Maverick Philosopher

The Deep Thinker

Elias Canetti, The Agony of Flies: Notes and Notations (Die Fliegenpein: Aufzeichnungen), Noonday 1994, tr. H. F. Broch de Rothermann, bilingual ed., p. 25:

His thoughts have fins instead of wings.

It flows better in German:

Sein Denken hat Flossen statt Flügel.

The title is my creation.

Many of Canetti's notations express insights; others, however striking, are exercises in literary self-indulgence, not that there is anything wrong with that.

Here are some good ones:

No code is secret enough to allow for the expression of complete candor. (5)

He will never be a thinker: he doesn't repeat himself enough. (13)

He desires the existence of the people he loves, but not their presence and their preoccupations. (15)

He wishes for moments that burn as long as match. (15)

I read that as a protest against time's fugacity.

He is as smart as a newspaper; he knows everything and what he knows changes from day to day. (19)

Even the great philosopher benefits from exaggeration, but with him she must wear a tightly woven garment of reason. The poet, on the other hand, exposes her in all her shimmering nudity. (19)

It's easy to be reasonable when you don't love anyone, including yourself. (21)

On fair days he feels too sure of his own life. (23)

That resonates with me.  But it is not an aphorism if an aphorism must present a universal truth.  This is an aphorism: On fair days one feels too sure of one's own life.  But this is the philosopher talking with his zeal to transcend the particular toward the universal. The poet is more at home, or entirely at home,  with the particular. There is an advantage to Canetti's formulation: it cannot be contradicted. He is reporting the feeling of a particular man, presumably himself.  The corresponding aphorism invites counterexamples.

God does not like us to draw lessons from recent history. (23)

I surmise that the thought driving the aphorism is that the horrors of the 20th century make theistic belief psychologically impossible. Who can believe in God after Auschwitz?

Related: Susan Sontag on the Art of the Aphorism 

Addendum.  Contrast

On fair days he feels too sure of his own life

with 

He whose days are fair feels too sure of his own life.

'He' in the second sentence functions as a universal quantifier, not as a pronoun.  Pronouns have antecedents: the 'he' in the second sentence has no antecedent.  Nor does it need one. The 'he' in the first sentence, however, could be called a dangling pronoun: its antecedent is tacit, and is presumably 'Canetti.'  If this is right, the two sentences express different thoughts and are not intersubstitutable salva veritate.  

I rather doubt that Canetti would approve of this analysis. Too philosophical.

Elias Canetti and Greta Thunberg

The former has the latter's 'number.'

Zwei Tendenzen, die sich nur scheinbar widersprechen, kennzeichnen die Zeit: die Anbetung der Jugend and das Absterben der Erfahrung.

Two trends, which only apparently contradict each other, epitomize this era: the worship of youth and the extinction of experience. (The Agony of Flies, Noonday, 1994, p. 168/169, emphasis in original.)

Bukowski and Others on Writing

Includes a mess o' good links.

Buk is trash, especially his novels, but in a load of rubbish you may sometimes find a gem.  Bluebird is a pretty good poem.

Dr. Johnson versus Kerouac

Patrick Kurp makes the case against spontaneous bop prosody. And a strong case it is. The Rolling Stones sang that it's only Rock and Roll, but I like it. I'd say something similar about Sweet Gone Jack's hyper-romantic effusions.  It's only rush and gush, flow and go, but I like it, like it, yes I do.  

(The 'go' alludes to the title of which minor Beat figure's novel?)

Jack Kerouac Went Home in October

Jack Kerouac quit the mortal coil 50 years ago today, October 21st, securing his release from the samsaric wheel of the quivering meat conception, and the granting of his wish:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead.  (Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus).

The Last Interview, 12 October 1969.  "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic."  "I just sneak into church now, at dusk, at vespers. But yeah, as you get older you get more . . . genealogical."

As much of a screw-up and sinner as he was, as irresponsible, self-indulgent, and self-destructive, Kerouac was a deeply religious man.  He went through a Buddhist phase, but at the end he came home to Catholicism.  

"Everybody goes home in October." (On the Road, Part I, Ch. 14, Para 1) Here's the whole paragraph:

At dawn my bus was zooming across the Arizona desert -- Indio, Blythe, Salome (where she danced); the great dry stretches leading to Mexican mountains in the south. Then we swung north to the Arizona mountains, Flagstaff, clifftowns. I had a book with me I stole from a Hollywood stall, "Le Grand Meaulnes" by Alain-Fournier, but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing. In inky night we crossed New Mexico; at gray dawn it was Dalhart, Texas; in the bleak Sunday afternoon we rode through one Oklahoma flat-town after another; at nightfall it was Kansas. The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.

 "Pretty girls make graves." (Dharma Bums) 

 Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (G. P. Putnam 1965), p. 48:

Outside it's October night in Manhattan and on the waterfront wholesale markets there are barrels with fires left burning in them by the longshoremen where I stop and warm my hands and take a nip two nips from the bottle and hear the bvoom of ships in the channel and I look up and there, the same stars as over Lowell, October, old melancholy October, tender and loving and sad, and it will all tie up eventually into a perfect posy of love I think and I shall present it to Tathagata, my Lord, to God, saying "Lord Thou didst exult -- and praise be You for showing me how You did it -- Lord now I'm ready for more -- And this time I won't whine -- This time I'll keep my mind clear on the fact that it is Thy Empty Forms."

. . . This world, the palpable thought of God . . . [ellipsis in original]

Alela Diane, We Are Nothing  

Jack Kerouac, Tristessa (written 1955-56, first published in 1960), p. 59:

Since beginningless time and into the never-ending future, men have loved women without telling them, and the Lord has loved them without telling, and the void is not the void because there's nothing to be empty of.

Henry Mancini, Moon River.  Video with shots of Rita Hayworth. YouTuber comment: indimenticabile Rita, stupenda Rita, vivi nei nostri ricordi, vivi nei nostri cuori. This was Jack Kerouac's favorite song.  Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac (St. Martin's 1998), p. 324:

One night he [Kerouac, during a 1962 visit to Lowell, Mass.] left a bar called Chuck's with Huck Finneral, a reedy, behatted eccentric who carried a business card that read: "Professional killer . . . virgins fixed . . . orgies organized, dinosaurs neutered, contracts & leases broken."  Huck's philosophy of life was: "Better a wise madness than a foolish sanity."  They drove to a friend's house in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and on the way, Jack sang "Moon River," calling it his favorite song.  Composed by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, "Moon River" was the theme song of the popular Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany's.  Sobbed by a harmonica, later swelling with strings and chorus, the plaintive tune's gentle but epic-like lyrics describe a dreamer and roamer not unlike Kerouac.

Indeed they do.  A restless dreamer, a lonesome traveller, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of mist, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore.  

Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard, California Zephyr

10,000 Maniacs, Hey Jack Kerouac

Tom Waits, Jack Kerouac on the Road

Aztec Two-Step, The Persecution and Restoration of Dean Moriarty

Some readings:

Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues, 228th Chorus

Jack Kerouac, The Wheel of the Quivering Meat Conception.  "I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel, safe in heaven, dead." Steve Allen on piano.

Jack Kerouac, Charlie Parker.  "Charlie, Parker, lay the bane off me, and everybody."

Was Sisyphus a Bachelor?

Franz Kafka ruminates in this 1922 diary entry on the problem of procreation and dreams of a bourgeois rootedness that probably would have suffocated him:

The infinite, deep, warm, saving happiness of sitting beside the cradle of one’s child opposite its mother.

There is also in it something of this feeling: matters no longer rest with you, unless you wish it so. In contrast, this feeling of those who have no children: it perpetually rests with you, whether you will or no, every moment to the end, every nerve-racking moment, it perpetually rests with you, and without result. Sisyphus was a bachelor.

(Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910-1923, ed. Max Brod, New York: Schocken, 1975, p. 401.)

Roger Kimball on Elias Canetti on Death

An excerpt from Roger Kimball, Becoming Elias Canetti:

. . . . Canetti’s response to the fact of death—“the only fact,” as he sometimes puts it—is a tragic stance of rebellion against an ineluctable fate. The overriding question for every individual, he writes in The Torch in My Ear, is “whether he should put up with the fact that a death is imminent for him.”

Canetti has never worked out his thoughts on death in any systematic fashion. His basic message would seem to be the unexceptionable admonition not to go gentle into that good night. Yet he also uses the rejection of death as the starting point for other, often more questionable, sorts of statements. At one point, for example, his insistence that the individual take a stand against death leads him to the pious declaration that “I care about the life of every human being and not just that of my neighbor.” And in one of his essays, he goes beyond the posture of stoically resisting death to tell us that “So long as death exists, no beauty is beautiful, no goodness is good.” We must of course be grateful that Canetti cares about the lives of all of us, even if the word “cares” is rendered practically empty in this context. But as for the relation between death and beauty and death and goodness—well, here I think we must question Canetti’s dictum. For it seems at least equally plausible that beauty and goodness can emerge as compelling forces in our lives only against the background of mortality; in this sense, death, as Wallace Stevens put it, is the mother of beauty. Things matter to us precisely because neither we nor they last forever. Now, I do not doubt that Canetti’s meditations on death betray a core of genuine pathos. But in the end I’m afraid that they amount to little more than a collection of sentimental exhortations; their chief function would seem to be to perpetuate the atmosphere of intellectual melodrama within which Canetti prefers to operate. Indeed, they would hardly be worth scrutiny, except that Canetti insists on placing them at the very center of his thought.

Canetti quoted: “So long as death exists, no beauty is beautiful, no goodness is good.” Canetti paraphrased:  To those who live free of illusions, nothing ultimately matters if neither we nor they last forever. Kimball quoted:  "Things matter to us precisely because neither we nor they last forever."

