While writing my first novel Big Sleep Boogie—available through Amazon now—I decided that an old book with a quincunx on the cover would be a perfect While writing my first novel Big Sleep Boogie—available through Amazon now—I decided that an old book with a quincunx on the cover would be a perfect McGuffin for the plot. The quincunx is the five-point pattern found on the five-point die, and, in the course of doing what I thought would be just a wee bit of research, I found quincunx concept—from its use in renaissance gardening to its ancient mystical implications—to be a fascinating one. It was a search that inevitably brought me to Sir Thomas Browne—17th century author of the essays “Religio Medici” and “Urne Burial The Garden of Cyrus.
Browne is a considerable prose stylist, an undeniable influence on that master of Romantic prose, Thomas De Quincey. Browne’s prose is periodic, ornate and difficult, and every passage typically has to be read more than once. I have to admit, though, that in The Garden of Cyrus Browne undoes himself. Even though it is only fifty pages long, it took me quite awhile to finish it. I still don’t think I understand it. But, like the few dozen pages of Finnegan’s Wake I completed, I enjoyed it more than almost anything else I’ve read that I barely understood at all.
I’m not sure the blame is Browne’s. After all, he was trying to something extraordinarily ambitious. In a small dense treatise of only five chapters—of course it would have five chapters—he strives to trace this five point patterns through the works of nature and the designs of man, catalogue its decussations (the crossings—like those of never fibres—that the pattern implies), and.suggest some of its mystical implications to its continual appearance in the universal order.
I can’t really recommend this book whole-heartedly, for its difficulties are considerable, but I would strongly advice you to dip into it, here and there, just to sample the wonders of its prose. Here’s just a little sample. I believe Browne’s purpose is to indicate to us that the same pattern of quincunx and decussation that can be found above us in the stars is also revealed below us in the stones of the earth:
Could we satisfie ourselves in the position of the lights above, or discover the wisedom of that order so invariably maintained in the fixed Stars of heaven; Could we have any light, why the stellary part of the first masse, separated into this order, that the Girdle of Orion should ever maintain its line, and the two Starres in Charles’s Wain never leave pointing at the Pole-Starre, we might abate the Pythagoricall Musick of the Spheres, the sevenfold Pipe of Pan; and the strange Cryptography of Gaffarell in his Starrie Booke of Heaven.
But not to look so high as Heaven or the single Quincunx of the Hyades upon the head of Taurus, the Triangle, and remarkable Crusero about the foot of the Centaur; observable rudiments there are hereof in subterraneous concretions, and bodies in the Earth; in the Gypsum or Talcum Rhomboides, in the Favaginites or honey-comb-stone, in the Asteria and Astroites, and in the crucigerous stone of S. Iago of Gallicia.
This is definitely minor Hawthorne, but then I always find Hawthorne—even of the minor sort—worth my time and attention. In this piece, the narrator—w This is definitely minor Hawthorne, but then I always find Hawthorne—even of the minor sort—worth my time and attention. In this piece, the narrator—who sounds a lot like the author—visits the ruin of the historic fort “Old Ticonderoga.” First he describes the ruin, and then indulges himself in a daydream about the three separate armies that once occupied the fort.
The portion of the ruin he describes in detail is the the inside of the old roofless barracks where he sits down to rest himself:
The exterior walls were nearly entire, constructed of gray, flat, unpicked stones, the aged strength of which promised long to resist the elements, if no other violence should precipitate their fall. — The roof, floors, partitions, and the rest of the wood-work had probably been burnt, except some bars of stanch old oak, which were blackened with fire, but still remained imbedded into the window-sills and over the doors. There were a few particles of plastering near the chimney, scratched with rude figures, perhaps by a soldier’s hand. A most luxuriant crop of weeds had sprung up within the edifice, and hid the scattered fragments of the wall. Grass and weeds grew in the windows, and in all the crevices of the stone, climbing, step by step, till a tuft of yellow flowers was waving on the highest peak of the gable.
Then our narrator begins a reverie about the various battles and occupying armies, ending with Ethan Allen’s motley crew being chased from the fort by British artillery:
Next came the hurried muster of the soldiers of liberty, when the cannon of Burgoyne, pointing down upon their stronghold from the brow of Mount Defiance, announced a new conqueror of Ticonderoga. No virgin fortress, this! Forth rushed the motley throng from the barracks, one man wearing the blue and buff of the Union, another the red coat of Britain, a third a dragoon’s jacket, and a fourth a cotton frock; here was a pair of leather breeches, and striped trousers there; a grenadier’s cap on one head, and a broad-brimmed hat, with a tall feather, on the next; this fellow shouldering a king’s arm, that might throw a bullet to Crown Point, and his comrade a long fowling-piece, admirable to shoot ducks on the lake. In the midst of the bustle, when the fortress was all alive with its last warlike scene, the ringing of a bell on the lake made me suddenly unclose my eyes, and behold only the gray and weed-grown ruins. They were as peaceful in the sun as a warrior’s grave.
“Old News,” written in 1836 but unpublished in book form until The Snow Image (1852) is certainly one of Hawthorne’s lesser works. Still, it is of int “Old News,” written in 1836 but unpublished in book form until The Snow Image (1852) is certainly one of Hawthorne’s lesser works. Still, it is of interest to any lover Hawthorne, for it demonstrates his keen interests in the sources of social history, and the way in which his own Massachusetts’ society changed over time.
