Isaiah Berlin on freedom

 Isaiah Berlin’s Freedom and Its Betrayal claims that the idea of liberty was undermined by six European thinkers. Countless others followed their lead.

In 1952, Berlin gave six radio lectures on Helvétius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, Saint Simon and Maistre. In Berlin’s account, each thinker became an enemy of the idea of individual choice.

The underlying theme in their thinking is that the central questions involving human life have only one true answer.

What’s the best way for a human being to live?

There might appear to be myriad answers. But these thinkers claimed that’s an illusion. There is only one true answer and many false pretenders.

And so thinker after thinker addressed the natural tension between individual liberty and communal authority in favor of authority.

The idea that there is only one true answer is ancient. You can find it in the scriptures of many religions and in the Greek philosophers. But Berlin is wonderful at tracing the evolution of ideas. He suggests that the scientific revolution had a profound effect.

People thought that, with Newton, the principles underlying nature had been discovered. Everything had been made clear.

Why was it that there were no such principles underlying ethics, and by extension politics? It was a scandal.

And so, one after another, inventive minds claimed to find such underlying principles in nature that answer those fundamental questions about what it means to live a good life.

And in case after case, what ordinary humans think is liberty — the freedom to make choices about their own lives without constraints — was found to be wanting. “Real” liberty was losing one’s individual life in something larger: a religious movement, a class struggle, a nationalist identity.

• Source: Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal; Princeton University Press, 2002.

A little more on seeing

 Here’s the heart of John Burroughs’s essay “The Art of Seeing Things”:

The science of anything may be taught or acquired by study; the art of it comes by practice and inspiration.

Taking walks along the creek to see what’s there is a way of life, rather than a scientific study. It’s the same with reading good books, listening to music, appreciating art.

Burroughs takes those walks for the love of it, the pleasure of it.

I take pleasure in noting the minute things about me. … One seldom takes a walk without encountering some of this fine print on nature’s page. 

 And, as he puts it:

What we love to do, that we do well.

He makes an interesting point about naturalists: Some are good observers and some are not. Some people who are interested in nature can’t wait to get off the trail and get to the library to look up the answer to the question that’s puzzling them. Others take pleasure in seeing and investigating for themselves.

Burroughs also noticed that some naturalists have a limited range of what they love — and thus what they notice.

If we think of birds, we shall see birds wherever we go; if we think arrowheads, as Thoreau did, we shall pick up arrowheads in every field.

They make easy targets, those bird watchers who are obsessed with their lifetime lists of species and rush from one sighting to another. But Burroughs has his finger on the problem: it’s not the interest, but the limited range of interest.

• Source: John Burroughs, “The Art of Seeing,” is in American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau; The Library of America, 2008, pp. 145-59. I found it in Library of America’s Story of the Week archives:

https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2012/07/the-art-of-seeing-things.html

 

Burroughs: ‘The Art of Seeing Things’

 John Burroughs, the star of the nine-minute film mentioned yesterday, wrote an essay on “The Art of Seeing Things.”

It’s a subject I want to know more about.

Imagine two people walking along the creek. One notices that aquatic flies are hatching and sees swallows feasting on them. He notices that three species of plants have just started flowering, including one he doesn’t know. He’s intrigued. The other fellow is just along for the walk. He notices nothing and, somewhere along the way, he stopped trying to notice things. He’s bored.

It’s the story of two different kinds of life — one rich, one impoverished. The difference in wealth can’t be measured in dollars, but it’s real.

This is not just about noticing the natural world. Some people can plod through a work of literature without noticing anything remarkable. Others can live in a world rich in art and music without wanting to see or hear any of it.

The value in education, it seems to me, has nothing to do with a career. An education is a chance to choose and cultivate the kind of life that sees and notices things.

Some wonderful writers have talked about this art of seeing things. I think Guy Davenport’s essay “Finding” might be the best.

Burroughs’s essay is worth reading for several reasons. Long after Burroughs died, Wittgenstein got at the distinction between what can be said and what can be shown.

It seems to me that Burroughs is at his best in showing us what it is to notice. He describes watching a newly emerged moth trying to find a place to unfold its wings before they dry and harden in the air. He investigates a mining bee (in genus Andrena) that burrows into the ground. He’s the kind of fellow who carries a trowel in his pocket.