The Notebook and its Ideal Entry, the Aphorism

Susan Sontag on Elias Canetti:

The notebook is the perfect literary form for an eternal student, someone who has no subject or, rather, whose subject is ‘everything’. It allows entries of all lengths and shapes and degrees of impatience and roughness, but its ideal entry is the aphorism. Most of Canetti’s entries take up the aphorist’s traditional themes: the hypocrisies of society, the vanity of human wishes, the sham of love, the ironies of death, the pleasure and necessity of solitude, and the intricacies of one’s own thought processes. Most of the great aphorists have been pessimists, purveyors of scorn for human folly. (The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well,’ Canetti has noted.) Aphoristic thinking is informal, unsociable, adversarial, proudly selfish. ‘One needs friends mainly in order to become impudent – that is, more oneself,’ Canetti writes: there is the authentic tone of the aphorist. The notebook holds that ideally impudent, efficient self that one constructs to deal with the world. By the disjunction of ideas and observations, by the brevity of their expression, by the absence of helpful illustration, the notebook makes of thinking something light.

The first two sentences sound for all the world like a description of this here weblog.  Or as I put it above:

. . . this weblog is just one philosopher's online journal, notebook, common place book, workshop, soapbox, sandbox, literary litter box, and online filing cabinet.    A lot of what I write here is unpolished and tentative.  I explore the cartography of ideas along many paths.  Here below we are in statu viae, and it is fitting that our thinking should be exploratory, meandering, and undogmatic.  Nothing human, and thus nothing philosophical, is foreign to me. 

It Used to be Hard to be a Good Catholic

John Fante, Full of Life, HarperCollins 2002, pp. 86-87. Originally published in 1952.

I liked an atheistic wife. Her position made matters easy for me. It simplified a planned family. We had no scruples about contraceptives. Ours had been a civil marriage. We were not chained by religious tenets. Divorce was there, any time we wanted it. If she became a Catholic there would be all manner of complications. It was hard to be a good Catholic, very hard, and that was why I had left the Church. To be a good Catholic you had to break through the crowd and help Him pack the cross. I was saving the break through for later. If she broke through I might have to follow, for she was my wife. 

It was indeed hard to be a good Catholic in the 'fifties and earlier. You had to do this and refrain from that. It put you at odds with the secular. But then, in the 'sixties, the Church decided to become 'relevant' to use a prominent buzzword of the era. The effect of the pursuit of 'relevance,' however, was to render itself irrelevant.  A Church that is just another pile of secular leftist junk is of no use to anyone. Not to true leftists who have no need for a superannuated substitute. The true hipster scorns the oldster trying to be hip. Not to the young who seek order and structure and transcendent guidance. Such seekers are nowadays drawn to Islam. One such was John Walker 'Jihad Johhny' Lindh. He was baptized and raised 'Catholic' but ran off to join the Taliban. 

A more recent example is  Jacob Williams, Why I Became Muslim.

Related: The Day Bukowski Discovered John Fante

On the Folly of the Vatican II 'Reforms'

Review of Mary Gordon, On Thomas Merton

The review is by Gary WILLS, not Willis. It is well worth reading. But, as someone who has read all seven volumes of Merton's Journals, I find this unfair:

In 1965, to keep him [Merton] on the vast grounds of the abbey, the abbot approved a state of virtual secession within the monastery. Merton could live in his own hermitage, distant from the main house, where he asked that other monks not visit him. He said that he wanted more solitude, but he told the truth in his journal, that he wanted “all the liberty and leeway I have in the hermitage.” It gave admiring outsiders easier access to him and let him slip off the grounds to make unmonitored phone calls to them.

Merton was conflicted, no doubt, but his commitment to the eremitic life was genuine.

 

[Reviews] Shallow Calls to Shallow by Garry Willis | Harper's Magazine

Discussed in this essay: On Thomas Merton, by Mary Gordon. Shambhala. 160 pages. $22.95. 

D. G. Myers on Kurt Vonnegut

I admit to never having read any Kurt Vonnegut. But I have just read a gushing article in The Atlantic about his Slaughterhouse-Five, now 50 years old. So I thought I'd see what D. G. Myers has to say about Vonnegut.  Some excerpts from No on Vonnegut:

The Library of America has made the weird and unpardonable decision to release an omnibus volume of fiction by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. The volume covers ten years of writing from 1963 to 1973, the period during which the novels Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions and the story collection Welcome to the Monkey House were published. Although I have been unable to confirm the exact contents, Vonnegut’s books are short enough that the Library of America volume is likely to include all five.

There is no possible justification for Vonnegut’s enshrinement in the Library of America, which exists “to preserve the nation's cultural heritage by publishing America’s best and most significant writing in authoritative editions. . . .” Even one of his champions—James Lundquist, in a 1977 single-author study—classifies his fiction as “ ‘naive’ literature because [Vonnegut] makes so much use of expected associations and conventions for the purpose of rapid communication with its readers.”

[. . .]

Until 1969, his most famous book was Cat’s Cradle, a silly fable that college students all over the country seemed to be reading in unison. Then came Slaughterhouse-Five, his novel about the Allied firebombing of Dresden during the last year of the Second World War. As in all his books, Vonnegut was careful to spell out the Message: “I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.” It is difficult to understand how anyone could experience the rush of moral knowledge while reading that sentence, but perhaps a certain kind of young reader feels something like personal unification—a delirious sense that his rebellion against the adult world is finally taking the firm shape of settled conviction—when swallowing Vonnegut’s books.

A recent critic calls Vonnegut, who lived through the firebombing of Dresden as a POW, “the war’s second most famous survivor,” after Elie Wiesel. (Francine Prose based an entire novel on the empty posturing behind such a claim.) Perhaps, though, this remark provides the key to his fiction, if not a reason to reprint it in an authoritative edition. The survivors of massacres and holocausts are indemnified against ordinary criticism, but also against the ordinary expectations—of subtlety, memorable characterization, layered prose—that readers bring to a work of literature.

A Commonplace Blog

A Commonplace Blog is the best literary weblog that I am aware of. It is defunct, its proprietor and sole contributor, D. G. Myers, having died in September, 2014. I believe I first came upon it via Patrick Kurp's excellent Anecdotal Evidence.

Now while the literary knowledge and literary sensibility of this metaphysician and logic-chopper lag far behind those of the gentlemen mentioned, this has not prevented him from voicing some literary opinions of his own with which Professor Myers has generously but critically engaged.  His discussions of my work can be found in six of his entries, here.

JUST OVER THE TRANSOM: THE SELECTED WORKS OF CESARE PAVESE

Whatever you say about Jeff Bezos & Co., Amazon's service is amazonianly amazing. I order a book. They promise delivery in two days. It arrives the next day. Would that happen in a socialist shit hole, Bernie? Could a company such as Amazon even get off the ground in such a politically feculent locale as Cuba? You and your ilk didn't build that, Obama.

There ought to be one nation on the face of the earth that celebrates the individual and his liberty. 'Diversity' demands it, don't you think?

Capitalism works. Socialism doesn't. Am I opposed to all government regulation? Of course not.

You say capitalism has its origin in greed? No more than socialism has its origin in envy. More on this topic later.

Enough Facebook for one day. I have done my daily bit in combating the Left and its destructive nonsense. Now it's your turn.

Do your bit. Speak out. Show some civil courage.

maverickphilosopher.typepad.com

 

Cesare Pavese, "Passion for Solitude"

Passion for Solitude BY CESARE PAVESE TRANSLATED BY GEOFFREY…

On Sentence Fragments

I was taught to avoid them. The teaching was sound. But rules of style admit of exceptions. That too is a rule of sorts. My rule anent sentence fragments hitherto has been that they are to be deployed, if deployed at all, sparingly. That's what I taught my students.

Does my rule admit of exceptions?  Is it in need of revision? Take a gander at the opening three paragraphs of Charles Dickens' Bleak House:

Chapter 1 — In Chancery

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

Not one complete sentence in these three paragraphs. And yet this is great writing. The fourth paragraph shows that the man can write complete sentences.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

 

To Write Well, Read Well

To write well, read well. Read good books, which are often, but not always, old books. If you carefully read, say, William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, you will learn something of the expository potential of the English language from a master of thought and expression. If time is short, study one of his popular essays such as "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life."  Here is a characteristic paragraph:

But this world of ours is made on an entirely different pattern, and the casuistic question here is most tragically practical. The actually possible in this world is vastly narrower than all that is demanded; and there is always a pinch between the ideal and the actual which can only be got through by leaving part of the ideal behind. There is hardly a good which we can imagine except as competing for the possession of the same bit of space and time with some other imagined good. Every end of desire that presents itself appears exclusive of some other end of desire. Shall a man drink and smoke, or keep his nerves in condition? — he cannot do both. Shall he follow his fancy for Amelia, or for Henrietta? — both cannot be the choice of his heart. Shall he have the dear old Republican party, or a spirit of unsophistication in public affairs? — he cannot have both, etc. So that the ethical philosopher's demand for the right scale of subordination in ideals is the fruit of an altogether practical need. Some part of the ideal must be butchered, and he needs to know which part. It is a tragic situation, and no mere speculative conundrum, with which he has to deal. (The Will to Believe, Dover 1956, pp. 202-203, emphases in original)

One who can appreciate that this is good writing is well on the way to becoming a good writer. The idea is not so much to imitate as to absorb and store away large swaths of such excellent writing. It is bound to have its effect. Immersion in specimens of good writing is perhaps the only way to learn what good style is. It cannot be reduced to rules and maxims. And even if it could, there would remain the problem of the application of the rules. The application of rules requires good judgment, and one can easily appreciate that there cannot be rules of good judgment. This for the reason that the application of said rules would presuppose the very thing — good judgment — that cannot be reduced to rules. Requiring as it does good judgment, good writing cannot be taught, which is why teaching composition is even worse  in point of frustration than teaching philosophy. Trying to get a student to appreciate why a certain formulation is awkward is like trying to get a nerd to understand why pocket-protectors are sartorially substandard.

But what makes James' writing good? It has a property I call muscular elegance. The elegance has to do in good measure with the cadence, which rests in part on punctuation and sentence structure. Note the use of the semi-colon and the dash. These punctuation marks are falling into disuse, but I say we should dig in our heels and resist this decadence especially since it is perpetrated by many of the very same politically correct ignoramuses who are mangling the language in other ways I won't bother to list. There is no necessity that linguistic degeneration continue. We make the culture what it is, and we get the culture or unculture we deserve.

