New Series
September 29, 2009
Barnes and Noble has put out a new set of books under the general label of "B&N Rediscovers." I think they've come up with a fine idea.
They're re-publishing notable books from the past, in hard covers , at reasonable prices. The selections are not really "classics" in the sense of Jane Austen or Charles Dickens but rather studies in literature, history, philosophy, religion and science that have earned a lasting reputation, but have, till now, not been readily available.
The first item I bought from the series was Owen Barfield's History in English Words, a book not known by hordes of people, but one that ought to be. It's based on Barfield's understanding that language reveals the evolution of consciousness. You might even say, after you work your way through the first pages of Barfield's text, that language is consciousness. Then you could go on to grasp that consciousness is a very strange phenomenon.
I was glad to see Barfield included in the series because his presence bespeaks the seriousness of the effort. He is one of those scholars who rise above the normal standards of the academy to write significant books that ultimately appeal more to general readers than to colleagues in a particular field. The significant thing about such writers is that they're accessible but they do not condescend.
I was also glad in a personal way because I knew Barfield slightly, visited him at his home in southeast England, and corresponded with him briefly afterwards. He was a man who could be simultaneously charming and blunt, and never give any hint that there's a conflict between those modes. There are too few persons in the world with that ability because it's rare to achieve such self-knowledge as Barfield possessed.
So, I'm glad to see him included among other writers of his class, persons like Loren Eiseley, Morris Kline, Michael Grant, John Gardner and Susanne Langer. I hope the series will get a larger response from readers -- and buyers -- than I fear it will.
More Cheap Reading
June 27, 2009
I'm almost shy to admit it, but I have read another schlocky novel with a Jane Austen theme. This one I plucked off the remainder table at Barnes and Noble in Burlington. The author is Shannon Hale and the title, Austenland.
The notion behind this tale is that there are legions of rich women who dream of Austen-like romance. So an enterprise in England has been set up to give them what they want. At a secluded country house, everything has been taken -- as near as possible -- back to 1810, or so. And a cast of actors, in the guise of visiting guests, has been supplied to carry out parts which vaguely resemble Jane Austen's characters.
The holiday lasts three weeks, and everyone agrees to stay in character the whole time -- an agreement which proves somewhat difficult to honor. How much it costs to participate in this charade is never precisely revealed, but the implication is clear: a vast amount.
The heroine of this story is not a typical client. First of all, she's not rich enough to pay for the experience herself. It has been willed to her by a recently departed great-aunt. Second, she's doubtful about the whole business, but decides to do it as a kind of wacky experiment. The plot, of course, deals with what happens to her during her twenty-one days at Pembroke Hall.
Her name, believe it or not, is Jane and her story turns out to be lackluster, though that, obviously, is not the intent. Ms. Hale is, technically, a more accomplished writer than Sally Smith O'Rourke, whose The Man Who Loved Jane Austen I mentioned here last week. Yet, Ms. O'Rourke managed to create a certain bumbling zest whereas Ms. Hale gives us no zest at all.
One assumes, after the first chapter of Austenland, that the pursuit of fake romance will, somehow evolve into the real thing. And that's exactly what happens. The Mr. Darcy character, who has been playing the role for four years and is getting fed up with it, actually falls in love with Jane and decides to chase her back to New York, where, we are to presume, they will live happily ever after.
Yet, satisfying as the outcome is supposed to be, I could take no pleasure from it. Jane never struck me as a genuine person, so I couldn't discern what it was about her that would cause Mr. Darcy to shed his 19th Century role
In these books, if they're to offer anything, there needs to be something that genuinely reminds you of Jane Austen. And I found nothing of that stripe in this one.
The Lure of Story
June 17, 2009
At the Montpelier Library sale I bought an uncorrected proof copy of Sally Smith O'Rourke's tale titled The Man Who Loved Jane Austen. Jane Austen seems to have inspired more post-fiction -- that is novels making use of her biography or her characters -- than any other English writer. I have occasionally tried to sample some of this vast production and generally found it unreadable.
I should have found Ms. O'Rourke's novel unreadable also. It's poorly written with wooden characters and a plot more fantastic than anything I've seen on TV lately. But for some reason, I found it diverting and read it right through.