You get a sense of what the art is by witnessing examples of it, rather than hearing a scientific explanation of it. Burroughs is good at showing.

• Sources: John Burroughs, “The Art of Seeing,” is in American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau; The Library of America, 2008, pp. 145-59. I found it in Library of America’s Story of the Week. Davenport’s account is in his essay “Finding.” It's in Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination; San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. You can find a note of it at “Davenport’s search for arrowheads” on March 15, 2022.  For more on a different kind of wealth, see “A pleasure that’s a kind of wealth,” Aug. 19, 2022.

Nine minutes with John Burroughs

 I stumbled across a 9-minute film called A Day with John Burroughs.

It was made in 1919, when Burroughs was 82. It’s a silent film, of course. But you can see the old man showing three children the wonders of nature.

Burroughs was a popular nature writer in his day. He camped with Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Ford. He wrote a biography of his friend Walt Whitman.

Burroughs was perhaps the most popular voice of the conservation movement. I’m just getting around to reading him.

And, yes, there is more than a little irony in a note recommending a film. When I was a boy, I really did promise my parents that, if they didn’t make me go to the movies with the other kids, I’d be good.

• Source: The film is at https://archive.org/details/ADayWithJohnBurroughs

Saul Kripke, 1940-2022

 The logician Saul Kripke was a prodigy. Although he supervised doctoral dissertations, his highest earned credential was a bachelor's degree, and he thought that had been a waste of time.

Jane O’Grady’s obituary, published Sept. 21, 2022 in The Guardian, contains this wonderful sentence:

At the age of three, he asked his mother if God really is everywhere, and if so whether he had, by walking into the kitchen, squeezed part of God out of it.

That is philosophy: the idea that all ideas have implications.

• Source: The obituary is at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/21/saul-kripke-obituary.

Mencken's 'The Hills of Zion'

 In 1925, H.L. Mencken reported that he’d gone to watch the people of Dayton, Tenn., try the infidel Scopes.

John Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution, against state law. (In Texas, the current Legislature frowns up the teaching history and literature.)

Scopes was tried during Prohibition, and Mencken claimed he went to Tennessee because he wanted to try the bootleg whiskey. He also said he wanted to see “evangelical Christianity as a going concern.”

Accompanied by a newspaperwoman from Chattanooga, he witnessed a camp meeting. The worshippers were overcome by the spirit, as they say.

Mencken said the experience of watching people in a religious frenzy would have been comic but was not. Witnessing it was, he wrote, like peeping through a keyhole and seeing someone writhing in pain.

Mencken reported that the people of Dayton had a good time with the trial. But real religion was up in the hills, not in the town.

• H.L. Mencken, “The Hills of Zion,” Prejudices, Vol. 2; New York: Library of America, 2010, pp. 221-27. Library of America offers a free story of the week here: https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/p/stories-sorted-by-author.html

Freud's 'Mourning and Melancholia'

 One of the recurring themes of this journal is grief. A friend pointed me to Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia.”

Freud’s distinction: 

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.

When someone close to me dies, the world seems less wondrous. For a while, even barbecue and chilaquiles don’t taste quite so good. The pleasures of a walk on the creek seem a little off. That’s mourning.

In melancholia, it’s not the world that’s missing something. It’s the person who is grieving.

The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished.

Freud noticed that the patients he’d seen who professed to be despicable didn’t actually show any signs of shame. He concluded he was witnessing a kind of transference. The real reprobate was actually someone else.

The woman who loudly pities her husband for being tied to such an incapable wife as herself is really accusing her husband of being incapable, in whatever sense she may mean this.

I don’t know enough about psychology to follow his line of thought. But I understand the distinction between something that is just a part of life and something that requires medical care.

Grief is largely mysterious to me. It’s fascinating because it can and does show up in astonishing ways.

• Source: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey; London: The Hogarth Press, 1995, Vol. XIV, pp. 243-58. I found the essay here:

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_MourningAndMelancholia.pdf

Never wrong, the old master

 Have you ever noticed how Euripides writes about courage: how there are different kinds?

Here’s the heroic version:

Danger gleams like sunlight in a brave man’s eyes.