As for the muscularity of James' muscular elegance, it comes though in his vivid examples and his use of words like 'pinch' and 'butchered.' His is a magisterial weaving of the abstract and the concrete, the universal and the particular. Bare of flab, this is writing with pith and punch. And James is no slouch on content, either.

C. S. Lewis somewhere says something to the effect that reading one's prose out loud is a way to improve it. I would add to this Nietzsche's observation that

Good prose is written only face to face with poetry. For it is an uninterrupted, well-mannered war with poetry . . . (Gay Science, Book II, Section 92, tr. Kaufmann)

A well-mannered war, a loving polemic. There is a poetic quality to the James passage quoted above, but the lovely goddess of poetry is given to understand that truth trumps beauty and that she is but a handmaiden to the ultimate dominatrix, Philosophia. Or to coin a Latin phrase, ars ancilla philosophiae.

Finally, a corollary to the point that one must read good books to become a good writer: watch your consumption of media dreck. Avoid bad writing, and when you cannot, imbibe it critically.

To write well, read well. Read good books, which are often, but not always, old books. If you carefully read, say, William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, you will learn something of the expository potential of the English language from a master of thought and expression. If time is short, study one of his popular essays such as "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life."  Here is a characteristic paragraph:

But this world of ours is made on an entirely different pattern, and the casuistic question here is most tragically practical. The actually possible in this world is vastly narrower than all that is demanded; and there is always a pinch between the ideal and the actual which can only be got through by leaving part of the ideal behind. There is hardly a good which we can imagine except as competing for the possession of the same bit of space and time with some other imagined good. Every end of desire that presents itself appears exclusive of some other end of desire. Shall a man drink and smoke, or keep his nerves in condition? — he cannot do both. Shall he follow his fancy for Amelia, or for Henrietta? — both cannot be the choice of his heart. Shall he have the dear old Republican party, or a spirit of unsophistication in public affairs? — he cannot have both, etc. So that the ethical philosopher's demand for the right scale of subordination in ideals is the fruit of an altogether practical need. Some part of the ideal must be butchered, and he needs to know which part. It is a tragic situation, and no mere speculative conundrum, with which he has to deal. (The Will to Believe, Dover 1956, pp. 202-203, emphases in original)

One who can appreciate that this is good writing is well on the way to becoming a good writer. The idea is not so much to imitate as to absorb and store away large swaths of such excellent writing. It is bound to have its effect. Immersion in specimens of good writing is perhaps the only way to learn what good style is. It cannot be reduced to rules and maxims. And even if it could, there would remain the problem of the application of the rules. The application of rules requires good judgment, and one can easily appreciate that there cannot be rules of good judgment. This for the reason that the application of said rules would presuppose the very thing — good judgment — that cannot be reduced to rules. Requiring as it does good judgment, good writing cannot be taught, which is why teaching composition is even worse  in point of frustration than teaching philosophy. Trying to get a student to appreciate why a certain formulation is awkward is like trying to get a nerd to understand why pocket-protectors are sartorially substandard.

But what makes James' writing good? It has a property I call muscular elegance. The elegance has to do in good measure with the cadence, which rests in part on punctuation and sentence structure. Note the use of the semi-colon and the dash. These punctuation marks are falling into disuse, but I say we should dig in our heels and resist this decadence especially since it is perpetrated by many of the very same politically correct ignoramuses who are mangling the language in other ways I won't bother to list. There is no necessity that linguistic degeneration continue. We make the culture what it is, and we get the culture or unculture we deserve.

As for the muscularity of James' muscular elegance, it comes though in his vivid examples and his use of words like 'pinch' and 'butchered.' His is a magisterial weaving of the abstract and the concrete, the universal and the particular. Bare of flab, this is writing with pith and punch. And James is no slouch on content, either.

C. S. Lewis somewhere says something to the effect that reading one's prose out loud is a way to improve it. I would add to this Nietzsche's observation that

Good prose is written only face to face with poetry. For it is an uninterrupted, well-mannered war with poetry . . . (Gay Science, Book II, Section 92, tr. Kaufmann)

A well-mannered war, a loving polemic. There is a poetic quality to the James passage quoted above, but the lovely goddess of poetry is given to understand that truth trumps beauty and that she is but a handmaiden to the ultimate dominatrix, Philosophia. Or to coin a Latin phrase, ars ancilla philosophiae.

Finally, a corollary to the point that one must read good books to become a good writer: watch your consumption of media dreck. Avoid bad writing, and when you cannot, imbibe it critically.

Hemingway on Wolfe

Is Line Editing a Lost Art? Excerpt:

Manuscripts, and spirits, are often saved by line editors. Ernest Hemingway began an October 1949 letter to Charles Scribner already in a mood: “The hell with writing today.” Then he opines about editor Maxwell Perkins and the novelist Thomas Wolfe: “If Max hadn’t cut ten tons of shit out of Wolfe everybody would have known how bad it is after the first book. Instead only pros like me or people who drink wine, not labels, know.” Years earlier, Hemingway had warned Perkins about his personality: “please remember that when I am loud mouthed, bitter, rude, son of a bitching and mistrustful I am really very reasonable and have great confidence and absolute trust in you.”

MavPhil suggestion: delete the commas in the initial sentence. Read the sentence out loud both ways and you will see that I am right.

Hyphens are a source of writerly vexation. I would have written 'loud-mouthed.' Papa was probably into his cups.

The Self-Reliant Don't Snivel

Louis L’Amour, Education of a Wandering Man, Bantam, 1989, p. 180:

Times were often very rough for me but I can honestly say that I never felt abused or put-upon. I never felt, as some have, that I deserved special treatment from life, and I do not recall ever complaining that things were not better. Often I wished they were, and often found myself wishing for some sudden windfall that would enable me to stop wandering and working and settle down to simply writing. Yet it was necessary to be realistic. Nothing of the kind was likely to happen, and of course, nothing did.

I never found any money; I never won any prizes; I was never helped by anyone, aside from an occasional encouraging word – and those I valued. No fellowships or grants came my way, because I was not eligible for any and in no position to get anything of the sort. I never expected it to be easy.

It is very difficult these days to explain the classic American value of self-reliance to 'liberals,' especially that species thereof known as the 'snowflake.'   Not understanding it, they mock it, as if one were exhorting people to pull themselves up by their own boot straps. 

Catholicism as a Literary Affair?

William Giraldi in Commonweal:

Because I want nothing to do with hocus-pocus, because dogma and decrees are closed to real contest, and because corporations make me glum (the Vatican is, among other things, a corporation), Catholicism is for me a literary affair: drama, poetry, myth, tradition. Homilies and hymnals, liturgies and sermons done right, the Benedictus, the Magnificat, the Gloria in Excelsis Deo: these are literature no less than The Iliad is.

One problem with cleaving to the aesthetics of Catholicism while dumping the metaphysics is that, post-Vatican II, there is not much to cleave to: the pageantry and liturgy have devolved in the direction of the insipid and ugly. There is no need to rehearse the litany of complaints.  But that is not the main problem.  

Even as a boy, I never believed in an Iron Age Hebrew deity who gives a damn about our mammalian plight. When Orwell, writing about Waugh, remarked that one really can’t be Catholic and grown-up at the same time, he was getting at the wild implausibility at the hub of Christianity. But “God” and “Christ” are, above all, terms of poetry, of allegory and metaphor and myth. Flannery O’Connor once famously snapped at Mary McCarthy when McCarthy said that the Eucharist is only a symbol: “Well, if it’s only a symbol, to hell with it.” Reluctant as I normally am to dissent from O’Connor, I have to side with McCarthy there. Religion not only traffics in symbols, it survives by them, and to mistake the figurative for the factual or allegory for history is to mistake much indeed. But mouthy unbelievers who find, say, Original Sin barbaric and absurd are missing the point on purpose: whatever else it is, Original Sin is most potently a metaphor for the inherent psychological wackiness of our kind, all those pesky hormonal urges that make us batty. Of course we are born blighted: evolution by natural selection is a malfunctioning process. Never mind your soul: just look at all those problems with your teeth, your back, your knees.

Giraldi makes it clear that he is an atheist. In this respect he is on the side of the "mouthy unbelievers." But he thinks that the latter deliberately (!?) miss the point of the doctrine of Original Sin.  But how could that doctrine have any point if there is no God? Sin, by definition, is an offense against God; if there is no God, then there is no sin either, and, a fortiori, no Original Sin.  The Doctrine has a point only if man, a creature made in the image and likeness of God, offended God and lost his prelapsarian right relation to God. Otherwise the Doctrine refers to nothing real.  The Doctrine refers to something real only if (i) God exists as the supreme moral authority of the universe, (ii) man exists as a spiritual being possessing free will and thus not as a mere animal, and (iii) man freely rejects divine moral authority in a doomed quest to become like God.

It is difficult to see how 'Original Sin' could be plausibly taken to be a metaphor for a blighted human condition brought about by evolution gone wrong.  The blight Giraldi mentions consists in factual defects in our mammalian constitution: teeth subject to rot, hormones prone to run riot, etc.  Now while the Doctrine as interpreted by many theologians does imply a certain fallenness in nature herself, the main point of it is moral and thus normative, not factual.   Man is morally messed up, not merely messed up in his empirical psychology and in his knees and joints. He is intellectually defective to boot, living as he does in deep ignorance of God, himself, and the ultimate why and wherefore.  This deep ignorance is a spiritual condition, not one explainable in terms of neurons and hormones.

Note also that it make no sense to speak of evolution by natural selection as MALfunctioning, when interpreted in the light of metaphysical naturalism, to which mast Girladi nails his colors. Evolution is just a natural process driven by natural selection operating upon random variations. No providential Intelligence directs it, and no internal teleology animates it.  To say that evolution malfunctioned in the case of h. sapiens presupposes a normative point of view external to it which is incompatible with a hard-nosed naturalism.

Another reason why Original-Sin-as-metaphor is at best a very bad metaphor is that the Fall stands at the beginning of human history or at a time just before human history.  Our mammalian miseries, however, come not at the start of evolution but near the end.

Catholicism as a literary affair? Why bother? 