“Old News,” a work in three parts, consists of Hawthorne’s descriptions of—and reflections upon—three collections of newspapers from three distinct periods: I. “Old News” (circa 1730), II. “The Old French War” (late 1750’s to early 1760’s), and III. “The Old Tory” (late 1770’s to early 1780’s).
In the first period, under the reign of George II, Hawthorne sees a variegated, burgeoning culture, its Puritan base now intertwined with working class Irish and black slaves, all caught up in the pursuit of commerce. (It must be noted that Hawthorne is wrong-headed on the subject of Northern slavery: “the slaves, we suspect, were the merriest part of the population, since it was their gift to be merry in the worst of circumstances; and they endured, comparatively, few hardships, under the domestic sway of our fathers.”) In the second period, Hawthorne emphasizes the martial character of the people, but also touches on the presence of a new “polite literature” and a surprising hint of luxury in middle-class life. In the last era, Hawthorne concentrates—perhaps because they were so foreign to his time—upon the views of an old loyal follower of the King, dismayed by this new movement toward revolution.
At the end of the the entire piece, Hawthorne makes it clear that he prefers the older newspapers to the newer:
Whatever antique fashions lingered into the War of the Revolution, or beyond it, they were not so strongly marked as to leave their traces in the public journals. Moreover, the old newspapers had an indescribable picturesqueness, not to be found in the later ones. Whether it be something in the literary execution, or the ancient print and paper, and the idea that those same musty pages have been handled by people once alive and bustling amid the scenes there recorded, yet now in their graves beyond the memory of man; so it is, that in those elder volumes we seem to find the life of a past age preserved between the leaves, like a dry specimen of foliage.
The Israeli novelist Amos Oz succumbed to cancer on December 28, 2018, at the age of 78. This small book of essays—three essays, to be precise—is the The Israeli novelist Amos Oz succumbed to cancer on December 28, 2018, at the age of 78. This small book of essays—three essays, to be precise—is the last book that he published before he died, and this little book—and their author—represent a more secular, liberal approach to being Jewish, something less and less common in the Israel of today.
The book’s first short essay, “Dear Zealots,” is an open letter to fanatics in general and Israeli fanatics in particular. Fanatics, Oz believes, are primarily people who see things in terms of black and white and wish to make others more like themselves. At the same time, their selves are extraordinarily precarious, filled with great anger and sentimentality, always ready to bow to the will of a charismatic leader who will unburden them of all moral decisions. The best way to avoid fanaticism, Oz says, is to respect other’s differences, learn to distinguish between shades of gray, and develop a sense of humor. The following excerpt sums things up pretty well:
The poet John Donne gave the world this wondrous line: No man is an island.” To this I dare to add: “No man is an island but each is a peninsula.” We all are partially joined to the land that is our family, our language, society, faiths and opinions, state and nationality, while the other side of each of us has its back to all those and its face to the sea, to the mountains, to the timeless elements, secret desires, loneliness, dreams, fears and death. . . . [E]very bond between people . . . is perhaps best when it exists as an encounter between peninsulas: close, sometimes extremely close, but without being erased. Without being assimilated. Without revoking one’s selfhood.
In the second essay, “Many Lights, Not One Light,” Oz speaks of Judaism as a culture, not just a religion, and makes it clear that there is a profoundly contrarian, anarchistic streak in Jewish thought:
It would be difficult to find two Jews who can agree on which is the most important [imperative], and it might be even hard to find one Jew who agrees with him- or herself about what came first, what subject has priority, how values should be ranked, and who is authorized to rank them . . . .
It is no accident of history that the Jews do not have a pope. If someone were to stand up and declare himself, or herself, “the Jews’ pope,” each of us would go up and tap him or her on the shoulder and say, “Hey, Pope, you don’t know me, but my grandma and your aunt used to do business together in Minsk, or Casablanca, so please sit down for five minutes—just five—while I explain to you once and for all what God wants us to do.”
Precisely because of its contrarian nature, Jewish culture must be democratic, open to many different approaches and ideas, and therefore is contrary to “Halachic Judaism,” that is, the most Orthodox, exclusionary elements:
What does Jewish culture comprise? It comprises everything we have amassed over the generations. Elements born inside it, as well as those absorbed from the outside, which become part of the family. Things that are customary, or used to be; things we all accept, as well as things only a few accept. Things accepted today, and things accepted in previous generations. Aspects that I accept, and ones I find annoying and distasteful. They are all included in Jewish culture. . . A certain type of humor and a tendency to wisecrack, which I cannot define but which I easily recognize whenever I encounter them. A blatant inclination to be critical and skeptical, to be ironic, self-pitying, and sometimes self-righteous. . . Ecstasy diluted with doubt. Euphoria blended with pessimism. Melancholy cheerfulness. And a profound, healthy suspicion of authority. A measure of stubborn resistance to injustice.
All of this, Oz says, is antithetical to the right-wing politics and Halachic Judaism that dominate the current Jewish state.