And here’s another flavor, harder to describe, less noticed, rarely admired:

To persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man.

The first line is from Iphigenia in Tauris. The second is from Herakles.

The Greeks celebrated the equinox in more than one way, including toasts to the playwright's birthday.

I'm just browsing

 You can see the way I think. I read something in Michael Leddy’s Orange Crate Art that reminded me of something I’d read by William Allen White, the old newspaperman from Kansas.

I found White’s essay in a collection of essays. But since then, these notes have mentioned several more essays, by other writers, included in that collection.

I write because writing is a species of thinking — that is, writing is a way of thinking. I like to think, and I think by writing and by browsing.

Browsing is important. It’s one the reasons that I have to go to the library. Unlike many people, I have to wander the stacks. One chance encounter leads to something else. I’ve learned to just follow my interests.

I could wish my mind were more orderly and worked more efficiently. But those regrets would be wasted. My mind works by browsing.

Incidentally, I’m fairly certain I bought this old collection of essays because I recognized the name of the editor. He’d written a biography of Thoreau I admired. Another example of how one small thing leads to something else, and sometimes to a long chain of thought.

• Source: The essay collection is Harper Essays, edited by Henry Seidel Canby; New York: Harper & Brother Publishers, 1927. And this whole chain of thought started with “The choices that news organizations make,” Sept. 13.

A death and ‘an excuse to think’

 People who love Huckleberry Finn or Letters From the Earth will disagree, but I think “The Death of Jean” might be the most remarkable thing Mark Twain wrote.

Samuel Clemens’s daughter Jean was epileptic. She died in her bath on the morning of Christmas Eve, 1909. She was 29.

Mark Twain was 74 and would die four months later. He wrote the essay, telling Albert Paine, his biographer, that it was the last chapter of his autobiography. He said: “I am setting it down — everything. It is a relief to me to write it. I furnishes me an excuse to think.”

I love that phrase: “excuse to think.” That’s what writing is.

The essay is grief, that most powerful force that unravels the strongest personality. Here’s what struck me:

• He had an obsession to recall every detail of the last 24 hours of his daughter’s life. It’s the terror of fading memory. We can’t recall an entire life. But the final day might be within our grasp. So we search ourselves for every last detail.

• The grieving survivors can’t help themselves: They search for a cause, and thus for blame. Jean Clemens, like her mother, exhausted herself with Christmas preparations. She was generous to all. She’d worn herself out, leaving herself vulnerable. This theme, written clumsily, is in two places. The great writer couldn’t just finish it and leave it alone.

• Jean had a German dog that resembles The Enormous Dog that Lives at Our Place. (German shepherds were just emerging as a breed.) Mark Twain loved cats. But that dog loved Jean. And so an old man and a dog became partners in mourning.

• Source: Twain’s essay appeared posthumously in Harper’s in January 1911. I have it in Harper Essays, edited by Henry Seidel Canby; New York: Harper & Brother Publishers, 1927, pp. 146-59.

Explaining a word and a way of life

 The Merriam-Webster Word of the Day was “haywire.”

The noun haywire refers to a type of wire once used in baling hay and sometimes for makeshift repairs. This hurried and temporary use of haywire gave rise to the adjective (and sometimes adverb) haywire.

It was that phrase “once used” that I stuck like a burr. The memories of my youth are now officially quaint.

The bales we handled were generally 60 to 80 pounds. We stacked them to the rafters of a tin barn in the summer in Texas. The temperature at the door of the barn might be 100 degrees. Since heat rises, it got hotter the closer you got to the rafters. Every once in a while you’d have to wrestle (though in Texas we’d rassle) a 90-pounder. And, of course, the laws of nature decree that the only space left for it would be at the top of the stack, up in the rafters, over by the wasp nests.

Actually, some hay was baled with wire and some with twine. We saved both. You save everything on a farm.

When the strands of a barbed-wire fence would separate and break, the repairs were all haywire.

The doctor's orders on reading

 I had a bowl of gumbo at Gaido’s in Galveston with friends. One sent me home thinking about books. Melvyn is 91. He is a professor of medicine at the university, still teaching, still practicing. But he’s also an insightful reader.

He told us two things that stuck in mind.