Now, I'm sitting here wondering why? The only reason I can find is that if, for reasons of mood or personal situation, you give yourself to a story -- most any story -- it will catch you up.
Some of the reader reviews on Amazon are scathing -- proclamations that it is the trashiest, most vacuous book ever produced. I suspect people who say so are merely bragging about their literary taste. Much so-called avidity for literature is simply a mode of egotism, a way of asserting one's superiority to the vulgar mob. And if people get pleasure from that, I don't suppose there's a great deal of harm in it.
This story involves a rich Virginia horse breeder named Fitzwilliam Darcy who goes to England to bid on a magnificent stallion at an auction. He manages to win out over an Arab prince, and that night, at a friend's estate near the auction, gets terrifically drunk in celebration. The next morning he wakes early with a hangover, and decides to clear his head by taking his new possession for a run. Recklessly, he chooses to leap a low stone gate at the edge of a field, hits rough ground on the other side, is thrown from the horse and hits his head against a wall.
When he wakes, it is 1810, and not only that, he is near Chawton and being looked after by two of Edward Austen-Knight's servants, who take him to Chawton Cottage as the nearest place where he can get care.
So you get the point. Amazingly silly, right?
Still, I wanted to see what happened. I wanted to find out how Mr. Darcy's brief life in Chawton -- only eight days -- could be woven together with his normal life in current America. And, so, as I said, I read right through.
Since this is not really a confession, you can judge me as you will. I don't mind. And I don't mind saying, even, that, to some degree, I enjoyed the tale.
Gods, Men and Miseries
April 3, 2009
Given what humans are, and their passions, fears, and intellectual frailties, it becomes a ticklish issue to sort out what responsibility they have for the horrors that fall upon them.
This has been a perplexing question for a long time.
In the opening lines of The Odyssey, Zeus, leader of the Olympians, expresses exasperation with the way men blame the gods for their troubles. If humans would just stop being idiotic, he says, they wouldn't have nearly so much to contend with. But he doesn't tell us that all human difficulties would be banished.
All English translations give us the same general sense of Zeus's exclamation, but each is different from the others in ways that help us confront the problem itself.
Here are five notable English renditions that have held my attention lately:
Samuel Butler (1898)See now how men lay blame upon us gods for what is after all nothing but their own folly.W.H. D. Rouse (1937)Upon my word, just see how mortal men always put the blame on us gods! We are the sourceof evil so they say -- when they have only their own madness to thank if their miseries are worsethan they ought to be.E.V. Rieu (1945)What a lamentable thing it is that men should blame the gods and regard us as the source oftheir troubles, when it is their own wickedness that brings them sufferings worse than any whichDestiny allots to them.Robert Fitzgerald (1963)My word, how mortals takes the gods to task!All their afflictions come from us, we hear.And what of their own failings? Greed and follydouble the suffering in the lot of man.Robert Fagles (1996)Ah how shameless the way these mortals blame the gods.From us alone, they say, come all their miseries, yes,but they themselves with their own reckless ways,compound their pains beyond their proper share.Here we have five different human deficiencies and though you could say that they all resemble one another, there clearly are distinctions among them that matter.
Folly, madness, wickedness, greed, and reckless ways are not exactly the same thing.
If one were a thorough scholarly pedant, he might say that the way to resolve the question would be to have resort to the text in Greek. But that would afford us no resolution of the intellectual problem. Even if one were a classical scholar and had deluded himself into believing that his grasp of the so-called original text was more accurate than anyone else's, there would still be the problem that we don't actually know what the original text is or where it came from. What we have now may be no more than one version of a tale of adventure which was sung more than two and a half millennia ago. The Greek text can be seen as having a certain precedence, but it is far from definitive.
After all, Butler, Rouse, Rieu, Fitzgerald, and Fagles were all intelligent men who chose their English words carefully. There's no intellectual degradation in taking their text as seriously as we take Homer's -- if there was such a man as Homer. In the end, we are left with words and we have to use them as best we can to think.