In any case, what seems really to interest Giraldi judging by the Commonweal piece are not so much the aesthetics of the rites, rituals, prayers and such of Catholicism, watered-down as they have become, but the aesthetic values of the products of Catholic writers such as Evelyn Waugh and Flannery O'Connor. 

Cactus Ed on Sweet Gone Jack

Here:

Some of Abbey's most entertaining letters involve skirmishes over literary reputation, one of his enduring obsessions. In a letter to the Nation, he contrasted Kurt Vonnegut's "concern for justice, love, honesty and hope" with "novels about the ethnic introspection project (Roth, Bellow)" and "the miseries of suburban hanky-panky (Updike, Cheever, Irving)."

He disparaged Jack Kerouac as "that creepy adolescent bisexual who dabbled in Orientalism and all the other fads of his time, wrote stacks of complacently self-indulgent, onanastic [sic] books and then drank himself to death while sitting on his mother's lap, down in Florida." He called Tom Wolfe a "faggoty fascist little fop" but later defended "Bonfire of the Vanities" as a "novel that reminds us, in the end, that defiance and resistance, manhood and honor, are still possible."

James Soriano, The Sin of Silence

Yesterday I quoted Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State (1997-2001) in the Clinton Administration: "There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other." The context was Albright's urging of women to vote for a woman, Hillary Clinton.

This just in from James Soriano,  "a retired Foreign Service Officer who spent three decades in the State Department, most of them in the Middle East." (from his mini-bio):

I remember Madeleine Albright saying that a couple of years ago, and in a bit of rhetorical jiu jitsu I used the phrase as the punch line in an essay Crisis Magazine posted yesterday.

 

I was inspired to write the piece because of what Francis The Leftist said of the Vigano revelations:  "I won't say a word about it."  Francis has many opinions about leftist enthusiasms, but maintains radio silence on issues of great concern to traditionalists.

 

Francis' silence on critical Church teachings somehow reminds me of the scene in the Inferno with Ugolino, who was starved to death in a Pisan tower with his sons. He was a father who said not one word to his children in their pain and anguish. Bergoglio e Ugolino.  I tried to twin them.  The editor thought it was a bit of stretch, but the commenters seem to have gotten the point.   

 

Regards,

Jim

 

Some 19th Century Rules for Social Intercourse

The wise man abstains from an excess of socializing as from an excess of whisky; but just as a little whisky at the right time and in the right place is a delightful adjunct to a civilized life, so too is a bit of socializing. But he who quits his solitude to sally forth among men must do so with his maxims at the ready if he values his peace of mind.

Herewith, a faithful transcription from a 19th century work, The Corsair: A Gazette of Literature, Art, Dramatic Criticism, Fashion and Novelty, Volume 1, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Timothy O. Porter 1839,  831 pages. (Obviously, not to be confused with the Danish publication that pilloried Kierkegaard):

Never discuss politics or religion with those who hold opinions opposite to yours; they are topics that heat in handling, until they burn your fingers; never talk learnedly on topics you know, it makes people afraid of you; never talk on subjects you don't know, it makes people despise you; never argue, no man is worth the trouble of convincing, and the better your reasoning the more obstinate people become; never pun on a man's words; it is as bad as spitting in his face. In short, whenever practicable, let others perform and do you look on: a seat in the dress circle is preferable to a part in the play. -- This is my rule.

A pretty good rule, one of what Schopenhauer calls Weltweisheit, worldly wisdom. In a fallen world, one needs such maxims. Did you know that Schopenhauer believed in something like Original Sin despite his being an atheist? 

"Never argue, no man is worth the trouble of convincing."  This is sage advice for almost all social situations.

I would add: never in general correct anyone's grammatical, logical, or factual mistakes unless it is your job to do so; the exception of course is serious discourse among serious and well-qualified people. Avoid talk of money if you don't want to be taken to be either poor-mouthing or bragging. Sex-tinged jokes can get you into trouble.  And so on.

Should we go all the way with  Pascal? “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées

To paraphrase a line often attributed (rightly or wrongly) to the cowboy wit, Will Rogers:

 

Never miss an opportunity to keep your mouth shut.

That of course is an exaggeration. But exaggerations are rhetorically useful if they are in the direction of truths.  The truth here is that the damage caused by idle talk is rarely offset by its paltry benefits.

My mind drifts back to the fourth or fifth grade and the time a nun planted an image in my mind that remains.  She likened the tongue to a sword capable of great damage, positioned behind two 'gates,' the teeth and the lips.  Those gates are there for a reason, she explained, and the sword should come out only when it can be well deployed. 

Related: Safe Speech

Now if you bear all of the above in mind, you may safely sally forth into society as long as your sojourn is brief and your maxims are 'cocked and locked.'

Of Trump and The Tempest

Roger Kimball:

I suspect that, come 2024, when President Trump completes his second successful term, Americans will indeed look back, but to the election of Barack Obama and the prospect of a second President Clinton in 2016. They will then wonder how they could have been so misguided as to have elected a naive, anti-American race-hustler like Barack Obama not once but twice, and they will thank their lucky stars that they dodged the bullet of a Hillary Clinton administration, which would have completed the anti-freedom agenda of the deep state and assured generations of economic lassitude and dependency. 

Cohen is correct that Shakespeare is relevant to the Trump administration. But the pertinent play is The Tempest, not Macbeth. In Act II, a few of the shipwrecked men are taking stock of their situation on Prospero’s enchanted island. It soon becomes clear that the island appears very different to different characters:

ADRIAN: The air breathes upon us here most sweetly. 
SEBASTIAN: As if it had lungs and rotten ones. 
ANTONIO: Or as 'twere perfumed by a fen. 
GONZALO: Here is everything advantageous to life. 
ANTONIO: True; save means to live. 
SEBASTIAN: Of that there's none, or little. 
GONZALO: How lush and lusty the grass looks! how green! 
ANTONIO: The ground indeed is tawny. 
SEBASTIAN: With an eye of green in't. 
ANTONIO: He misses not much. 
SEBASTIAN: No; he doth but mistake the truth totally. 

As the play unfolds, it becomes clear that Gonzalo sees the world aright while Antonio and Sebastian are caught in the grip of a fevered delusion.  Their animus and hatred blinded them to reality. The increasingly fanatic and hysterical anti-Trump chorus would do well to reflect on that phenomenon. Their hyperbole has begotten an alarming disconnection from the real world of solid political accomplishment.  The situation is pitiable as well as contemptible. But the malignancy of their vituperation disarms pity before it can even engage. All that is left is contempt, leavened by anger.

Cesare Pavese, "Passion for Solitude"

Passion for Solitude

BY CESARE PAVESE

TRANSLATED BY GEOFFREY BROCK

 

I’m eating a little supper by the bright window.

The room’s already dark, the sky’s starting to turn.

Outside my door, the quiet roads lead,

after a short walk, to open fields.

I’m eating, watching the sky—who knows

how many women are eating now. My body is calm:

labor dulls all the senses, and dulls women too.

 

Outside, after supper, the stars will come out to touch

the wide plain of the earth. The stars are alive,

but not worth these cherries, which I’m eating alone.

I look at the sky, know that lights already are shining

among rust-red roofs, noises of people beneath them.

A gulp of my drink, and my body can taste the life

of plants and of rivers. It feels detached from things.

A small dose of silence suffices, and everything’s still,

in its true place, just like my body is still.

 

All things become islands before my senses,

which accept them as a matter of course: a murmur of silence.

All things in this darkness—I can know all of them,

just as I know that blood flows in my veins.

The plain is a great flowing of water through plants,

a supper of all things. Each plant, and each stone,

lives motionlessly. I hear my food feeding my veins

with each living thing that this plain provides.

 

The night doesn’t matter. The square patch of sky

whispers all the loud noises to me, and a small star

struggles in emptiness, far from all foods,

from all houses, alien. It isn’t enough for itself,

it needs too many companions. Here in the dark, alone,

my body is calm, it feels it’s in charge.

 

Cesare Pavese, "Passion for Solitude" from Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950. Copyright © 2002 by Cesare Pavese. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townshend, WA 98368-0271, coppercanyonpress.org. Source: Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950 (Copper Canyon Press, 2002) 

 

...........................

 

Who knows how many women are eating now, women dulled by labor, thought of by Cesare, alone at table, in a dark room, who, like the struggling star is alone, but unlike the star, is enough for himself, body calm and in charge feeling no need for a woman.

 

Czeslaw Milosz on Lev Shestov

Shestov, or the Purity of Despair

Gray Flannel and the Matter of Money

Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit  appeared in 1955 two years before Jack Kerouac's  On the Road. I never finished Gray Flannel, getting only 80 or so pages into it.  It's a book as staid as the '50s, a tad boring, conventional, and forgettable in comparison to the hyper-romantic and heart-felt rush of the unforgettable On the Road. Since how 'beat' one is in part has to do with one's attitude towards money, which is not the same as one's possession or non-possession of it, I'll for now just pull some quotations from Horace and Sloan Wilson.  The Horace quotations seem not to comport well with each other, but we can worry that bone on another occasion.

Quaerenda pecunia primum est; virtus post nummos. (Horace, Epistles I, 1, 53) Money is to be sought first of all; virtue after wealth. Or, loosely translated, cash before conscience.

Vilius argentum est auro virtutibus aurum. (Horace, Epistles I, 1, 52). Silver is less valuable than gold, gold less valuable than virtue.

The next morning, Tom put on his best suit, a freshly cleaned and pressed gray flannel. On his way to work he stopped in Grand Central Station to buy a clean white handkerchief and to have his shoes shined. During his luncheon hour he set out to visit the United Broadcasting Corporation. As he walked across Rockefeller Plaza, he thought wryly of the days when he and Betsy had assured each other that money didn't matter. They had told each other that when they were married, before the war, and during the war they had repeated it in long letters. "The important thing is to find a kind of work you really like, and something that is useful," Betsy had written him. "The money doesn't matter."