He said he was making a point of reading writers he didn’t know. With age comes the tendency to prefer the familiar, and that tendency narrows your horizons.

He also said he always begins a new book after finishing the old one —  he starts on the same day. That way, he’s always reading something. His mind is open, not idle. He’s learning.

Another thing about William Carlos Williams

 One more note on William Carlos Williams: He was influenced by poets I like and influenced poets I like. 

Kenneth Rexroth, in his poem “A letter to William Carlos Williams,” describes the older poet as the first Great Franciscan poet since the Middle Ages — “a real classic, though not loud about it.” Rexroth said Williams was unlike strident Sappho of Lesbos and like the epigrammist Anyte of Tegea,

                        who says

            Just enough, softly, for all

            The thousands of years to remember.

            It’s a wonderful quiet

            You have, a way to keeping

            Still about the world.

The poet pictures a young woman walking by the beautiful Williams River, named after the man who loved it and saw it when it was the filthy Passaic.

            Poets create such sacramental relationships.

Michael Schmidt has pointed out that, in an age when Eliot was supremely influential, Williams seems to have been immune. A good thing, it seems to me.

Marking the Day: W.C. Williams

 Asked to name the greatest American poet, I’d guess most people would say Whitman. On most days, I’d say William Carlos Williams.

I like many things about him, but here are four:

• He was clear and brief and he drew sharp images. That emphasis on the image seems fundamental to me. It made him sympathetic to the original imagist practice: Go In Fear of Abstraction, as Pound put it. In 1931, the short-lived Objectivist Movement blossomed briefly. He was the old man among Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky.

• Williams was constantly asking himself what poetry is. He was constantly revising his answer. One of his notions about poetics is the idea of “variable feet.”

• Williams, unlike some poets, was a writer. He kept a notebook in his medical bag and typewriter on his desk in his office. He earned his living as a doctor, and wrote between appointments.

• He wrote a long poem about a place, Paterson.

He wrote so many good poems. One of my favorites is “Tract,” which begins:

            I will teach you my townspeople

            how to perform a funeral ...

The poet gets into the details. He wants a rough wagon, or a dray, for the hearse. No need for glass. The dead don’t need to see out.

            No wreaths please —

            especially no hothouse flowers.

Instead, a memento — old clothes, his books. The mourners should walk behind, exposed “to the weather as to grief.”

            Or do you think you can shut grief in?

William Carlos Williams was born on Oct. 17, 1883 in Rutherford, N.J. I’m marking his birthday as a way to honor a writer who influenced me. For more on “Marking the day” see “An activity in lieu of making resolutions,” Dec. 31, 2021.

Why does anyone obey orders?

 Isaiah Berlin said that the first question of moral philosophy, which includes political philosophy, is why one human being should obey another. Why obey laws that other people make? Why obey orders?

While I should have been going to high school, I instead grew up in the navy. For a while, I was the lowest ranking sailor at Pacific Fleet headquarters. There were far more admirals than ordinary seaman. I was there because I had been trained in cryptography. Aside from those specialized skills, I had no business being there.

I’ve spent a lifetime musing about what I saw. I’ve been puzzled by the question of leadership — why people follow some human beings and not others.

I wish theorists such as Berlin had considered the behavior of navies, of ships and the people who sail them. It seems to me that naval service is fundamentally different from service in the army. Senior army officers are usually safe in the rear, away from the fighting. But if a ship goes down, everyone goes: the captain along with the lowliest seaman.

There is a beautiful passage in one of Rear Adm. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s essays. When he was a midshipman before the Civil War, Mahan was assigned to USS Congress, one of the last great sailing ships. And though Congress was tiny by today’s standards, it had a big crew, including at least 400 to handle all that canvas.

Off the coast of Argentina, the ship hit rough weather — “scudding, in fact.”

Unsteadied by wind on either side, she rolled deeply, and the sight of the faces of those four hundred or more men, all turned up and aft, watching intently the officer of the deck for the next order, the braces stretched along taught in their hands for instant obedience, was singularly striking.

On a ship, everyone has a job. The officer in charge couldn’t do half of them. But for a ship to survive, everyone has to do his own part and also has to do it as part of a team. Only a coordinated effort will do.

When an officer who is not a leader is in charge, you can sense the dread. When a real leader is onboard, all eyes focus on one person. Oddly enough, it seems the most natural thing in the world. 