If I were to be presented with this list of moral turpitude and asked which of the five visits upon us the worst results, I guess I'd pick folly because it's the most general. In a way, it encompasses the other four. But because it is general, it's not very satisfying . We would like to know what is it, exactly, in the human heart, that most causes suffering. In this list, greed is the most specific. It stands out as something we know, have actually experienced. As such, it has an odor more vile than the rest. Certainly, nothing exceeds it in the generation of delusion. Just think of the statements that have appeared in our newspapers over the past several months. So if Zeus is telling us that men agonize more than they ought to because of their greed, I'd have to say that Zeus is a pretty good god.
Zeus is also becomingly humble. He makes no claim that the gods, themselves, could banish all human pain. There is a proper share in the lot of man, a certain amount that ought to be. It is allotted by Destiny, which rises in power above the gods.
As I have grown older, I've become less satisfied with the idea of an omnipotent god -- or gods. If you're going to have a god who's omnipotent, there's nothing to do but revile him. After all, it is he, himself, in his overweening power, who decides to torture you. What possible decent motive could he have for doing that. Saying that god's ways are inscrutable is just silly mumbo-jumbo, at least as far as the human mind is concerned. It makes no sense to love god simply because he is powerful. It might make sense, if by loving him you incurred his favor. But history tells us that loving is not enough; it won't placate him. It is from the experience of unrequited love that notions of paradise arrive. It would be just too horrible, wouldn't it, if you loved omnipotence completely and abjectly, and it still smashed your hopes, dreams, and desires? So, there must be some pure justice and mercy out there somewhere, right?
Homer's Zeus doesn't deal in that sort of sentimentality. He notes, almost offhandedly, that Destiny allots suffering. But it doesn't bring us as much as we have. Much of it is our own fault, and if we would give up our foolishness, we would have to bear much less horror than we do.
It is, I suspect, this clear-eyed gaze at the nature of things which continues to give the Greek classics their hold on at least some of us. We can't know, for sure, what kind of life we would have if we accepted Zeus's analysis. Yet, the suspicion lingers that we would be more noble if we did. True, we don't even know what noble means, unless it means simply doing the best we can as long as we have the power to do anything. What's the good of that, one might ask, if there's no ultimate meaning, no eternal resolution?
It's a powerful question, one we're not fully capable of putting away. Or, perhaps I should say, it's not one I'm capable of putting away. Even so, I stay drawn to that man of countless exploits, that master of tactics, that man in word and actions both, who faced his fate on the wine dark sea. I also relish his relations with the gods, and, in particular, his interaction with his supporter, Athena. It would be a fine thing to have a friend like her, even if she weren't omnipotent. I'm reasonably sure if I could resemble Odysseus more than I do, I would achieve a healthier life.
Consequently, I'm grateful to Homer, or whoever it was, who told Odysseus's story. And, I'm also in debt to the men who took the ancient words and transformed them into phrases I can read and think about.
Celestial Choices
March 18, 2009
When Odysseus visited the land of the dead, one of the spirits who came flitting up to him was Tyro, who in life conceived a passion for the river god Enipeus. As he was about to reap the benefits of her love he informed her that "bedding down with the gods is never barren, futile."
I've been wondering about that promise lately. In the great battle for our souls between Athens and Jerusalem I've found myself being drawn to the former. The fruits it offers are not as consoling as those we get from the Holy City of Palestine but they are more bracing. Since the only serious purpose of religion is to counsel us about death, we turn to spiritual advice for help in deciding whether to stare it down or accept it. It's a decision every person has the perfect right to make for himself or herself. Nobody ought to be telling you the way to go. As for me, I can't get myself into a welcoming frame of mind where death is concerned.
Taking the Olympian gods as your pantheon is not as bizarre a choice as you might suppose. The great error of the conventional religions during my lifetime has been trying to base gods on belief. Belief has nothing to do with them. We choose them on the basis of how much awe or respect they strike into our hearts. You might think that Zeus, for example is a not a figure to hold up for admiration, but he does have his virtues. When he's on your side, you're in great shape, and when he's against you, at least you know where you stand. Clarity is not the least of the virtues and Zeus tended to be pretty clear, though he could change his mind.
Odysseus, that master of exploits and man of pain, had Athena to help him on his way home. Athena's flaw was that she was not omnipotent. Still, she was a useful assistant. It's a great mistake to place your trust in an omnipotent deity. Omnipotence is not a characteristic in existence, either among the gods or men. The best you can hope for is a reasonable shot and a god to steady your hand.