In the third and last essay, “Dreams Israel Should Let Go of Soon,” is Oz’s vigorous defense of the two-state solution—no longer considered achievable in some quarters—as the only possible road to the preservation of Israel.If there are not two states here, very soon, there will be one. If there is one state, it will be an Arab one that stretches from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. . . If we don’t have two states, it is likely that in order to thwart the establishment of an Arab state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan, a temporary dictatorship will be instituted by fanatic Jews, a racist regime that uses an iron fist to oppress both Arab residents and its Jewish opponents. That sort of dictatorship will not last long. Oz says that he word he hates most these days is “irreversible,” used by both the right-wing Orthodox settlers and the left-wing anti-Zionists to describe the Israeli settlements in the occupation territories and thus crush the two-state dream of the Zionist left. But Oz makes it clear that he will not despair and will not leave his home.
And now comes a little confession: I love Israel even when I cannot stand it. If I have to fall over in the street one day, I would like it to happen on a street in Israel. Not in London, not in Paris, not in Berlin or New York. Here people will come over immediately and pick me up. (Granted, once I’m back on my feet there w2ill probably be quite a few who will be happy to see me fall down again.
Amos Oz got his wish—sort of. He died—not on the street, but—in the Rabin Medical Center at Petah Tikva, about 10 kilometers east of Tel Aviv....more
As an old guy, I came late to the “mansplaining” thing, but now that I know what it is and also realize that I have been doing it for at least forty y As an old guy, I came late to the “mansplaining” thing, but now that I know what it is and also realize that I have been doing it for at least forty years (or so my wife tells me), I thought I’d read the essay that started it all, “Men Explain Things to Me”--and the other pieces in this brief collection of essays—and drink (as I like to do) from the source, from the ideational spring.
I am glad I did. I loved the essay, and enjoyed the eight others that followed. Rebecca Solnit is that rarity, an imaginative and incisive thinker who writes with superb style, and I am proud that I have discovered her, (Yes, I know, I know: much of the world discovered her ten—perhaps fifteen, twenty—years ago.)
I have a particular affection for “Men Explain Things to Me” because it was the essay that led me to Solnit, but I think it’s not nearly the best thing in the collection. My two favorites are “Grandmother Spider” in which Solnit uses a painting by Ana Teresa Fernandez (of a woman in high heels outlined—yet almost entirely obscured—by a white sheet hanging from a clothesline) as a metaphor for how, in spite of the continual attempts to erase women from the world, the traces of their presence continually remain, and “Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable”, which explores the blessed uncertainty of the future as hinted at in a quote of Virginia Woolf: “The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.”
Each of the other essays, though, is worth reading: “The Longest War” (violence against women), “Worlds Collide in a Luxury Suite” (the rape of women and the exploitation of the developing world as exemplified by the case of the IMF’s Dominque Strauss-Kahn and his attack on the hotel maid Naffissatou Diallo), “In Praise of the Threat” (the real meaning of marriage equality), and “Pandora’s Box and the Volunteer Police Force (how rape-culture language is used to intimidate women on-line). For those readers lucky enough to possess the expanded 2015 edition, there are two additional essays: “Cassandra and the Creeps” (how “credibility” is used against women who speak out)—my third favorite essay, particularly noteworthy in the wake of the recent Kavanaugh hearings: "#YesAllWomen: Feminists Rewrite the Story" (motivated by the “incel” hostility that produced the Isla Vista murders).
I will conclude with an edited version of Solnit’s classic “mansplaining” story, an incident which took place at a party at Aspen, where she and her forty-something women friends, who “passed for the occasion’s young ladies" among the gathering's older crowd, were confronted by the host, “an imposing man who’d made a lot of money”:
”So, I hear you’ve written a couple of books?”
I replied, “Several, actually.”
He said, in the way you encourage your friend’s seventeeen-year-old to describe flute practice, “And what are they about?”
. . . I began to speak of only the most recent . . . “River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West,” my book about the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life.
He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. “And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?”
He was already telling me about the very important book—with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority. . . .
So Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when [my friend] Sallie interrupted him, to say. “That’s her book.”
. . . . And then, as if in a nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn’t read, just read about in the “New York Times Book Review” a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless—for a moment, before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing, and we’ve never really stopped.
“The Old Manse”—originally published as the introduction to Hawthorne’s short story collection Mosses from the Old Manse—is probably the best of Hawth “The Old Manse”—originally published as the introduction to Hawthorne’s short story collection Mosses from the Old Manse—is probably the best of Hawthorne’s familiar essays. Reminiscent of many of the sketches included in his earlier Twice Told Tales (first intended as frame stories for an abandoned youthful project, The Story Teller), it shares with them an easy conversational style markedly different from the more serious tone of the tales. “The Old Manse” differs from these earlier pieces, however, in that it is thoroughly finished work, intended to stand on its own, and that it benefits from a particular weight and depth derived from the fact that it is a semi-biographical utterance from a notable—if not yet famous—public man.
Also central to the value of the essay is that it was written at his home “The Old Manse,” a notable building in a notable neighborhood. The neighborhood was Concord, Massachusetts—not far the legendary Revolutionary War battlefield, and “the old manse” “The old manse” (a venerable Scots term meaning “formerly the minister’s house”) was once the residence of William Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grandfather. (Emerson, in fact, from whom Hawthorne rented the house in 1842, had composed the first draft of “Nature” in one of the manse’s upstairs room eight years earlier.)
Hawthorne takes his readers on a tour of the grounds, as if we were his highly valued guests, showing us the garden, the river, the old battlefield, the even older ruins of a native American village. Later, it begins to rain, and he takes us inside, where he shows us library, and tells us a little something about the manses’ two ghosts. It is a memorable visit, well worth the reader’s time.