• Source: Alfred Thayer Mahan’s “Old-Time Naval Officials” was published in Harper’s in October, 1917, three years after he died. It’s in Harper Essays, edited by Henry Seidel Canby; New York: Harper & Brother Publishers, 1927, pp. 13-26.

It was the story Captain Billy told

 William H. Renahan, as a teenager, was a scout for the Union Army during the Civil War. He then came to Texas to work as a cowboy, freight hauler and buffalo hunter. He lived among the Cherokee for a while. He made some money as a railroad man. When he retired, “Captain Billy” settled in Alamo Heights, north of downtown San Antonio.

For a while, Renahan was a running buddy of Judge Roy Bean, purveyor of justice and whiskey beyond the Pecos.

Renahan said he once asked Bean: “Roy, I wonder where we would be now if we had our just dues?”

Bean replied: “In hell, I reckon.”

• Source: Paula Allen, “Frontiersman lived in Alamo Heights Home,” San Antonio Express-News, Sept. 11, 2022, p. A4. Allen’s column quotes a profile published in the San Antonio Light, May 22, 1939, when Renahan was nearing 90. If I were king for a day, I’d declare that every newspaper ought to have a column on local history. Allen’s is a good one.

What newspapers are like

 Being a newspaper editor in a small town is, as my grandfather would say, like unto this:

A prominent businessman calls you and says that he was arrested — unfairly, mind you — for driving under the influence of alcohol. He asks you to keep his name out of the paper.

You explain that you can’t do that.

In a big city, that would be the end of it. But in a small community, you will bump into this fellow at the grocery store. He will still be angry.

And so, in some small way, every day of your life is a challenge to stand for truth — or, if that’s too pretentious, it’s a challenge to stand for facts that can be verified. It’s not heroic. But then again, you can forget about the idea of ever doing something as mundane as buying tomatoes in peace.

Here’s William Allen White, the editor of The Emporia Gazette, again:

Boston people pick up their morning papers and read with shuddering horror of the crimes of their daily villain, yet read without that find thrill that we have when we hear that Al Ludorph is in jail again in Emporia. For we all know Al; we’ve ridden in his hack a score of times. And we take up our paper with the story of his frailties as readers who begin the narrative of an old friend’s adventures. …

In lists of wedding guests in our papers we know just what poor kin was remembered, and what was snubbed. We know when we read of a bankruptcy just which member of the firm or family brought it on, by extravagance or sloth.

• Source: William Allen White’s essay “The Country Newspaper” appeared in Harper’s in May 1916. I have it in Harper Essays, edited by Henry Seidel Canby; New York: Harper & Brother Publishers, 1927, pp. 235-45.

The choices that news organizations make

 Matthew Dowd, a political pundit, noted that the major broadcast networks rushed to carry King Charles’s speech. None carried President Biden’s primetime address on threats to American democracy.

It was a telling comment about priorities.

When I was a young reporter, I’d have said that fact reflects the difference between newspapers and broadcast news. I would have argued that the press, by and large, was more serious.

But then I became an editor, and the responsibility of editing a newspaper that was worthy of a literate, diverse and well informed community knocked a little of that hubris out of me.

Now I’d say this is closer to the truth: Newspapers are written and edited by a great variety of people with a great variety gifts and limitations. You’ll find, among writers and editors, enormous differences in politics, competence and talent. About the only thing all these people have in common is that they’re fallible, and their mistakes end up in print. Their errors can be corrected, but not erased.

It’s a humbling experience.

When I saw Dowd’s comment in my daily reading of Michael Leddy’s Orange Crate Art, I thought of William Allen White, the old editor of the Emporia Gazette. He wrote:

Of course our country papers are provincial. We know that as well as any one. But then, so far as that goes, we know that all papers are provincial. How we laugh at the provincialisms of the New York and Boston and Chicago papers when we visit the cities!

I was lucky to work for the newspaper in an interesting place: Galveston, Texas. The people there read the newspaper. They would have expected more about the president’s speech about threats to the democracy and less about the new king.

• Source: William Allen White’s essay “The Country Newspaper” appeared in Harper’s in May 1916. I have it in Harper Essays, edited by Henry Seidel Canby; New York: Harper & Brother Publishers, 1927, pp. 235-45.