I think I'll ask Athena to come along with me for a while. I realize I can't be sure about her. As Odysseus says "Who can glimpse a god who wants to be invisible gliding here and there?" Still, the thought of her clearing the way is pleasant and if she decides to do it for me, the promise of Enipeus will have been borne out.
Timelessness
February 18, 2009
One of the more interesting passages in Augustine's Confessions comes in Book IX, where the author describes a conversation he had with his mother Monica on the day of her death. Mother and son are trying to imagine what existence will be once life on earth is over. He says that after they had talked and panted for this knowledge they were able to touch it "in some small degree" by a total concentration of the heart.
What this touch revealed was the nature of eternity, where there is no past and no future. His actual words -- in the translation by Henry Chadwick -- are: "For to exist in the past or in the future is no property of the eternal." Furthermore, this is a condition of wisdom "by which all creatures come into being, both things which were and things which will be."
Here is evidence that, at least since the 4th century -- and doubtless well before then -- the human mind has been intrigued by the notion that time is simply an illusion of this world, and that once we escape into the next realm we will no longer be tyrannized by it.
What might the source of this concept be? I suppose the most obvious answer is that time is the ultimate horror. Though it is always bringing us new things it is also relentlessly taking away things we love. The person to whom we talk one day in perfectly ordinary terms may the next be gone beyond any possibility of talking. This strikes most of us -- if we're willing to be honest -- as intolerable. So, perhaps, the mind just makes up something to banish that possibility. This is standard 20th and 21st century psychology.
Still, one thing we can be fairly sure of: current psychological explanation is not ultimate wisdom. There will be many other explanations which will operate with at least as much force.
Now and then a voice says to me that nothing that was once in the universe can disappear from the universe. Trouble is, the same voice says that nothing that was not in the universe from the beginning can ever come into it. Take those two notions together and you have something approaching Augustine's concept of eternity.
None of this fits well with common sense. It seems to have little effect on how we behave when shopping at Shaw's (our local supermarket). I suppose most people will say that common sense is all that counts. Even so, it seems a paltry thing. So we have moments where we seek "total concentration of the heart." And whenever we do, we seem, inevitably to put time in the docket.
Faith, Sixteen Hundred Years Ago
February 11, 2009
In his Confessions, Augustine tells us that the five elements of his faith are:
- God exists.
- He is immutable substance.
- He cares for humanity.
- He judges humanity.
- Through Christ and scripture he has provided a way of salvation whereby humanity can come to a future life after death.
These matters are so firmly fortified in his mind, he says, they can never be shaken. He has doubts and confusions about other issues, such as the reason for the existence of evil. Yet about the five basic principles, there is no doubt whatever.
The content of his faith is not particularly surprising. You can find millions of believers today who would subscribe to the same list. Yet it is fascinating that such beliefs could have subsisted with virtually no alteration from his time to ours. That's sixteen hundred years -- a fairly long time. I suppose orthodox Christians would say their lastingness is proof of their validity.
There have been many books in which believers who profess to be certain, beyond question, attempt to explain how they arrived at their certainty. None of them work. It seems to be impossible for one mind to convey to another the process of achieving doubtless certainty.
Obviously, the elements of Augustine's faith are tempting. If there is something immutable which not only cares for us but offers us a way to escape the miseries and fears of life then a person would have to be an idiot not to want to get in line with it. But what is this something? How do we get in touch with it? How do we know it exists? How do we even know what the word "exists" means in this context?
These are questions no one seems capable of answering.
I have nothing against attempting to answer them or even against people who claim to have succeeded. The worm comes into the apple when these claims get embodied in institutions which exercise power over human lives right here in this commonsense world we inhabit. I don't see how that can fail to lead to corruption. To the degree that history can guide us, it tells us that it always does.
Still, we do have the mystery of these beliefs lasting as long as they have. I suppose you could say they are a perfect formula for addressing all our problems and, therefore, can't be resisted by uncritical minds. They are the ultimate in wishful thinking. It's an explanation I find partially satisfying, but not wholly. There is something else in them beyond a desire to escape.