Here are a few highlights of the tour.
On the old battlefield:
On the farther shore, overhung by a clump of elder-bushes, we discern the stone abutment of the bridge. . . . The stream has here about the breadth of twenty strokes of a swimmer’s arm — a space not too wide when the bullets were whistling across. Old people who dwell hereabouts will point out, the very spots on the western bank where our countrymen fell down and died; and on this side of the river an obelisk of granite has grown up from the soil that was fertilized with British blood. The monument, not more than twenty feet in height, is such as it befitted the inhabitants of a village to erect in illustration of a matter of local interest rather than what was suitable to commemorate an epoch of national history. . . A humbler token of the fight, yet a more interesting one than the granite obelisk, may be seen close under the stone wall which separates the battle-ground from the precincts of the parsonage. It is the grave — marked by a small, mossgrown fragment of stone at the head and another at the foot — the grave of two British soldiers who were slain in the skirmish . . . Soon was their warfare ended; a weary night-march from Boston, a rattling volley of musketry across the river, and then these many years of rest.
The Native American village:
Here, in some unknown age, before the white man came, stood an Indian village . . . . The site is identified by the spear and arrow-heads, the chisels, and other implements of war, labor, and the chase, which the plough turns up from the soil. You see a splinter of stone, half hidden beneath a sod; it looks like nothing worthy of note; but, if you have faith enough to pick it up, behold a relic! Thoreau, who has a strange faculty of finding what the Indians have left behind them, first set me on the search; and I afterwards enriched myself with some very perfect specimens . . .
Hawthorne’s impressions of Emerson, and his very different opinion of Emerson’s followers:
It was good . . . to meet him in the woodpaths, or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure, intellectual gleam diffused about his presence like the garment of a shining one; and be, so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man alive as if expecting to receive more than he could impart. And, in truth, the heart of many an ordinary man had, perchance, inscriptions which he could not read. But it was impossible to dwell in his vicinity without inhaling more or less the mountain atmosphere of his lofty thought, which, in the brains of some people, wrought a singular giddiness — new truth being as heady as new wine. Never was a poor little country village infested with such a variety of queer, strangely dressed, oddly behaved mortals, most of whom took upon themselves to be important agents of the world’s destiny, yet were simply bores of a very intense water.
First published anonymously (“by a Pedestrian”) in New-England Magazine, IX (November and December 1835), These four fragments were originally part of First published anonymously (“by a Pedestrian”) in New-England Magazine, IX (November and December 1835), These four fragments were originally part of Hawthorne’s first grand conception The Story Teller in which the stories of the eponymous hero—a young vagabond named Oberon—would be told within the context of a series of American scenes:
With each specimen will be given a sketch of the circumstances in which the story was told. Thus my air-drawn pictures will be set in frames, perhaps more valuable than the pictures themselves, since they will be embossed with groups of characteristic figures, amid the lake and mountain scenery, the villages and fertile fields, of our native land.
"The Notch," and "Our Evening Party among the Mountains" are each part of a mountain context originally intended to frame “The Ambitious Guest” and “The Great Carbuncle”) and “The Canal Boat” chosen as a context for “A Rill from the Town Pump” and “Wakefield” (four stories later published in Twice-Told Tales.
Although Hawthorne soon abandoned the grand project of The Story Teller as unwieldy, he couldn’t bring himself to reject these “sketches from memory,” and later published them under that title in Mosses from the Old Manse. I am glad he did so. Their prose possesses a narrative simplicity, a natural descriptive grace very different from the later, nuanced, allegorical Hawthorne, and it is pleasant to contemplate these early examples of a young literary giant at work.
Here, for example is Hawthorne’s description of “the diversified panorama along the banks of the canal.”:
Sometimes the scene was a forest, dark, dense, and impervious, breaking away occasionally and receding from a lonely tract, covered with dismal black stumps, where, on the verge of the canal, might be seen a log-cottage, and a sallow-faced woman at the window. Lean and aguish, she looked like Poverty personified, half clothed, half fed, and dwelling in a desert, while a tide of wealth was sweeping by her door. Two or three miles further would bring us to a lock, where the slight impediment to navigation had created a little mart of trade. Here would be found commodities of all sorts, enumerated in yellow letters on the window-shutters of a small grocery-store, the owner of which had set his soul to the gathering of coppers and small change, buying and selling through the week, and counting his gains on the blessed Sabbath. The next scene might be the dwellinghouses and stores of a thriving village, built of wood or small gray stones, a church-spire rising in the midst, and generally two taverns, bearing over their piazzas the pompous titles of "hotel," "exchange," "tontine," or "coffee-house." Passing on, we glide now into the unquiet heart of an inland city--of Utica, for instance--and find ourselves amid piles of brick, crowded docks and quays, rich warehouses and a busy population. We feel the eager and hurrying spirit of the place, like a stream and eddy whirling us along with it. Through the thickest of the tumult goes the canal, flowing between lofty rows of buildings and arched bridges of hewn stone. Onward, also, go we, till the hum and bustle of struggling enterprise die away behind us, and we are threading an avenue of the ancient woods again.
