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 God 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.