That's why I think it's important for us to keep on knowing about them. It's possible they could be a stepping stone to a knowing that's better than we've ever had before.
Oracles
January 29, 2009
There is a type of literature rife in the world we need a common word to describe. "Rife," as you know is a term carrying harmful or undesirable connotations. If we were more intelligent, the literature I speak of would not be rife, it would merely be widespread, and that would be a good thing.
We do have a word that fills the need. The problem is it’s not well-known, and even many who think they know what it means are mistaken. I'm referring to "Delphic." If you look it up in most dictionaries, you find it defined as meaning "obscure" or "ambiguous." I suppose that's technically correct, but it misses the whole point of a Delphic text.
The purpose of oracles, as, for example, the sayings that came from the temple at Delphi, was not to confuse but to teach. They do confuse to a certain extent but their use is to challenge us to work through the confusion and make something with our own minds.
In the Western world, the most potent Delphic text is the collection of writings we call the Bible. Many people try to use it as an instruction manual, which is the reason for its low standing with considerable portions of the learned population. The latter are as wrong to reject it as the former are to employ it as a moral club (well, maybe not quite as wrong).
The Bible pulsates with Delphic instruction. You can scarcely open a page without finding an example of it.
Consider the passage I happened to read just this morning -- the third and fourth verses of the fourth chapter of the letter of James in the New Testament:
You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. Unfaithfulcreatures! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoeverwishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.It presents us with four short sentences, which seem, at first glance fairly clear -- clear that is until we begin to dig at three of its words.
What is "passion"? What is the "world?" Who is "God?"
You could easily spend a lifetime trying to assign meaning to those three little words, and you would not complete the task. We could start by facing the truth that we have little idea of what the writer meant when he used them and go on from there.
Since we can't to the bottom of what's being said does that mean we should ignore it? I don't think so. The more you struggle with Delphic passages, the better and stronger your mind becomes. At the very least you learn that you're never going to sort everything out and that it would degrade your humanity if you could.
Quick and easy interpretation is the bane of human society. Its practitioners are trying to lead you down the paths of foolishness (to use a Delphic utterance myself). Preaching exactitude when there is no exactitude is the behavior of a charlatan.
And, "charlatan" is not a particularly Delphic term.
Fleet Prison
January 23, 2009
Readers of Dickens know that of all the institutions he despised -- and he despised many -- debtors' prisons were at the top of the list. That's doubtless because his father was incarcerated in Marshalsea Prison when Dickens was a small boy. In addition to his personal grievance, though, Dickens hated the illogic of the practice. Men were locked up for years because they owed money, thus taking away the possibility of earning money to pay their debts.
Mr. Pickwick, of course, was thrown into Fleet Prison for a time because he refused to pay a judgment against him rising from Mrs. Bardell's suit for breach of promise. Knowing the charge was false, Pickwick, out of a dogged sense of justice, chose to languish in prison rather than pay a penny to reward a false accusation.
Debtors' prisons in 19th century England were curious operations. Prisoners of means -- of whom there were few, of course -- could buy many of the conveniences of life and live somewhat comfortably even though they were in degraded surroundings. But those who had nothing, had to subsist on charity, and existed in crowded, miserable, filthy conditions. Some became so malnourished they perished.
The descriptions of the Fleet in Pickwick make up a chronicle of complete, cruel corruption. It may seem out of order to include such dark episodes in a comic novel, but that was one of Dickens inveterate habits. He knew that even the jolliest episodes of life take place in the vicinity of horror, and he wanted his readers to recall that truth every day. It's not a comfortable mental habit but, clearly, it's the duty of honorable men and women. That so few practice it shows us how far we are from civilization. In the United States now, for example, it's what lets most of the population remain complacent about our hideously over-gorged prison system.
In Great Britain, the Debtors' Act of 1869 finally abolished imprisonment for debt. That was forty-one years after Mr. Pickwick's fictional captivity. It's fairly clear that Dickens's writings had something to do with that reform, which is not the least of the reasons we should respect him now.
Pickwick, etc.
January 22, 2009
It came into my head to make 2009 the year in which I would read all of Charles Dickens's novels again. I'm not sure how long it has been since I read some of them, perhaps more than twenty years. In any case, this time I have resolved to start with The Pickwick Papers and go right through.