The hell with that, he thought. The real trouble is that up to now we've been kidding ourselves. We might as well admit that what we want is a big house and a new car and trips to Florida in the winter, and plenty of life insurance. When you come right down to it, a man with three children has no damn right to say that money doesn't matter. (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Simon and Shuster, 1955, pp. 9-10)

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Shakespeare on the Fire Down Below

My favorite Oregonian luthier, Dave Bagwill, sends this for our delectation:

PROSPERO (to FERDINAND) 

 

Look thou be true. Do not give dalliance

Too much the rein. The strongest oaths are straw

To th' fire i' th' blood. Be more abstemious,

Or else, goodnight your vow.

 

The Tempest, Act 4, Sc. 1

Dave's emphasis.

Bob Seger expatiates on the theme in "The Fire Down Below." I shall resist the temptation to link to it.

Time Was . . .

. . . when I had space for books, but no money. Now it's the other way around.

So I allowed myself only two purchases today at the antiquarian Mesa Bookshop in downtown Mesa, Arizona, Gary Wills' slim volume, Saint Augustine, Viking 1999, and Joseph Agassi's Faraday as Natural Philosopher, University of Chicago Press, 1971. 

But I resisted the temptation to buy a big fat biography of Richard Brautigan, a poet/novelist of sorts I hadn't thought about in years and whom I last read in the 'sixties. The book of his I read is probably the same one you read if you are a veteran of those heady days and were en rapport with its Zeitgeist.  I refer of course to Trout Fishing in America. Even if you never read it, you will recall the cover from the numerous copies scattered about the crash pads of the those far-off and fabulous times.

But I resisted the temptation to buy the fat, space-consuming biography for which there is no room on my Beat shelf.  Instead, I sat down and  read deep into the opening chapter which recounts in gory detail Brautigan's suicide at age 49 in 1984 achieved by a .44 magnum round to the head.

Brautigan, like Bukowski, had a hard life and writing was their therapy. The therapy proved more efficacious in the case of Bukowski, however.

I have been visiting the Mesa Bookshop for over a quarter of a century now. These days I pop in once a year, every year, on Thanksgiving Eve right after I pick up my T-shirt and race number for the annual Mesa Turkey Trot, Thanksgiving morning, which I run or 'run' every year.  Time was when I ran the 10 K but tomorrow I'll essay the 5 K and see how the old knees hold up.

After the book shop and a snatch of conversation with Old Mike behind the counter I follow my tradition of having lunch nearby either at a good Mexican joint name of Mangoes or as today at a Thai place across the street, Nunthaporn Thai Cuisine. Recommended if you should ever find yourself in the heart of Mesa.

How I love this time of year! And what a pleasure listening to Dennis Prager on the drive over and Michael Medved on the drive back. 

Wonder Lost

I fanciulli trovano il tutto nel nulla, gli uomini il nulla nel tutto.

The child finds everything in nothing; the man nothing in everything.

And knocking back a couple or three Fanciulli cocktails won't help matters.

False Expectation

He who expects all of life to be both wise and philosophical is neither.

.................

Modeled on Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837):

Nessun maggior segno d'essere poco filosofo e poco savio, che volere savia e filosofica tutta la vita.

There's no greater sign of being a poor philosopher and wise man than wanting all of life to be wise and philosophical.

(Giacomo Leopardi, Pensieri, tr. W. S. Di Piero, Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1981, p. 69) Do you see how the translation imports an ambiguity that is not present in the Italian original?

Reading Now: Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

Undoubtedly the most Joycean of the booze novels. This is not what one could call a 'page turner.' Not suitable for beach or bed reading. But it looks to be a deep work that will repay the close attention it demands. Under the Volcano was originally published in 1947. Two other booze novels from the '40s are rather more suited for entertainment: Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend, 1944, and Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square, 1941.

And then there is the grandpappy of them all, Jack London's John Barleycorn. My analysis: Jack London, John Barleycorn, and the Noseless One. (Perhaps an astute literary type will point me to a booze novel in English temporally antecedent to London's.)

It is interesting to note in these waning days of dear October, Kerouac month, that Lowry and Jack both died of drink and at the same age: 47. The difference seems to have have been that Lowry was deliberately out to off himself on the day of his death, his last binge fueled as it was with barbiturates, while Kerouac had not fixed upon 21 October 1969 as Todestag.

The mystery of self-destruction! Is there a natural explanation? Or is the booze monkey a real demon?

There follows an example of of a Lowry sentence that will slow down the serious reader, indeed bring him to a dead stop, as he tries to untangle the syntax. Lowry being a Cambridge man, we assume he knows how to write English. But then we come across this:

His love had brought a peace, for all too short a while, that was strangely like the enchantment, the spell, of Chartres itself, long ago, whose every sidestreet he had come to love and café where he could gaze at the Cathedral eternally sailing against the clouds, the spell not even the fact he was scandalously in debt there could break. (13)

 As I said, this novel is not a 'page turner.' 

Addendum (10/28)

London Ed writes,

If you mean a novel that is almost entirely about drunkenness, i.e. whose subject is just drunkenness, such as Lowry, then you won’t find much in 19^thcentury literature. I recommend Lamb’s Confessions of a Drunkard, if you haven’t come across it already, but that is an essay, not a novel. (It has been questioned whether Lamb actually was a drunkard, but the evidence suggests he was).

In A Tale of Two Cities –  as you surely know – a drunkard is the central character, and drunkenness is one of the themes, but the central theme is an unusual kind of redemption, not drink itself.

See also The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, where again drunkenness is a theme, but not central. Bronte may have modelled the drunken character on her alcoholic brother Bramwell, although she may have been influenced by The Anatomy of Drinking (Robert Macnish, 1835), which is worth a visit (‘Men of genius are often unfortunately addicted to drinking’).

For an interesting conspectus of modern ‘feminist’ writers who were no enemies to the bottle, see this Guardian article. ‘Not many writers manage to get sober and those who do often suffer a decline in output’. Is there a relation between the bottle and the writing? Macnish argues that genius is accompanied by ‘melancholy’, i.e. depression. ‘High talent has ever been distinguished for sadness and gloom’. So they drink to relieve the gloom. So the bottle, on his account, is more a property in the Aristotelian sense: it accompanies the phenomenon of genius, but is not essential to it. Or by contrast is it essential? It is hard to imagine Burroughs without junk. (Or Kerouac without the drink?).

 Enjoy the volcano book. I have it in the attic somewhere, but didn’t get beyond the first chapter or two.

And let's not forget the role that benzedrine played in the composition of On the Road.

Addendum 2 (10/28, 5:08 AM MST)

Ed adds,

Sorry, some more. Macnish rightly says the the most ‘delightful’ state is when sobriety and inebriation briefly become neighbours. That’s right. There is a short episode, usually after the first glass, when the gods come down to the planet, and the world is blessed. Unfortunately the blessedness is so good you want to continue it, and have another, but this never works. For this reason, wise men (and women) never go beyond the third glass. Another alcoholic writer, (Chandler) cleverly said “Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.” Perhaps you meant the same when you spoke (somewhere) about having a couple of Buds but being none the weiser).

I agree entirely. The wise man stops at the third when returns diminish bigly.  But you and I are not alkies.  They achieve some crazy bliss from continuing.

Raymond Chandler?  Funny you should mention him. In the midst of his high-falutin' Joycean prose, Lowry uncorked a Chandleresque line: "Darkness had fallen like the House of Usher." (22-23) Here is my attempt at Chandler-style prose:

The stranger sat down and played his King's pawn to e4. I countered with the French Defense and in a few moves he was all over me like a cheap suit.

I wasn't thinking  about taking any girl's clothes off when I repeated the old redneck line, in a blog post circa 2004, "Ah had me a coupla Buds, but I got none the wiser."  'Wiser' pronounced something like waah-zr.

Addendum 3 (10/28, 11:04)

Ed continues,

“Darkness had fallen like the House of Usher.”

“in a few moves he was all over me like a cheap suit.”

Love them both. I think the second is more Chandleresque. Hard to say why. The first contains a literary illusion. The second is just cheap suits. You have to remember that Chandler was brought up in London, quite near where I live, and he went to an English public school (Dulwich). So he carried an English snobbery with him to the US. When he says ‘Los Angeles has the personality of a paper cup’ you can hear that public school sneer under his voice. His work is almost entirely about the vulgar, but that is the point of it.

I mentioned the London thing to a hard core noir fan, who was astonished. He thought, not without reason, that Chandler was a quintessentially American writer. No more than Joseph Conrad (who did not speak fluent English until his twenties) was quintessentially English.

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A week or so and then I'll be through with Jacking off until next October. So bear with me, ragazzi.

Here  is a NYT piece from 1988 by Richard Hill that gets at the truth of Jack. Excerpts:

He seemed uncertain of his friends from the 50's. Ginsberg was lost; he hadn't found the answers Jack had, in the Roman Catholic Church. Burroughs was a brilliant and heroic old devil, but Jack hadn't seen him since his trip to New York for William Buckley's Firing Line. ''I admire Buckley,'' he said. ''He stopped the show and took me into his office to give me hell about being drunk. Then we went back to do the show and I still gave those intellectuals the old raspberry.'' Burroughs was staying in the same hotel at the time, but didn't want to go out. ''Into those streets?'' said the man whose daring and decadence had become a legend, and Jack gave up on him.

But of Neal Cassady, Jack's companion on the road through many of the novels, he was more sure: ''Neal's not dead. He'll show up someday and we'll go someplace.'' Jack loved Cassady, who died on a railroad track in Mexico on one of the last trips of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. ''Turn your mind on,'' Jack said bitterly. ''I've been trying to turn mine off.''

Jack was also trying to get his affairs in order. He knew he was going to die soon; the doctor had told him his liver was nearly gone. He talked about his will, read and reread his genealogy and spoke much of the Kerouac family tradition and his boyhood home in Lowell. He worried that critics would fail to see his novels as he intended them to be read - not only as an ambitious chronicle of America, but also as a loving portrait of his family and his childhood home. In his later writings, he seemed more interested in capturing Lowell than in an America he no longer understood or liked. He asked about funeral homes and embalming: ''Do they treat you with dignity?'' He asserted his faith in the church he had abandoned years ago for Zen Buddhism.

[. . .]