The reverent study of 'bad' books

 If you did not detect a tone of tongue in cheek in yesterday’s note, my apologies.

My first love in college was philosophy, a field in which all, or almost all, the literature is made up of ideas that failed in some way.

The problem of bad books

 I think almost all people who speak of getting “bad” books out of our libraries are dangerous idiots who would have gladly and thoughtlessly joined the Nazi Party in the 1930s. Almost all, but not quite.

John Maynard Keynes brought up the idea of an Index Expurgatorius 101 years ago. He had in mind a process by which bad books would disappear from general circulation. Perhaps, like some Confederate monuments, they’d disappear into museum vaults. But they wouldn’t get in the way of people trying to learn.

Keynes’s Treatise on Probability, published in 1921, had a lengthy bibliography, and by way of explanation he said this:

• He hadn’t read all the books listed.

• The list was too long and included “dead treatises and ghostly memoirs,” i.e., bad books.

• Fewer than 100 useful books had been written on the subject. Libraries of course had more.

Then he said this:

At present a bibliographer takes pride in numerous entries; but he would be a more useful fellow, and the labors of research would be lightened, if he could practice deletion and bring into existence an accredited Index Expurgatorius.

Keynes was no supporter of ignorant people who want to burn any book they don’t have the ability to grasp. He knew that the process of getting rid of the bad, the confused and the outdated could only “by accomplished by the slow mills of the collective judgment of the learned.”

But he was musing aloud because he knew that the way to encourage students to study a challenging topic was to have them read good books, rather than bad ones.

And so we’re back to the idea of a canon.

The problem is always: Who gets to decide which is better — indeed, which is acceptable?

I like Keynes’s suggestion, “the collective judgment of the learned.”

By contrast, I don’t think you could do worse than the State Board of Education in Texas. The board’s judgment is narrow, rather than collective. It celebrates the ignorant and excludes the learned.

Thinking about what you have

 One other note on Tantalos: The idea of what we have is pretty clear in some cases, but the concept can get fuzzy.

A small child is absolutely clear about whether she has the promised ice cream. But when we talk of the relationships we have, it’s not so clear what having is. What claims can we make about the friendship we have with the a god? Can we really claim the love of a child we just put in the soup?

Here’s a trivial example of having, perhaps easier to understand because it doesn’t involve people:

I grew up among rural folks who prized having land. That’s the kind of having they valued. They were proud when they passed land down to their children.

I love public — not private — land. I use it in the sense that I walk it almost every day and look at the changes in vegetation and wildlife. I know it. I’m familiar with it. I love this land, but don’t own it, except in the sense that we are all owners and trustees of public land.

I claim that I have land. My sense of having is different than the one I inherited from ancestors.

A tantalizing story from the acient Greeks

 One of the stranger stories in Greek mythology is about Tantalos, a mortal who got to be an intimate friend of Zeus.

Tantalos was invited to dine on Olympus and returned the social favor at one of his estates. He got concerned about whether there was enough food to go around and so he boiled his son Pelops in the stew.

The gods and goddesses were outraged — except for Demeter. Distracted by grief at the loss of her daughter Persephone, Demeter cleaned up the left the shoulder.

Zeus brought back Pelops by collecting the leftovers and boiling them again in the same cauldron. Gods and goddesses provided the breath of life and some other essentials.

Hephaistos, the craftsman among the gods, had to make a new shoulder blade out of ivory. Otherwise, Pelops was as good as new.

Zeus punished Tantalos by putting him in a creek under the overhanging branches of a wondrous fruit tree. But every time he tried to get a handful of water or a piece of fruit, it slipped away.

I heard my father and his friends use the word “tantalizing.” I don’t hear that word anymore.

The Greeks used the myth to talk about people who have things they can’t enjoy. Some of the tales get to interesting questions about what we humans really do have.

No two versions of the story agree, which is one of the things I like about the Greeks. If someone didn’t like a story he heard from his parents, he changed it.

• Robert Graves’s account is in The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 25-31. Graves says the whole business about “tantalizing” is a misreading of the myth: Tantalos was in agony not from thirst but from fear of drowning.