So far I have been poking along at the rate of two or three chapters a day and at the moment am about two-thirds of the way through that first rollicking tale, which was completed in 1837, when Dickens was twenty-five years old. That, in itself is an amazement -- twenty-five years old! And he turned out this huge compilation that adds up to about three hundred thousand words.
I loved Pickwick when I first read it and, now, naturally enough, I love it even more. I don't know if my sense of humor has got more acute than when I was younger but I'm pretty sure I laugh out loud more often now than I did when I first worked my way through it. Something else, though, has also changed.
The obvious things are still there to delight, such as Mr. Magnus's deep observation that company is a very different thing from solitude. Or the magnificent concerns of the Brick Lane Branch of the United Grand Junction Ebernezer Temperance Association. Or Mr. Tony Weller's having "heerd how many ordinary women one widder's equal to in pint o' comin' over you (the number, which I can't be bothered to look up right now is either twenty-four or twenty-five).
Those things draw my attention as they did decades ago. Yet, underneath them is something even more compelling, a dark substratum of human misery and folly that washed past me before with my scarcely noticing it.
The courtroom scene, on the day Mr. Pickwick attempted to defend himself against Mrs. Bardell's charge of breach of promise, is about as funny as anything in literature. But it's also a scathing indictment of the legal system, which remains as pertinent now as it was then. The totality of human misery produced by the practices of lawyers like Serjeant Buzfuz could never be summed up by even the most capacious human heart. Dickens detested the process of drawing people into the hands of the law, and I've never read anyone who makes that disgust more palpable.
What he does for the law, he does also for greed, and poverty, and skinflint harshness, and domestic tyranny, and idiotic recklessness and just about any other element of human folly. It's all there, right from the start in Pickwick.
We misread if we see only the jokes, and the fellowship, and the blazing firesides, and the tables groaning with eatables. They are so cozy, so cheery, because of the black background that's always present to remind us what cross-grained creatures we humans are. This was seen and laid out by a young man scarcely grown past boyhood. And, here I am with virtually all of his efforts still in front of me in this rapidly devolving year.
][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][
A question which much agitated the 18th Century -- whether morality and aesthetics are different principles -- remains difficult today.
Samuel Johnson believed they were distinct and, consequently, was eager to give precedence to morality. It would be easier to agree with him if we were sure we know precisely what morality is.
What if it is actually something that is best approached by taste? And what if taste operates with equal force on both morality and aesthetics?
Morality separate from taste has to fall back on rules. And rules fall back on convention.
Johnson may well have had premonitions of this because there were times when he seemed to agree with Joshua Reynold's definition of taste as the power of knowing right from wrong. One might say this is a specialized meaning, but it might also be the most potent one.
Language itself tells us something when we speak of certain actions as being ugly. (Posted, 7/1/06)
][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][
In Lycidas, Milton tells us that:
Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
Nor in the glistering foil
Set off to th' world, nor in broad rumour lies,
But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes,
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove.
If this were true it would be the most glorious news ever heard by humankind. It would mean that each of us, down the ages, would be known as he or she deserves to be known, independent of human publicity. The unpublished tract of genius would stand above the most lucrative of ephemeral bestsellers. A life of kindness and generosity would shine brighter than the the machinations of presidents and prime ministers. Acts of courage never mentioned in newspapers would overwhelm the manufactured, uniformed behavior of government and corporate agents. This being so, the only religion worth the name is striving to live as though Milton's words were the decree of the universe -- a religion made all the finer by the suspicion that they are not enrolled in eternity. (Posted, 6/30/06)
][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][
At my local bookshop, I picked up a new edition of quotations by Thomas Jefferson and found myself in the section on alcoholism. In a letter of 1823, Mr. Jefferson said that the drunkard, like the infant, the maniac and the gambler, requires the attention of the legislator. He didn't say what that attention ought to produce but presumably he was calling for regulation and restraint of some sort. The assumption that those who cannot ameliorate their own bad habits are suffering from mental debility so severe that they need to be taken in hand by the institutions of society continues to be a controversial position. It undermines, to some extent, the idea of free will, which appears to have little standing in either psychology or social science. But free will remains the lynchpin of our legal system. If people really don't have the ability to control themselves, then what right have we to punish them for their transgressions? We can restrain them, of course, in order to protect ourselves. But punish? It becomes absurd in a deterministic world. The compromise we've arrived at so far is the conclusion that some people can't control themselves. Therefore, though we can regulate their behavior, we have no right to inflict punishment on them. But others we can punish, almost to our hearts' desire, including killing them, because we say they were operating under self control. How we know we can't say but that's our stance all the same. I suppose, if we were being perfectly consistent, we might say the legislators are operating under impulses just as irresistible as the desire for drink or gambling. But, I doubt Mr. Jefferson would have been willing to go that far. (Posted, 6/17/06)
][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][
Elizabeth Carter was an 18th Century London writer who became a friend of Samuel Johnson. He respected her so much he accepted two essays from her for his periodical publication, The Rambler. In No. 44, she recounted a dream in which she met two spirits, each claiming to be a spokesperson for religion. The first, a gloomy figure, told her that:
"Misery is the duty of all sublunary beings, and every enjoyment is an offense to the deity who is to be worshipped only by the mortification of every sense of pleasure, and the everlasting exercise of sighs and tears."