People sometimes wrote or called me to ask what Jack had really been like, hoping I could confirm one romantic thesis or another. One man wanted to believe he died from the scuffle in the black bar. Ironic, but untrue. Nobody wanted to believe he died of drinking.

He did. Drinking was part of his pilgrimage. He was a sensitive soul who'd set his sights on nothing less than enlightenment. When the booze failed to take him there, it at least numbed the disappointment. It is a classic alcoholic pattern, which has produced statements as powerful as Under the Volcano as well as several Kerouac novels - from the sweetness of ''The Dharma Bums'' to the terrifying wine-soaked hallucination of the true cross over ''Big Sur.'' We may know the drinking wasn't necessary, but Jack didn't. And though he gave in to his drinking, he never completely abandoned his search. His record of that search reminds us why we value him so much. It was a sacrifice from which most of us shrink, a gift for which he paid the highest price. We can argue that his life was tragic or his talent misspent, but never doubt the passion that drove it. He showed us America through his innocent eyes, singing to us like the canary old-time coal miners took underground. When the bird died, they knew it as a warning that the air was deadly and that their own lives were no longer safe. 

Should There be University Courses on Beat Generation Authors?

From a longer essay:

I've read my fair share of [William S. ] Burroughs and I concur [with Patrick Kurp] that his stuff is trash: Junkie, Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, Exterminator.  All in my library.  But there is a place for literary trash.  It has its uses as do the pathologist's  slides and samples.  But put on your mental gloves before handling the stuff. 

Kerouac alone of the Beat Triumvirate [Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs] moves me, though I surely don't consider him a great writer.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that there really shouldn't be any university courses on Kerouac or Dylan or other culturally influential recent figures since their material is easily accessible and easily understandable.  Universities ought not pander. They should remain -- or rather return to being -- institutions whose sacred task is the preservation and transmission of HIGH culture, great culture, culture which is not easily understood and requires expert guidance to penetrate and appreciate. 

The thought is extended in Inheritance and Appropriation.

I am but a vox clamantis in deserto. You will be forgiven for thinking me a superannuated idealistic sermonizer out of touch with current events and trends. The West may be finished, and my preaching useless.   The barbarians are at the gates and the destructive Left is eager to let them in. The authorities are in abdication. The Pope is a fool: a leftist first, a Catholic second. Leftist termites have rotted out the foundations of the universities.

On the other hand, it ain't over til it's over.  So we battle on.  

The Relativity of Lived Time

Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), This Business of Living, Diaries 1935-1950, Transaction Publishers, 2009, p. 126, from the entry of 10 December 1939:

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours seem short and the years long. 

A very sharp observation. Unfortunately, most of Pavese's diary is not at this level of objective insight.  It is mostly self-therapy, a working though of his misery and maladjustment and self-loathing. For example,

And one can understand the innate, ravening loneliness in every man, seeing how the thought of another man consummating the act with a woman -- any woman -- becomes a nightmare, a disturbing awareness of a foul obscenity, an urge to stop him, or if possible destroy him. Can one really endure that another man -- any man -- should commit with any woman the act of shame? Noooo. Yet this is the central activity of life, beyond question. . . . However saintly we may be, it disgusts and offends us to know that another man is screwing. (p.64)

Has the poet come too much under the influence of Stile Nuovo? There is the tendency of romantics, and Italians are romantics, to put women on pedestals and make 'angels' of them. The thought of sexual intercourse, were it possible, with an angel or with a woman one has angelicized is admittedly repulsive. 

Dark is the morning that passes without the light of your eyes.

Related: Suicide, Drafts, and Street Corners

Abstain the Night Before, Feel Better the Morning After

Do you regret in the morning the spare supper of the night before or the foregoing of the useless dessert?  Do you feel bad that you now feel good and are not hung over?  You missed the party and with it the  ambiguity and unseriousness and dissipation of idle talk.  Are you now troubled by your spiritual continence?

As for idle talk, here is something good from  Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910-1923, ed. Max Brod, Schocken 1948, p. 199:

In the next room my mother is entertaining the L. couple. They are talking about vermin and corns. (Mrs. L. has six corns on each toe.) It is easy to see that there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort. It is information that will be forgotten again by both and that even now proceeds along in self-forgetfulness without any sense of responsibility.

I have read this passage many times, and what delights me each time is the droll understatement of it: "there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort." No indeed. There is no progress because the conversations are not seriously about anything worth talking about. There is no Verantwortlichkeit (responsibility): the talk does not answer (antworten) to anything important in the world or anything real in the interlocutors. It is jaw-flapping for its own sake, mere linguistic behavior which, if it conveys anything, conveys: ‘I like you, you like me, and everything’s fine.’  An expression of boredom, it does little to alleviate it.

The interlocutors float along in the inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit) of what Heidegger calls das Man, the ‘they self.’ Compare Heidegger’s analysis of idle talk (Gerede) in Sein und Zeit (1927), sec. 35.

Am I suggesting that one should absolutely avoid idle talk?  That would be to take things to an unnecessary and perhaps imprudent extreme.  It is prudent to get yourself perceived as a regular guy -- especially if you are an 'irregular guy.'

Even Misfits Find Their 'Fit'

I have a longstanding interest in 'marginal types': the characters, oddballs, misfits, Thoreauvian different-drummers, wildmen, mavericks, weirdos, those who find an adjustment to life, if they find it at all, at the margins, on the fringes of respectability, near the edge of things. Those who were not stamped out as by a cookie cutter, but put their own inimitable stamp on themselves. The creatively maladjusted and marginal who do duty as warnings more often than as exemplars.

Joe Gould, Greenwich Village bohemian, is an example. His story has been told by that master of prose, Joseph Mitchell. 

Gould found his fit and 'made it' as a bum. He was a 'successful' bum. Some aren't cut out for the bum life: they can't 'cut it.' These are the bums manqué. Gould stuck with it till he died of it. He found his own peculiar adjustment to life, his purpose and place, albeit one based on deceiving himself and others about his "Oral History of Our Time," the magnum opus that never existed. 

Gould got through life in his own way. If success is living life in your own way, then Gould was a success.

You say he never amounted to anything? Then why am I writing about him now? Why did Joseph Mitchell devote two long pieces to him? Why was a movie made about him?

You really should read Joseph Mitchell.  As someone who knows what good writing is, I can tell you that he is a master of American English. Get yourself a copy of Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories, Vintage 1993, and enjoy. Why read the contemporary stuff in The New Yorker when you can read Mitchell?

Bob Dylan on Moby Dick

Bob Dylan finally gave his Nobel Prize for Literature lecture. I'm impressed. Besides his musical he mentions his literary influences. He cites many of the books I read as assigned readings in high school, books he claims to have read as assigned readings in grammar school! I'm talking about some serious tomes: Moby Dick, Ivanhoe, A Tale of Two Cities, Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and others.

Audio here. Dylan's comments on Moby Dick are from 6:27-12:30.

A BBC article with some of the text. Full text at first link above.

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George Orwell on Julian Green

A footnote in Paul Tournier's The Meaning of Persons sent me to Julian Green, Personal Record 1928-1939. Here is George Orwell's review in Time and Tide, 13 April 1940:

Julian Green's diaries, which ten years ago or even five years ago might have seemed comparatively commonplace, are at this moment of the greatest interest. What they really record is the twilight of the aesthetic age, the last gasp of the cultivated second-generation rentier. With his extreme sensitiveness and his almost effeminate manner of writing, Mr Green is a figure particularly representative of the nineteen-twenties, of the period when simply to preserve your aesthetic integrity seemed a sufficient return for living on inherited money. Although the diary records visits to London, to various parts of Europe, and to America (Mr Green is of American origin though he writes in French), one has the feeling of being all the while in Paris, the Paris of old yellow-faced houses and green plane trees, and also of first nights, private views and interminable literary conversations with Gide, Gertrude Stein and Madame de Noailles. Everything is recorded with the restless sensitiveness of the writer, who translates his experience into literature almost as automatically as a cow turns grass into milk:

December 19th. A gas-lamp burning behind the glass door of a concierge's room at the end of a winter's day, with darkness overhead — what a lovely opening for a novel! Today, for a whole hour, I had nothing but this admirable picture in my mind.

February 2nd. At Versailles. . . . As I looked at the ivy-leaves with their dainty pale yellow borders, I had a moment of sadness at the thought that, till my life's end, things as lovely as they will be there for me to see and I shall have no time to describe them.

He writes much of his work, and his difficulties with his work (like the majority of writers he never feels in the mood for writing, and yet his books somehow get finished), of his dreams, which seem to affect his waking life considerably, and of his remembered childhood in the golden age "before the war". Nearly all his thoughts have a nostalgic tinge. But what gives them their special interest is that he is far too intelligent to imagine that his way of life or his scheme of values will last for ever. Totally uninterested in politics, he is nevertheless able to see, even as early as the nineteen-twenties, that the age of liberalism is ending and that wars, revolutions and dictatorships are just round the corner. Everything is cracking and collapsing. The shadow of Hitler flits almost constantly across the pages:

We are going to see life changing under our very eyes. Everything that gives us pleasure will be taken from us. . . . I am growing accustomed to the idea of vanishing from sight, together with all that I love in this world; for it seems reasonable to suppose that we are approaching the end of a long era. How long shall we sleep?. . . Paris is living in a sort of latent panic. . . . In the Europe of 1934 murder inevitably and fatally leads to other murder. How far can this go without the outbreak of war?. . . The war rumours continue as before. Everyone's daily life seems to be saturated with these feelings of apprehension. . . . The Rhineland has been reoccupied. . . . I was asked to say something on the wireless about Minuit. As if that were of the slightest importance with things as they are at the moment! But one has to go on pretending. . .

The feeling of futility and impermanence, of hanging about in a draughty room and waiting for the guns to begin to shoot, which has haunted many of us during the past seven years, is present everywhere, and it grows stronger as the diary moves towards 1939. Perhaps even the possession of this feeling depends upon being of a certain age (Julian Green is not quite forty), young enough to expect something from life and old enough to remember "before the war". It is a fact that the people who are now twenty do not appear to notice that the world is falling into ruins. But what is attractive in this diary is its complete impenitence, its refusal to move with the times. It is the diary of a civilized man who realizes that barbarism is bound to triumph, but who is unable to stop being civilized. A new world is coming to birth, a world in which there will be no room for him. He has too much vision to fight against it; on the other hand, he makes no pretence of liking it. As it is exactly that pretence that has been the stock-in-trade of the younger intelligentsia during the last few years, the ghostly sincerity of this book is deeply appealing. It has the charm of the ineffectual, which is so out-of-date as to wear an air of novelty.