First published in the London Magazine (October 1823), this short piece by the author of Confessions of an Opium Eater may be the best thing Thomas De First published in the London Magazine (October 1823), this short piece by the author of Confessions of an Opium Eater may be the best thing Thomas De Quincy ever wrote. Its subject is the moment in Macbeth, after King Duncan’s murder, when MacDuff begins knocking at the gate, and how—to the boy De Quincey—it “reflected back upon the murderer a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity.” Why? The adult De Quincey wondered, and proceeded to explore the topic in this brief essay.
I have heard this essay described as one of the first examples of psychological criticism, but I think it is more unique than that. Psychological criticism, as I understand it, is the psychological examination of the motivations of the individual character or perhaps of the writer himself. But this essay is something rarer, more characteristically Romantic: the explorations of the sensations of the observer of the work as a method of determining meaning:
my understanding could furnish no reason why the knocking at the gate in Macbeth should produce any effect, direct or reflected. In fact, my understanding said positively that it could not produce any effect. But I knew better: I felt that it did; and I waited and clung to the problem until further knowledge should enable me to solve it.
Then De Quincey proceeds to solve his problem, not by reference to Aristotle or Longinus or the writings of Samuel Coleridge, but to the story of the Ratcliff Highway Murders, a sensational event of the time.
I won’t spoil your reading pleasure by summarizing De Quincey’s discovery, but I will say that his essay helped me solve a related problem. Why is it that, every time I watch Hitchcock’s Psycho, and Norman Bates, having loaded Marion’s corpse in the trunk, shoves her car into the river, why is it that when the car pauses for a second, floating as if miraculously, putting all Norman's efforts in danger, why is it that (though I like Marion, loathe Norman) I find myself completely on Norman's side now, shouting at that floating car once again: “Down! Goddam you! Sink down!”...more
In these eight brief essays, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Michael Chabon tells us stories about his teenage children and shares the vulnerability o In these eight brief essays, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Michael Chabon tells us stories about his teenage children and shares the vulnerability of parenthood: what it feels like to be reduced to a “minder,” a receding figure of dwindling relevance, looking for the permissible moments to be helpful, striving to be of use. Yet he shares the rewards of parenting too: we see him find those permissible moments, and share his joy as his children grow closer even as they grow beyond him.
The first essay (“The Opposite of Writing”) is an introduction of sorts), in which Chabon—years later, now a father of four—responds to the advice of a famous novelist who told him never to have children. The second piece (“Little Man”) is the best, about a trip he and his youngest son made to Paris for Fashion Week (fourteen-year-old Abe is obsessed with fashion; his father Michael couldn’t care less). The other six essays, though, are good too: “Adventures in Euphemism” (how to deal with the “N-word” when reading Huckleberry Finn aloud to your children), “The Bubble People” (during a visit to a neighborhood Berkeley coffeehouse—where his fifteen-year-old daughter sports a rasberry pillbox hat with a veil—Chabon reflects upon growing up in sedate Pittsburgh, and wonders, “Which one is the bubble?”), “Against Dickitude” (how does a father respond to his teenage son’s callous ignoring of a girl?), “The Old Ball Game” (A daughter and a son help Chabon wrestle with the mythic enormities and the complex realities of baseball), “Be Cool or Be Cast Out” (Clothing—for both him and older son—as a badge of defiance and self-assertion, and “Pops” (a memoir of his own brilliant father).
This book is a brief, but eventful journey, and throughout Chabon shows himself to be a loving, parent, always looking out for the opportunity to attain th the brief, occasional moment of relevance. May we all be so loving and attentive . . . and so lucky....more
This short work was a bit of a disappointment. I have been an admirer of DeQuincey for many years, and have fallen greatly in love—during readings and This short work was a bit of a disappointment. I have been an admirer of DeQuincey for many years, and have fallen greatly in love—during readings and subsequent re-readings—with The Confessions of an English Opium Eater, “On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts,” and “The English Mail Coach.” But in addition, although I have not re-read it for at least a quarter of a century, I have a distinctly positive memory of “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” a short essay based upon what I believe most good literary criticism should be based upon: the sensory and emotional effect of the individual work upon the sensibility of the intelligent viewer or reader. Hoping to get more of that sort of criticism, I decided to read De Quincey’s Shakespeare: a Biography. After all, it was free on-line. And—as I said—it was short.
What I didn’t realize, though, when I begun my reading, was that this was not a magazine essay, like “On the Knocking...”, “On Murder...”, or “The English Mail Coach,” but instead an entry that DeQuincey had been commissioned to write for the Encyclopedia Brittanica, 7th Edition (1838). His magnificent periodic sentences are still here, every phrase or clause another by-way or back-track in a convoluted but always fascinating mental journey, but this time—in keeping with the sedate character of an encyclopedia article—his destinations are not nearly as eccentric, surprising, or insightful as in his customary reveries.
Of course, to give De Quincey credit, writing a Shakespeare biography is not easy, since there is so little known of the great man, and I suspect De Quincey sometimes stretches his speculations to the breaking point in an effort to pad the word count. For example, he spends altogether too much time attempting to prove Shakespeare’s marriage must have been unhappy, based on the difference in age (his wife was older) and the fact that she may have trapped him into marriage (his first child was born six months after the wedding), but such a supposition is little more than conjecture, and does not really tell us much about the man. This, and other such speculations, I found long-winded and tedious. They do, however, add to the articles length (which may have been their real purpose).