There aren't many religious figures now who will be quite that blunt but the message, in a subdued form, is still with us. We continue to be influenced by the notion not only that pleasure can lead to excess but that pleasure is excess and anybody who indulges in it will be led straight to the bad place.
In her essay, Mrs. Carter revealed that the bearer of the doleful argument was actually Superstition and that all one needs to banish her is to begin to see the world as it is. I'm not sure that seeing things as they are is a possibility for humans. We may be too tangled for that. But perhaps we can hope that superstition among us will lose some of its grip. The great parade of "ought tos" which have strangled countless afternoons remain too much with us, and they retain their power because few try to see the world as it is. Freud reminded us that in this existence we are assailed by three threats -- nature in a surly mood, our fellow human beings, and the phantoms of our own minds. I'm not sure but what the last is the worst. Certainly, it's the one we are least able to combat. If Mrs. Carter could see us now, she might be discouraged. (Posted, 6/17/06)
][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][
Hester's Thrale, answering charges that she had not prettified her subject in her Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson wrote,
" It is surely no dispraise to an oak that it does not bear jessamine; and he who should plant honeysuckle round Trajan's column would not be thought to adorn, but to disgrace."
It's a point more pertinent now than it was in the 18th Century. Our PR-driven lust to prettify has become insane. It turns us away from what we can do, and expect, towards a naive pretense that accomplishes nothing but, eventually, manufactured scandal -- which is perhaps PR's ultimate goal. Mrs. Thrale appeared to know that human perfection is not only not attainable, it's not an ideal either. A perfect human would be a monster. Faults, though not to be sought, always accompany genius, and when we are perfectly alienated by faults we are also cut off from love and appreciation. That's not to say we shouldn't be trying to get better and to reduce our faults, but the effort has to be made in the knowledge that it's an ongoing struggle and not a thing to be completed. I don't know where the notion came from that air-brushing is the path to paradise, but it has got terribly fixed in our brains nowadays. (Posted, 6/13/06)
][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][
In The Rambler, No. 202, Johnson noted that:
"Among those who have endeavored to promote learning and rectify judgment, it has been long customary to complain of the abuse of words, which are often admitted to signify things so different, that instead of assisting understanding as vehicles of knowledge, they produce error, dissention, and perplexity, because what is affirmed in one sense is received in another."
This remains as true as it was when Johnson wrote it. Yet, it is almost never acknowledged with respect to political debate. Men scream at one another as though each knows what the other is saying. Ill-defined words are made the basis for fierce recriminations. The result is a political discourse that's nothing but the babble of men who are seeking goals they can't reveal, both because it would be embarrassing and because they don't know what their aims actually are. And when politicians go home at night, having babbled all day, what then passes through their minds? Anything? Why do we sit and listen solemnly to what such men say? To take it as meaningful may be the surest sign of our own degradation. (Posted, 6/8/06)
][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ][
All images and text on this page are the property of Word and Image of Vermont
This site is designed and managed by Neil Turner
Word and Image of Vermont
Readings at Word and Image of Vermont
Archives...
