyce Kilmer, Trees and Other Poems:
ibidem
H. W. Auden, Greek Prose Phrase-Book:
A. Kiesling, ed. Seneca Rhetor:
Newton & Treat, Outline for Review: Roman History:
Lord Houghton, Life and Letters of John Keats:
Charles E. Bennett, Latin Composition:
R. C. Seaton, ed. Apollonii Rhodii, Argonautica:
This is, apparently, not the year I will be reading the works of the fifteenth century Scots poet, Gavin Douglas. As mentioned earlier, I ordered his Aeneid through ILL, yet received it not; this was meant to be his poetry. At least they got the author’s name right this time.
from the Cowley Image Archive
All was sunshine and flowers until the library delivered the wrong book for an interlibrary loan. I don’t care what the critics say, Allen Mandelbaum is no Gavin Douglas.*
* Brief critical introduction to and biography of Douglas. He also has the dubious honor of being somewhere commended by Ezra Pound.
Modern Greece, in history and literature, has been viewed as a transitory moment squeezed between two larger and more important entities. Viewed chronologically, modern Greece rests between the glory of the classical Greek past and the hope of a resurrected Greek future, which in many Western minds ought to resemble the democracies of Western Europe and America, which were founded on classical Greek models.
Roessel’s book is much needed: the ideals of and ideas about modern Greece in English-language literature after Byron deserves much closer attention.1 I just wish he wouldn’t begin it by citing the silly fallacy that ‘the democracies of Western Europe and America […] were founded on classical Greek models’. Last I checked, representative democracy (aka ‘Republicanism’)—such as is found in, e.g., America—was a Roman idea. The details of all the constitutions of ‘Western Europe’ is beyond my ken, but again I would imagine that there’s more of Rome than Athens in them—romantic fictions notwithstanding.
Come to think of it, though, there were so many different forms of ‘classical’ Greek government, it’s ridiculous to talk as if Athens was the model for them all.2 Admittedly, it would not be at all amiss to talk as though people think that’s the case. However: if I keep on at this rate, I’ll start telling you why I think the Elgin marbles should be sent to China; and I don’t think either of us would be amused at the end of that tirade…
Jane Ellen Harrison, 1850–1928
Independent lecturer in London, later a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, Jane Harrison was author of (among other things): Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Relgion (1903) and Themis: a Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912). She is also one of the few women mentioned in the who’s who of classical scholarship.
¶ Overview of Cambridge Ritualists (Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism) & web supplement to The Cambridge Ritualists: An Annotated Bibliography of the Works by and About Jane Ellen Harrison, Gilbert Murray, Francis M. Cornford, and Arthur Bernard Cook (op)
¶ James Davidson (of Courtesans and Fishcakes fame) reviews Mary Beard’s The Invention of Jane Harrison (and is a bit too excited by Miss Harrison’s ‘Sapphic love, her fondness for William Morris wallpaper’—as tho’ that were the most interesting thing about her…) Cf. Oliver Taplin’s review & BMCR review.
¶ BMCR account of Annabel Robinson’s The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison
Coin depicting the Emperor Augustus1
from A Visual Compendium of Roman Emperors.
At last reading Ronald Syme’s famous book, The Roman Revolution (Oxford, 1939), a history of the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the principate. It begins slowly, with a grim overview of the career of C. Julius Caesar Octavianus (later known as Augustus) and a bit of Republican background. Once Caesar has been assassinated, though, the plot picks up. Everybody knows that the history of the years 44 to 31 bc2 is the stuff of tragedies, but in Syme’s book, with the wealth of prosopographical detail, one feels the busy-ness of the scene, how everyone knew the Republic was going to perdition and nobody could or would do anything about it. This comment on Brutus is typical:
Whatever be thought of those qualities which contemporaries admired as the embodiment of aristocratic virtus (without always being able to prevail against posterity or the moral character of another age), Brutus was not only a sincere and consistent champion of legality, but in this matter all too perspicacious a judge of men and politics. Civil war was an abomination. Victory could only be won by adopting the adversary’s weapons; and victory no less than defeat would be fatal to everything an honest man and a patriot valued. But Brutus was far away. (147f.)
That’s the real question, then, isn’t it? What do you do, as an honest man and a patriot, when your country is bent, not on self-destruction, but on the destruction of those values which make it worth defending? But there is room for neither philosophy nor morality in politics; no, and never has been, I suppose.
I have to remind myself it was only a book – mass-market paperback, pristine condition though bought used.
I lent it to an acquaintance; I do not say she was a friend, because she was
not. She was an acquaintance. At the time I would have compared her to a whirlwind, for wherever she went chaos and confusion invariably followed. She had a talent for capturing the affection, the admiration, perhaps even the love of other people. Though lacking beauty in any strict sense of the word, her energy and heedlessness – a sort of helplessness born of irresponsibility – drew people to her. In this sense, she was attractive.
She had no difficulty in asking favors, either, and people almost instinctively granted them. That, in fact, was how I met her. She asked if she could sleep in my room, because she had forgotten her key and needed a place to stay until her roommate returned to open the door. At the time, I shrugged, having no objections. That was the first favor she asked, and it seems to me there were so many others I cannot remember them all.
There was, for instance, the time she came to dinner, uninvited, with the latest young man in tow. An eager puppy of a fellow, he was embarrassed to intrude, but so besotted with her he could not help but follow withersoever she led. At the time, the sight amused. I fed them rice and other foods, made them tea, and chatted idly over the sound of Prokofiev.
She often called on me, after that, to accompany them, as chaperone, and prevent the young man from making a scene or asking too many questions. It would not do, you see, if he made a fuss when she asked him to drive her to Boston, to visit one of her lovers at MIT. It would not do at all. A third (or perhaps a fourth?) was needed to diffuse the tension; and such was I. How could I mind, though, when they were young and vivacious, and the boy had such a beautiful neck?
She wanted to borrow the book, to read over the weekend. She was not what I would call a reader, for she read neither widely nor disrciminately, but she liked to have read what her friends had read – if the title piqued her interest. With no misgivings, I lent her the book.
When she returned the book a month later, I didn’t recognize it. The cover was mangled and torn, the pages dog-eared, thumbed (was that a spider I see squashed there at the cover – oh, it is, how nice), and the spine broken. All the life had gone out of it; the very words on the page seemed weary and plaintive, their phosphorescence worn away. The book, in its mute injury, seemed nearly as bitter and exhausted as that young man, the boy with the beautiful neck, who hadn’t even lasted the winter at her heels.
I didn’t get a chance to finish it, she said, I didn’t have time.
I handed the book back to her. Take all the time you need. I’ve finished with it long ago.
England, 12 November, 7:24 a.m.
When I remember something I would rather forget, or when some unpleasant action or unwitting stupidity of mine forces its way forward into the present from the past, I think I don’t feel well. Oh happy past, which can so disorder the present.
A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing grip on its empire and on itself. And this looseness and blowsiness is not anything as simple and scandalous as abrupt and disordered syntax. It concerns the relation of expression to meaning. Abrupt and disordered syntax can be at times very honest, and an elaborately constructed sentence can be at times merely an elaborate camouflage.
Again, up early. Restless. Still reading the Letters of Rupert Brooke. Aside from having a perfectly splendid name and being a tremendously handsome (in the English manner, if you like that sort of thing) minor poet, I find he even manages to write amusing letters, about such interesting things as, well, life—which is nice (tho’ admittedly I’ve only got through 1908, and he was only twenty-one at the time…).
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.
::
ego hoc feci mm–mmx
© 2000–10 M.F.C.