At the end of the biography, though, De Quincey does have a few interesting things to say about the plays themselves. It was here that I felt the great Shakespearean critic of "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth" briefly revive, at least for a few paragraphs:
ON SHAKESPEARE’S SKILL AT SUMMONING GHOSTS (HAMLET’S FATHER)
In summoning back to earth “the majesty of buried Denmark,” how like an awful necromancer does Shakspeare appear! All the pomps and grandeurs which religion, which the grave, which the popular superstition had gathered about the subject of apparitions, are here converted to his purpose, and bend to one awful effect. The wormy grave brought into antagonism with the scenting of the early dawn; the trumpet of resurrection suggested, and again as an antagonist idea to the crowing of the cock, (a bird ennobled in the Christian mythus by the part he is made to play at the Crucifixion;) its starting “as a guilty thing” placed in opposition to its majestic expression of offended dignity when struck at by the partisans of the sentinels; its awful allusions to the secrets of its prison-house; its ubiquity, contrasted with its local presence; its aerial substance, yet clothed in palpable armor; the heart-shaking solemnity of its language, and the appropriate scenery of its haunt, viz., the ramparts of a capital fortress, with no witnesses but a few gentlemen mounting guard at the dead of night,—what a mist, what a mirage of vapor, is here accumulated, through which the dreadful being in the centre looms upon us in far larger proportions, than could have happened had it been insulated and left naked of this circumstantial pomp!
ON HIS APTNESS OF EXPRESSIONS OF THOUGHT AND SENTIMENT
From his works alone might be gathered a golden bead-roll of thoughts the deepest, subtilest, most pathetic, and yet most catholic and universally intelligible; the most characteristic, also, and appropriate to the particular person, the situation, and the case, yet, at the same time, applicable to the circumstances of every human being, under all the accidents of life, and all vicissitudes of fortune.
ON THE NATURALNESS OF HIS DIALOGUE
. . . in Shakspeare . . . in all his impassioned dialogues, each reply or rejoinder seems the mere rebound of the previous speech. Every form of natural interruption, breaking through the restraints of ceremony under the impulses of tempestuous passion; every form of hasty interrogative, ardent reiteration when a question has been evaded; every form of scornful repetition of the hostile words; every impatient continuation of the hostile statement; in short, all modes and formulae by which anger, hurry, fretfulness, scorn, impatience, or excitement under any movement whatever, can disturb or modify or dislocate the formal bookish style of commencement, —these are as rife in Shakspeare’s dialogue as in life itself . . . .
First published United States Magazine and Democratic Review, XVI (April, 1845). “P’s Correspondence"—although not completely successful—is unusual an First published United States Magazine and Democratic Review, XVI (April, 1845). “P’s Correspondence"—although not completely successful—is unusual and extraordinarily interesting. It is at once an alternate history, a frame-story including an unreliable narrator, a case study of madness, and a satiric commentary on the youthful dead heroes of the previous generation, and what they would have been like if they had lived—as most of us do—to a less romantic and attractive old age.
An unnamed narrator introduces us to his friend P, whose hallucinatory experiences he describes as “not so much a delusion, as a partly wilful and partly involuntary sport of the imagination.” In his letter, P tells us of entertaining great men in London, men whom we know died in their youth but who have continued to live and age in P’s imagination. He seems to relish the fact that in old age these giant personalities have become too ridiculous for greatness, and, even though the occasional memory of a tomb or a terminal biography may frightens him into reality, P. tenaciously maintains his delusion, and continues to gently mock the ruins of great men.
Here are three of P.’s portraits:
LORD BYRON AT 60
He wears a brown wig, very luxuriantly curled, and extending down over his forehead. The expression of his eyes is concealed by spectacles. His early tendency to obesity having increased, Lord Byron is now enormously fat; so fat as to give the impression of a person quite overladen with his own flesh, and without sufficient vigor to diffuse his personal life through the great mass of corporeal substance, which weighs upon him so cruelly. . . Were I disposed to be caustic, I might consider this mass of earthly matter as the symbol, in a material shape, of those evil habits and carnal vices which unspiritualize man's nature, and clog up his avenues of communication with the better life. But this would be too harsh; and besides, Lord Byron's morals have been improving, while his outward man has swollen to such unconscionable circumference. . . .
ROBERT BURNS AT 85
His white hair floats like a snow-drift around his face, in which are seen the furrows of intellect and passion, like the channels of headlong torrents that have foamed themselves away. . . . He has that cricketty sort of liveliness--I mean the cricket's humor of chirping for any cause or none--which is perhaps the most favorable mood that can befall extreme old age. . . . It seems as if his ardent heart and brilliant imagination had both burnt down to the last embers, leaving only a little flickering flame in one corner, which keeps dancing upward and laughing all by itself. . . . Burns then began to repeat Tam O'Shanter, but was so tickled with its wit and humor--of which, however, I suspect he had but a traditionary sense--that he soon burst into a fit of chirruping laughter, succeeded by a cough, which brought this not very agreeable exhibition to a close. On the whole, I would rather not have witnessed it.