Virtue and its Exhortation

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 72:

Virtue is not hateful. But speeches on virtue are. Without a doubt, no mouth in the world, much less mine, can utter them. Likewise, every time somebody interjects to speak of my honesty . . . there is someone who quivers inside me.

This entry betrays something of the mind of the leftist. Leftists are deeply suspicious of anything that smacks of 'preaching.'  Theirs is the hermeneutics of suspicion. Nothing is what it manifestly is; there is always something nefarious at work below the surface. Too much enamored of the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, leftists failed to achieve a critical stance toward them where a critical stance allows for a separation (krinein) of the true from the false, the coherent from the incoherent.

Surely Camus goes entirely too far in the above entry. If speeches are hateful, then so are sermons and exhortations. Civilization and its transmission are impossible, however, without appeals to our higher natures.

To a leftist, preaching can only be 'moralizing' and 'being judgmental.'  It can only be the phony posturing of someone who judges others only to elevate himself.   The very fact of preaching  shows one to be a hypocrite.  Of course, leftists have no problem with being judgmental and moralizing about the evil of hypocrisy.  When they make moral judgments, however, it is, magically, not hypocritical.  

And therein lies the contradiction.  They would morally condemn all moral condemnation as hypocritical.  But in so doing they condemn themselves as hypocrites.

We cannot jettison the moral point of view. Marx tried, putting forth his theories as 'science.'  But if you have  read him you know that he moralized like an Old Testament prophet.

Once More on the Bogus Aristotle 'Quotation'

The indefatigable Dave Lull delivers again.

But first Uncle Bill's lessons for the day:

1) Be skeptical of all unsourced quotations.

2) Do not broadcast unsourced quotations unless you are sure they are correct.

3) Verify the sources of sourced quotations.

4) Correct, if you can, incorrect 'quotations.'

5) Do not willfully mis-attribute!  Or, like Achmed the Dead Terrorist, I KEEL you!

6) Don't use 'quote' as a noun; it is a verb.

 

Mr. Lull send us to Aristotle and accuracy where the following comment clarifies matters:

Robin Smith said...

 

You are correct that this quotation, in the form that seems to be all over the Internet now, is not a quotation from Aristotle: it's not even a loose translation of Nicomachean Ethics 1094b23-25. The English translation from which it has descended is as follows (I'm not sure whose this is):

"It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible."

In fact, this isn't a great translation, but at least it gets the sense right. Notice that the first eight words match the beginning of the spurious quote exactly (actually, the corresponding Greek is just two words, (pepaideumenou esti), one of which (esti) means "it is" and the other one of which (pepaideumenou) is translated "the mark of an educated mind". Since it's distinctive of this translation to supply "mind" instead of "man" or "person", I'm sure that's the source. In bouncing about the Internet, Aristotle's own quote has been transmogrified into something quite different that evidently resonates with many people. Just for the record, I am an academic in a philosophy department, I specialize in Aristotle, and I've published translations of some of Aristotle's works. --Robin Smith

I believe this is the Robin Smith I met at a Plato conference back in 1980.  I am indeed blessed with, and grateful for, a good memory.  You would expect that of a Platonist, right? 

 

Nulla Dies Sine Linea: Bad Medieval Latin?

No day without a line. Should it be nullus dies sine linea?  I don't know. The maxim in the form nulla dies sine linea entered my vocabulary circa 1970 from my study of Kierkegaard. The Dane had taken it  as the motto for his prodigious journals in the sense of 'No day without a written line.' I made the maxim my own, and long has she presided over my rather less distinguished scribbling.

Edward the Nominalist, whose Latin is better than mine, writes,

I spotted your post today, and wondered about the gender of ‘dies’. It is one of the only fourth declension nouns to have masculine gender, at least in the singular, which has caused misery to generations of Latin students. Technically it should be ‘nullus dies’, e.g. Nullus dies omnino malus / no day is altogether evil, unus dies apud Dominum sicut mille anni et mille anni sicut dies unus / one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day etc. 

But the formulation is quite common, so I did some digging. It originates with a story by Pliny (Plin. Nat. 35.36) about the Greek painter Apelles, who apparently was steadfast in practicing his art. Pliny writes ‘It was a custom with Apelles, to which he most tenaciously adhered, never to let any day pass, however busy he might be, without exercising himself by tracing some outline or other; a practice which has now passed into a proverb’. Note that this is not about writing, but painting! 

Although Pliny mentions the proverb, he never formulates it. The modern formulation seems to originate with the Latin of Erasmus and other late medieval writers, e.g. ‘Nulla dies abeat, quin linea ducta supersit.’ ‘Let no day pass by, without an outline being drawn, and left to remain.’  So the formulation may just be bad medieval Latin. Nikitinski (‘Zum Ursprung des Spruches nulla dies sine linea’,Rheinisches Museum 142: 430-431, 1999) has argued that if Pliny had formulated it, he would have written ‘nullus dies sine linea’

Very interesting: the maxim pertained to painting before its use in connection with writing. Other extensions are possible. One can imagine an erudite cokehead abusing the phrase along with his nostrils.

Dr. Michael Gilleland is a bona fide classicist besides being an "antediluvian, bibliomaniac, and curmudgeon."  He offers a wealth of details and variant maxims here, but unless I missed it, finds no fault with the grammar of the nulla dies sine linea formulation.

"No Man is a Hypocrite in His Pleasures"

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 95:

Johnson: "No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures."

The Johnson in question is Samuel Johnson. Translator Bloom informs us that James Boswell's Vie de Samuel Johnson (Life of Samuel Johnson) was published in France in 1954. So it looks as if Camus was mining it for ideas. 

In a second footnote we read:

Camus adapted this quote into [his novel] The Fall: "No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures; have I read that or did I think it, my dear compatriot?"

Camus knew the answer, but that didn't stop him from passing on both the thought and its formulation as his own. Is that unseemly for a novelist? Can one plagiarize in a work of fiction? An interesting question.

What the Johnsonian saying means interests me more.  Does it mean that no man preaches a  pleasure he does not practice? An example would be a high school teacher who preaches the pleasures of the life of the mind to his students but spends his leisure hours at the racetrack.  But on this reading the saying comes out false.

Or does it mean that no man indulges in a pleasure that he does not enjoy? This is true, and so this is what I take Johnson to be saying. Consider the pleasure of smoking a fine cigar, a La Gloria Cubana, say. No one indulges in this pleasure if he does not like cigars.

A hypocrite in his pleasures would then be a man who indulged in pleasures he did not enjoy.  But this is much closer to algolagnia than it is to hypocrisy.

Should we say that Johnson's aphorism is flawed? Well, it got me thinking and is insofar forth good.

It got me enjoying the pleasures of the life of the mind which I both preach and indulge in.

Patrick Kurp on Arthur Krystal

Long-time friend of this weblog, and an accomplished blogger himself, Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence has an article out in the Los Angeles Review of Books entitled "Literature with a Capital L": On Arthur Krystal's "This Thing We Call Literature." (HT: Dave Lull)

Krystal was a protégé of Jacques Barzun, editing the late polymath’s The Culture We Deserve. Like Barzun, Krystal has resisted specialization. His approach to books is not academic: “There’s nothing wrong with admiring Elmore Leonard without likening him to Proust or Henry James.” To this he adds: “One can be a fan of Agatha Christie, but one can’t really be a fan of George Eliot.” Tell that to the Janeites and Trollopians, and to the devotees of Lee Child and Dean Koontz. Strictly speaking, Krystal isn’t a critic at all, and he certainly has no theories to peddle. We might think of him as an enthusiastic reader who happens to write. He reminds us of the respect once shown to Dr. Johnson’s notion of the common reader, “uncorrupted with literary prejudices.”

John Updike, Seven Stanzas at Easter

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

John Updike, 1960. (Source)

Given what we know from yesterday's Updike entry, the suspicion obtrudes that, while Updike clearly understands the Resurrection as orthodoxy understands it, his interest in it is merely aesthetic in Kierkegaard's sense, and not ethical in the Dane's sense, which suspicion comports well with the charge that Updike radically divorced Christian theology from Christian ethics.

Or perhaps, as a Protestant, Updike thinks that since God in Christ did all the work of atonement, he needn't do anything such as reform his life and struggle and strive for metanoia but can freely enjoy himself in the arms and partake of the charms of other men's wives.  Am I being fair?

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John Updike's Christianity

Gerald R. McDermott (emphases added):

In Updike’s religion, then, there are no commandments we are meant to keep except the obligation to accept what is: “Religion includes, as its enemies say, fatalism, an acceptance and consecration of what is.” Our only responsibility is to “appreciate” the great gift that life represents. He learned from Barth that the next life is simply this life in review, and from his Lutheranism, he wrote, “a rather antinomian Christianity”—the idea that there are no laws we should fear or live by—which he was “too timid to discard.” There is no hint of final judgment. Nor is there any imperative to repent or improve ourselves: in Begley’s words, “Original sin may be inescapable, but any concerted effort to improve one’s game resembles a righteous struggle for salvation.” And if there was anything he learned from Barth, it was that all human efforts to save ourselves are wrongheaded and futile. As one critic summed it up, Updike “radically divorced” Christian theology from Christian ethics.

The upshot was a self-indulgent religion that basked in self-affirmation while running from voices that would challenge the self to change, particularly in ways that were not pleasant. It is telling that Updike’s last poem ends with words of self-assurance from Psalm 23: “goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, forever.”