George Eliot's way with characters

 Virginia Woolf was a wonderful reader. She kept a commonplace book. She wrote reviews and essays. She noticed things that other readers miss.

In her essay “George Eliot,” Woolf famously described Middlemarch as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”

I think her observation about fictional characters is helpful to writers:

Thus one can muse and speculate about the greater number of George Eliot’s characters and find, even in the least important, a roominess and margin where those qualities lurk which she has no call to bring from obscurity.

I love that phrase “roominess and margin.” Many of George Eliot’s characters are capable of who knows what. You can sense the potential for crime, social gaffs, quarrels just beneath the surface. And that’s true of characters that are just passing by.

• Virginia Woolf’s essay “George Eliot” was published in The Times Literary Supplement on Nov. 20, 1919.

The canon and quotations, Part 3

 At some point, you start making your own book of quotations. They used to be called commonplace books and were a place where you copied the best lines from your reading. (My first was a spiral notebook with a brown cover.)

The practice is meant to bring you into closer contact with your reading, but the real discovery is about yourself: what kind of reader you are. You discover what you are like by comparing yourself to the general rule, the canon.

My book of quotations would be half filled with Montaigne and crowded with Greeks. But there would be a place for Roy Bedichek, Charles Lamb, Thomas Browne and Gilbert White, writers who were never wildly popular but who somehow manage to survive by attracting a few devotees in every generation. And I love minor poets.

There would be shocking lapses: Less Shakespeare than you’d expect, no Dickens, and of the Eliots, more George than T.S. 

You don’t blindly follow the canon. But you can get a better sense where your own interests have led you to wander if you know where other readers have gone.

The canon and quotations, Part 2

Another way to look at it: One of the standard books is called Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and I don’t think you can ignore the word “familiar.”

It might be a regional usage, but if you are familiar with something, you know it intimately. Intimacy can happen in an instant — a chance meeting, a magical moment. But familiarity is a kind of intimacy that lasts. It lasts so long that one’s understanding of the intimacy changes.

I think we people of the polis spend our lives arguing about what’s remarkable, what’s good and what’s better. Asking human beings to stop developing canons of literature is like asking bees to stop building hives.

The canon and a book of quotations

 I sometimes think that teachers of literature have tied themselves in knots about the idea of a canon.

It’s a bit like philosophy teachers, who sometimes tie themselves in knots over the is-ought problem. You can, if you’re interested, find some earlier notes about the problems involved in deriving an ought (a moral imperative) from an is (a set of facts). All educated people should know something about those difficulties. But if you are the kind of person who would let a toddler wander onto the freeway without stopping because you’re worried about the is-ought problem, I don’t want to talk to you.

I think English teachers should worry about the problems with having a canon. But those problems shouldn’t stop them.

We are going to have a canon — more accurately, many competing canons — because we are, as Aristotle put it, animals who live in a polis. We’re communal creatures, and so when we hear news we share it.

We share our views on movies and pop songs. We say that the new café is better or worse than the old ones. And we sometimes share our views on more serious things.

In time, what’s said changes. What’s said to be good or better changes. But the idea that you could stop this process entails the idea that you could change human nature overnight.

If you want a poor man’s insight into the canons of literature, look at books of quotations. Notice that they change.

If you look at today’s editions, you’ll find fewer specimens of Milton and Tennyson. Perhaps one day there will be more.

Books of quotations reflect what we collectively found worth talking about, worth trying to hold in memory — at the time. We tried to hold these particular words in memory because those lines had been found to appeal to others — at the time. It was a way we could communicate, a way we could live in the polis together.

Marking the day: Richard Wright

 Richard Wright’s Black Boy is one of the finest books written by an American. It’s the story of his early years in the Jim Crow South.

It has many wonders. One of the great moments, for me, is a story about a public library.

At 19, Wright was living in a rooming house on Beale Street in Memphis. He started by washing dishes and then found a job making deliveries for an optical company, starting at $8 a week. He paid $2.50 a week for the room and saved every dime, planning to escape, with his mother and brother, to Chicago.

One day, Wright saw an editorial in The Commercial Appeal castigating H.L. Mencken, editor of the American Mercury and a critic of the South.

All his life Wright had heard white people express hatred for Black people. He wondered what a white man could have written to prompt that kind of hatred.