NAPOLEON AT 76
There is no surer method of annihilating the magic influence of a great renown, than by exhibiting the possessor of it in the decline, the overthrow, the utter degradation of his powers--buried beneath his own mortality--and lacking even the qualities of sense, that enable the most ordinary men to bear themselves decently in the eye of the world. This is the state to which disease, aggravated by long endurance of a tropical climate, and assisted by old age--for he is now above seventy--has reduced Bonaparte. . . While I was observing him, there chanced to be a little extra bustle in the street; and he, the brother of Caesar and Hannibal--the Great Captain, who had veiled the world in battle smoke, and tracked it round with bloody footsteps--was seized with a nervous trembling, and claimed the protection of the two policemen by a cracked and dolorous cry.
If you are an agnostic with few illusions who seeks the consolations of philosophy; if you are fortified by Ligotti’s bleak analysis (A Conspiracy Aga If you are an agnostic with few illusions who seeks the consolations of philosophy; if you are fortified by Ligotti’s bleak analysis (A Conspiracy Against the Human Race) and sustained by Cioran’s grim maxims (A Short History of Decay); if the fiction of J.G. Ballard, Will Self, and Jim Crace is congruent with your assumptions, congenial with your attitudes; then John Gray’s Straw Dogs may be the book for you.
The atheist Gray, who rejects the assumptions of Christianity, here targets the contemporary consensus of humanism. In ridding itself of theistic illusions, Gray believes, secular humanism didn’t go nearly far enough.
For Gray, Utopianism is a variant of the Kingdom of God, progress a non-theistic version of salvation history, the exaltation of human consciousness and the celebration of free will little more than the vestiges of a repressed belief in the integrity and persistence of the immortal soul. Gray argues that there is no real evidence for any of these commonly accepted beliefs: human consciousness is fitful, free will illusory, progress a fiction (history is cyclical, not forward-looking), and ”utopia”—given the contrary nature of man—will be (at best) the occasional result of autocratic, repressive regimes.
Although Gray’s book challenges our comfortable assumptions, it also offers its own severe form of consolation. If we cease to believe in progress, to yearn for utopia, we may save ourselves from continual disappointment; if we cease to believe in a unitary self in command of fictive choices, we may more easily immerse ourselves—as the Daoist and Zen Buddhist do—in the successive ebb and flow of time, the "lucid dream" which constitutes humankind’s richest simulacrum of reality.
Although Gray’s laconic style lacks Cioran’s witty ironies and Ligotti’s deadpan humor, he makes up for it with his wide-ranging scholarship and the concentrated power of his thought. There is much in this book to ponder, much to which a thoughtful reader may return, again and again.
Here are eight of my favorite passages:
* * * * * The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialisation, 'Western civilisation' or any flaw in human institutions. It is a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate. Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation.
* * * * * Cities are no more artificial than the hives of bees. The internet is as natural as a spider's web. As Margulis and Sagan have written, we are ourselves technological devices, invented by ancient bacterial communities as means of genetic survival: 'We are a part of an intricate network that comes from the original bacterial takeover of the Earth. Our powers and intelligence do not belong specifically to us but to all life.'
* * * * * Among us, science serves two needs: for hope and censorship. Today, only science supports the myth of progress. If people cling to the hope of progress, it is not so much from genuine belief as from fear of what may come if they give it up.
* * * * * Over the past 200 years, philosophy has shaken off Christian faith. It has not given up Christianity's cardinal error — the belief that humans are radically different from all other animals.
* * * * * Postmodernists parade their relativism as a superior kind of humility — the modest acceptance that we cannot claim to have the truth. In fact, the postmodern denial of truth is the worst kind of arrogance. In denying that the natural world exists independently of our beliefs about it, postmodernists are implicitly rejecting any limit on human ambitions. By making human beliefs the final arbiter of reality, they are in effect claiming that nothing exists unless it appears in human consciousness.
* * * * * Even the deepest contemplation only recalls us to our unreality. Seeing that the self we take ourselves to be is illusory does not mean seeing through it to something else. It is more like surrendering to a dream. To see ourselves as figments is to awake, not to reality, but to a lucid dream, a false awakening that has no end.
* * * * * Action preserves a sense of self-identity that reflection dispels. When we are at work in the world we have a seeming solidity. Action gives us consolation for our inexistence. It is not the idle dreamer who escapes from reality. It is practical men and women, who turn to a life of action as a refuge from insignificance.
* * * * * Other animals do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?
I chose Thoreau’s essay Civil Disobedience as my 2018 Fourth of July read, figuring I could write something quick and easy, something about the Resist I chose Thoreau’s essay Civil Disobedience as my 2018 Fourth of July read, figuring I could write something quick and easy, something about the Resistance, Generalissimo Trump, and the coming Blue Wave. Yada yada yada. Something inspiring and comforting.
But it didn’t work out that way.
I found Thoreau’s personality prickly, many of his pronouncements naive and uncongenial. I don't deny that his essay is morally challenging, and that it is also stylistically rich, filled with dozens of memorable passages. (You should read it again for yourself, and rediscover how fine it is.) But it is also thorny, and dense, and more than a little absurd. And yet . . . there was something about my encounter with Thoreau that would not let me rest.
That’s how it is when one crosses paths with a saint. St. Francis of Assisi makes me feel like that too. Histrionic, ostentatiously guileless, he never realized that his moral theatrics were permitted—indeed, fostered—by friends and family, and by the compromised social institutions he held up to criticism. Still, his witness challenges us all. Even his most extreme gestures—like the yoke the prophet Jeremiah placed upon his own neck—were part of his call, integral to his inspiration.