One cannot help thinking that Updike’s religion helped build the theological scaffolding for mainline Protestantism’s baptism of gay marriage. Updike wrote of mainline Protestants and their efforts to justify the sexual revolution. Although Updike himself regarded heterosexual sex as normative, his elevation of sex as a way to transcendence would prevent heterosexual Protestants from barring the door to other kinds of sex. Updike told the CBS reporter, “Sex is one of the means—maybe the foremost means—whereby the [moral and religious] search is conducted.” Once mainline America became persuaded—even in the absence of empirical evidence—that gays are born that way, how could they deny that their sex might be their way to the divine? Updike would surely have agreed. And millions of Updike readers could thank the novelist for helping them see that marriages defined by desire were not only a right but also a sacrament.

'See' is standardly employed as a verb of success. I wonder: does the author in his last sentence so intend it?  'Believe' would work better, no?

More importantly, it is just self-serving nonsense to view sex as the foremost means for conducting the moral and religious search. That sounds like a joke. I am put in mind of Chogyam Trungpa. According to one report, ". . . Trungpa slept with a different woman every night in order to transmit the teaching to them. L. intimated that it was really a hardship for Trungpa to do this, but it was his duty in order to spread the dharma."

We are concupiscent from the ground up. So it is no surprise that even Christianity can be so twisted as to serve the sex monkey by one who apparently was its slave.

But if truth be told, I just now ordered Couples to see how the brilliant Updike makes his case.  Updike is a master of social phenomenology as I discovered when I read Rabbit is Rich in the early '90s.

As for the radical divorce of theology and ethics, there cannot be anything salutary about splitting them asunder. But if split them you must, it would be better to jettison the theology and keep the ethics for the sake of our happiness in this world, which we know, as opposed to the next which we merely believe in.  It is an empirical question, but on balance the sexual revolution has not improved human eudaimonia. Our predicament post-pill is hardly a paradise.

Updike looks to be a poster boy for the false dichotomy of spirituality versus religion. 

Related: A Death Poem at Year's End.  I reproduce and comment on a fabulous Updike poem.

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Do You Speak English?

Then you are guilty of 'cultural appropriation' unless you are English.

Addendum 4/12:

A philosophy professor comments:

The claim in your post today, strikes me as clearly false.

 

Just because someone speaks a language (even as a primary language) doesn't mean they are cultural appropriators guilty of something.  Imagine the English colonize your land and people and force English upon you.  Then this conditional, which is what I think you are claiming, is false: "If you speak English and you are not English, then you are guilty of 'cultural appropriation'.

The good professor has found a counterexample to my conditional claim.  But he misses the point of my pithy little poke. My intention was to ridicule the politically correct silliness of those who see something reprehensible in, say, donning a sombrero when one is not a Mexican.  Aphorisms, maxims, and other sayings derive their punch from their pith. You have heard it said, briefly, and with wit, that "Brevity is the soul of wit."

 

Let us note en passant and in defiance of the content of the witticism that it can be found in William Shakespeare in Hamlet, Act II wherein the Bard has Polonius say:

Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit

And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,

I will be brief: your noble son is mad.

Was this beautiful coinage first put into circulation by Shakespeare? I have no idea.  But I digress.

 

Consider the following piece of folk wisdom,

He who hesitates is lost.

Counterexamples abound.  And the same goes for the competing maxim,

Look before you leap.  

If one were to rewrite them to make them proof against the punctilios of philosophers and logicians, the result would be something clunky and not particularly memorable.  For example,

It is often, but not always, the case that one who hesitates before acting misses his opportunity and in consequence of such hesitancy either loses his life or suffers some lesser, but nonetheless regrettable, loss.

But then one has traded the lawyerly for the literary.

 

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E. M. Cioran and Skepticism

I brought Cioran into my latest Pyrrhonian post to lay bare the contrast between the Christian's pursuit of a "peace that surpasses all understanding" (Philippians 4:7) and the Pyrrhonian's peace which is beneath understanding inasmuch as it is predicated upon not understanding -- and not caring any more about understanding. I then asked whether this could be a peace worth wanting.

I ended my Pyrrhonian post with the quip: "To Emil Cioran I would say: safety is overrated."  My point, in contemporary jargon, is that really fruitful living requires frequent and extended forays from one's 'comfort zone' into regions of stress and challenge and doxastic risk. 

Kai Frederik Lorentzen comments:

I think you do Cioran wrong insofar as he seems to be ambivalent about Skepticism. In Histoire et Utopie (1960), he writes: "Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls."

Cioran's spiritual yearning appears real to me.

I have read quite a bit of Cioran but not enough to venture a definitive judgment. So I don't know whether his spiritual yearning is genuine or just a literary posture. My impression is that he is a mere litterateur. But even if he is sincere, his scepticism seems distinct from Pyrrhonian Skepticism. Acolytes of the latter try not to dogmatize whereas it is not clear to me that Cioran avoids or tries to avoid a dogmatic scepticism/nihilism.  A bit of (inconclusive) evidence:

X, who instead of looking at things directly has spent his life juggling with concepts and abusing abstract terms, now that he must envisage his own death, is in desperate straits. Fortunately for him, he flings himself, as is his custom, into abstractions, into commonplaces illustrated by jargon. A glamorous hocus-pocus, such is philosophy. But ultimately, everything is hocus-pocus, except for this very assertion that participates in an order of propositions one dares not question because they emanate from an unverifiable certitude, one somehow anterior to the brain’s career. (E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered (New York: Seaver Books, 1983), translated from the French by Richard Howard, p.153)

A statement of Cioran’s scepticism. But his scepticism is half-hearted and dognatic since he insulates his central claim from sceptical corrosion. To asseverate that his central claim issues from “an unverifiable certitude” is sheer dogmatism since there is no way that this certitude can become a self-certitude luminous to itself. Compare the Cartesian cogito. In the cogito situation, a self’s indubitability is revealed to itself, and thus grounds itself. But Cioran invokes something anterior to the mind, something which, precisely because of it anteriority, cannot be known by any mind. Why then should we not consider his central claim – according to which everything is a vain and empty posturing – to be itself a vain and empty posturing?

Indeed, is this not the way we must interpret it given Cioran’s two statements of nihilism cited above? If everything is nothing, then surely there cannot be “an unverifiable certitude” anterior to the mind that is impervious to sceptical assault.

Again, one may protest that I am applying logic in that I am comparing different aphorisms with an eye towards evaluating their mutual consistency. It might be suggested that our man is simply not trying to be consistent. But then I say that he is an unserious literary scribbler with no claim on our attention. But the truth of the matter lies a bit deeper: he is trying have it both ways at once. He is trying to say something true but without satisfying the canons satisfaction of which is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of anything’s being true.

My interim judgment, then, is this. What we have before us is a form of cognitive malfunction brought about by hypertrophy of the sceptical faculty. Doubt is the engine of inquiry. Thus there is a healthy form of scepticism. But Cioran’s extreme scepticism is a disease of cognition rather than a means to it.   The writing, though, is brilliant.

The above commentary on the bolded passage is excerpted from a much longer entry, Some Aphorisms of E. M. Cioran with Commentary.

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Shakespeare on Lust

Sonnet 129: Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame

 

Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action; and till action, lust

Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,

Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,

Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had

Past reason hated as a swallowed bait

On purpose laid to make the taker mad;

Mad in pursuit and in possession so,

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;

A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe;

Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.

    All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

    To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

 

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Literary Stride

We adjust our stride to the steepness of the terrain: the steeper the trail, the shorter the steps. A good writer watches his literary stride: the more difficult the subject matter, the shorter the sentences. Back on the flat he leaps and lopes and stretches his legs.

Klavan on Experience

I am now on p. 118 of Andrew Klavan's memoir, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ. Thomas Nelson, 2016, 269 pp. As I reported a few days ago when I was on p. 18, 

If you are a tough-minded American Boomer like me on a religious/spiritual quest you will probably be able to 'relate' very well to this book. A fortiori, if you are Jewish.

The book gets better and better especially for those of us who are (i) 'true' Boomers and (ii) were influenced by the Zeitgeist of the '60s.  I divide the Boomer cohort (1946-1964) into the 'true' Boomers and the 'shadow' Boomers.  You are one of the former if and only if you remember the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November of 1963.  Otherwise you are a 'shadow' boomer.  Klavan, born in 1954, is a 'true' Boomer.  

Mike Gilleland, who is my age and few years older than Klavan, told me some years back that the '60s passed him by.  I would put it this way: many of those who came of age in the '60s were not of the '60s.  It is like a Christian's being in the world but not of it.  My point is that if you a 'true' Boomer of and not merely in the '60s, then Klavan's book is one you will want to read.

We were experience-hungry.  We were in quest of the Real and thought that it could be found by a close grappling with the seedier and seamier sides of life. We took drugs, consorted with dead-end women, got drunk in flophouses with bums, worked dirty and dangerous jobs, left on 1200 mile trips with five dollars in the pocket returning with ten.  This is what got a lot of us into a lot of trouble. Klavan:

Experience! That's what made a writer great, I thought. Harsh, brutal, savage Experience -- I would have done anything to get my hands on some. But where? There were nothing but lawns and homes and normal families around me as far as the eye could see.

I didn't want to go to war. Those in the know had declared the Vietnam conflict corrupt and evil. [. . .]

Instead I took jobs whenever I could -- not jobs that would teach me something or contribute to my future or career. No, I took jobs that I hoped would get me nearer to the grit of things: Experience. I was a gas jockey, a warehouseman, a truck driver, a construction worker, a delivery boy to some of the dodgier areas of New York City. After seventeen years in grassy peace and comfort, I was hungry for anything that looked like cruel reality. 

What I wanted most, though, was to wander. Not to travel -- to drift. [. . .] My romantic fantasies often involved a girl in some other town, not this town. A brief affair. A tearful goodbye. Then, babe, I've got to travel down  that lonesome, dusty road. (116-117)

At this point Klavan might have referenced Dylan's Don't Think Twice with its talk of long, lonesome roads and the lines:

So long honey babe
Where I'm bound, I cain't [sic] tell
But goodbye is too good a word, babe
So I'll just say fare thee well.

Robert Zimmerman, too, the middle-class Jewish son of a Hibbing, Minnesota appliance salesman. recoiled from the unreality of suburbia and hit the road, more or less.

Summing this up: reading Klavan's book I am reading about myself.  

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