On his errands, Wright passed the public library and sometimes picked up books for white workers at the optical company. The library, in 1927, was off limits to Black people.

Some of the men in the shop were members of the Ku Klux Klan. Others were sympathizers. Wright approached one of the workers, a man named Falk, an Irish Catholic who was himself hated by the Klansmen. Wright asked Falk if he could use his library card.

Wright forged a note from Falk — using a racial slur so the librarian wouldn’t suspect him — and was given two books: Mencken’s A Book of Prefaces and Prejudices.

Wright said: “That night in my rented room, while letting the hot water run over my can of pork and beans in the sink, I opened A Book of Prefaces and began to read.”

Mencken opened the door to other writers — Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Conrad, Flaubert — and Wright kept reading. Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street was his first serious novel.

This was my first serious book.

• Source: Richard Wright, Black Boy; New York: Harper Perennial Classics, 1998. Wright was born Sept. 4, 1908, near Roxie, Miss. I’m marking his birthday as a way to honor a writer who influenced me. For more on “Marking the day” see “An activity in lieu of making resolutions,” Dec. 31, 2021.

Not good or bad, but natural

 Religious sensibilities: On balance, good or bad?

I think it’s the wrong question. I think religious sensibilities are natural, part of being human. Religious sensibilities are not universal, but the vast majority of human beings have some religious or spiritual sense, in the same way the vast majority have some musical or artistic sensibilities.

I do see the potential for good — revolutionary good.

I can imagine a world in which human beings had the sense that we were all children of the same god, that we were all family members, and that it thus was imperative to look after each other and our environment. I could see how people could use such shared sensibilities to create — together — a better humanity. It would be revolutionary, like bees learning a better way to build hives.

Paracosm and religious sensibility

 A paracosm is a detailed, imaginary world. The term is usually used in the psychological descriptions of children. But T.M. Luhrmann, an anthropologist who is interested in religious sensibilities, uses the term to describe how people build a sense of reality about their religious beliefs.

In her view, it’s a natural process. People who are religious in that way work at it. They spend time in prayer and study. They get into the details.

Luhrmann uses music as an analogy. A beginner plays scales on the piano and eventually performs Mozart. A level of creative detail slowly builds up. And of course the 21^st Piano Concert is real, beautiful, sublime.

Similarly, a Christian mystic might begin by reciting the Lord’s Prayer and will spend hours in contemplative prayer.

Tolkien created a paracosm. St. Augustine did too, I think.

Investigating religious sensibilities

Oliver Sacks had an interesting way of pursuing problems. I think he had the kind of mind that gets carried away by curiosity, a mind that can’t do its homework if it’s interested in something more interesting. (It might take one to know one.)

Here he is talking about religious sensibility:

The tendency to spiritual feeling and religious belief lies deep in human nature and seems to have its own neurological basis, though it may be very strong in some people and less developed in others. … Some religious people come to experience their proof of heaven by another route — the route of prayer, as the anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann has explored in her book When Good Talks Back. The very essence of divinity, of God, is immaterial. God cannot be seen, felt, or heard in the ordinary way. Luhrmann wondered how, in the face of this lack of evidence, God becomes a real, intimate presence in the lives of so many evangelicals and other people of faith.

I think there are two religious sensibilities — not one. The two are not compatible, and lumping them together leads to confusion.

In the first kind, people feel a sense of intimacy with the divine.

The other is suggested by Anselm’s Ontological Argument, which claims that God is a logical necessity.

The implications of that view are not acceptable to people who claim that a person can know God.

If God is a logical necessity, no fact about this world could have any relevance about what we could say. The fact that there is baffling beauty in the world could have no bearing on a logical certainty. Neither could the fact that there is evil in the world. Evidence is simply not relevant to something that’s logical certain.

If you hold that sensibility, though, you hold the view that divinity is simply beyond humanity. There’s nothing more we can say.

I think that’s one of several things Wittgenstein had in mind when he said: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Scholars sometimes speak of “Spinoza’s God” or “Einstein’s God,” neither of which is much liked by those who are intimate with the Almighty.

• Source: The long quotation is from Oliver Sacks, “Seeing God in the Third Millennium,” The Atlantic, December 2012.