And so it was with Thoreau. At the age of 27, Thoreau committed his act of civil disobedience: a refusal to pay the poll tax as a protest against the land-grabbing Mexican War and the inherent evil of slavery. But he only spent one night in the Concord jail (less time, and in a much nicer jail, than his disciples Gandhi and MLK Jr.), his tax having been paid by an anonymous donor (probably his aunt.)
That one night in jail was an epiphany for the young Henry David, for he saw the heart of his own little town differently than he had before, almost as it too were part of Nature:
It was like travelling into a far country, such as I had never expected to behold, to lie there for one night. It seemed to me that I never had heard the town clock strike before, nor the evening sounds of the village; for we slept with the windows open, which were inside the grating. It was to see my native village in the light of the Middle Ages, and our Concord was turned into a Rhine stream, and visions of knights and castles passed before me. They were the voices of old burghers that I heard in the streets. I was an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent village inn- a wholly new and rare experience to me. It was a closer view of my native town. I was fairly inside of it. I never had seen its institutions before. . . .
When I came out of prison- for some one interfered, and paid that tax- I did not perceive that great changes had taken place on the common . . . and yet a change had to my eyes come over the scene- the town, and State, and country- greater than any that mere time could effect. I saw yet more distinctly the State in which I lived. I saw to what extent the people among whom I lived could be trusted as good neighbors and friends; that their friendship was for summer weather only; that they did not greatly propose to do right; . . . they . . . hoped, by a certain outward observance and a few prayers, and by walking in a particular straight though useless path from time to time, to save their souls. . .
This last passage is the one that touched me close to the heart, for I am that supposed “good neighbor,” that “summer weather” friend. “From time to time” I have walked that “straight though useless path,” but I am far from certain that walking that path I have managed to save my soul.
Do you think a prayer to St. Henry David would help?
I’ll end with the conclusion of Thoreau’s account of the morning he was released from jail, for it ends—fittingly enough—with a return to the realm of Nature:
I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour- for the horse was soon tackled- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
The subject of this essay is the lowly sea shell: how its shape appears to the human eye and how it got formed that way. But do not be deceived, for t The subject of this essay is the lowly sea shell: how its shape appears to the human eye and how it got formed that way. But do not be deceived, for the essay itself is not always easy to follow. I think this is partly because it was written by a poet, who uses his subtle philosophical skills primarily in the service of metaphor, not the other way round.)
Paul Valery’s short but elaborate inquiry unites naive fancy, philosophical analysis and poetic vision in a meditation, ostensibly on the seashell itself, but in actuality on the unique creative methods of nature. Its author observes that shells and other natural objects—crystals and flowers, for example—are beautiful but also mysterious: although we immediately intuit their formal structure, the method by which their form is created continues to baffle us:
We can appreciate the structure of these objects, and this interests us and holds our attention, but we do not understand their gradual formation, and that is what intrigues us. Although we ourselves were formed by imperceptible growth, we do not know how to create anything in this way.
It is this wondrous process of development, by which the simple gastropod, with a glacial slowness, creates in a way man cannot observe or completely comprehend, which provides the heart of Valery’s meditation.
Nothing we know of our own actions enables us to imagine what it may be that so gracefully modulates these surfaces, element by element, row by row, without other tools that those contained in the thing that is being fashioned; what it may be that so miraculously harmonizes and adjusts the curves, and finished the work with a boldness, an ease, a precision which the most graceful creations of the potter or bronze founder are far from equaling. Our artists do not derive the material of their works from their own substance, and the form for which they strive springs from a specialized application of their mind, which can be completely disengaged from their being. Perhaps what we call perfection in art (which all do not strive for and some disdain) is only the sense of desiring or finding in a human work the sureness of execution, the inner necessity, the indissolable bond between form and material that are revealed to us in the humblest of shells.
This brief essay, first printed in Pioneer, I (February, 1843), is a fine example of Hawthorne’s mature allegorical style. In it, the narrator and his This brief essay, first printed in Pioneer, I (February, 1843), is a fine example of Hawthorne’s mature allegorical style. In it, the narrator and his friend visit the hall of fantasy where they encounter writers and artists (of course), but also planners of cities and railroads, idol momentary dreamers, social reformers, religious cultists, and ends with the most extreme fantasist of all: Mister Miller, patriarch of the Millerites (later the Seventh Day Adventists) who predicted that the end of the world would come in the year this essay was published, 1843. The essay does not condemn fantasy, but praises it (at least in small doses), but it nevertheless reserves its greatest praise for the great green earth that Miller’s fantasy condemns to destruction:
"The poor old Earth!" I repeated. "What I should chiefly regret in her destruction would be that very earthliness, which no other sphere or state of existence can renew or compensate. The fragrance of flowers, and of new-mown hay; the genial warmth of sunshine, and the beauty of a sunset among clouds; the comfort and cheerful glow of the fireside; the deliciousness of fruits, and of all good cheer; the magnificence of mountains, and seas, and cataracts, and the softer charm of rural scenery; even the fast-falling snow, and the gray atmosphere through which it descends--all these, and innumerable other enjoyable things of earth, must perish with her. Then the country frolics; the homely humor; the broad, open-mouthed roar of laughter, in which body and soul conjoin so heartily! I fear that no other world can show us anything just like this.
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