Fox v. Hedgehog

From Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman:

For until this moment he had lived in a state of pure possibility, not knowing what sort of a man he was or what he must do, and supposing therefore that he must be all men and do everything... Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.

Ouch.

"I don't want to meet my new life without you"

My copy of The Idiot is out on loan, but I found this quote again recently thanks to the forward thinking of my good-natured friend Roland. I am posting it here for my birthday, which will be in a few days.

"Stop, and never speak of that again!" cried Myshkin. "Listen, Parfyon, just before you appeared I came here and suddenly began laughing -- I don't know what about. The only reason was that I remembered it was my birthday tomorrow. It seems to have come on purpose. It's almost twelve o'clock. Come, let us meet the day! I've got some wine. Let's drink some. Wish for me what I don't know how to wish for myself. You wish it, and I'll wish all happiness to you. If not, give back the cross. You didn't send the cross back to me the next day! You've got it on now, haven't you?"

"Yes," said Rogozhin.

"Well, then, come along. I don't want to meet my new life without you, for my new life has begun. You don't know, Parfyon, that my new life has begun today." [1]

[1] I believe this is the Constance Garnett translation.

Some thoughts of the ending of War and Peace

Today is the anniversary of both the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and the Assignation of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, so it is a good day to remember World War I. In his memoir Surprised By Joy, C. S. Lewis describes some pretty disturbing goings on in the boarding school he attended as a teenager. After the description, however, he writes one of the most chilling paragraphs he ever wrote:

Peace to them all. A worse fate awaited them than the most vindictive fag among us could have wished. Ypres and the Somme ate up most of them. They were happy while their good days lasted.

Which brings me back to War and Peace, which I finished finally a few weeks ago. I heard a professor say that the amazing thing about Tolstoy was that he ended his great epic with Natasha rejoicing over her sick child's dirty diaper. I think the Count seems to be implying that the health of small child is more meaningful and important than the vain pretensions of Emperors and famous men. On this point, I probably agree with him. War and Peace ends with a long philosophical essay about history and war. But before that it's narrative ends with a sort of image of family happiness, in the families of Marie and Nikolai, and Natasha and Pierre. But even in the midst of this family happiness, we know that tragedy again lurks in the background. Tolstoy never mentions the Decembrist uprising, which to be sure is not so tragic as World War I, but Pierre's participation in his secret society in St. Petersburg, which sounds an awful lot like the Northern Society, makes one wonder: what fate awaits Pierre and Natasha's family happiness? Exile, Siberia, or the gallows?

a good word for tonight from St. John of Damascus

Yesterday I found a beautiful image from St. John of Damascus' First Homily "On the Dormition of the Holy Mother of God:

What, then--shall we keep silent, cowering in fear, because we cannot praise her [Mary, the Holy Theotokos] worthily? Not at all! Or shall we stretch out our foot over the boundary, as they say, and ignore our own limitations? Shall we shake off the reins of fear, and boldly reach out to the untouchable? Never! Mingling, instead, fear with longing and weaving from them both a single wreath, let us, in holy reverence, with trembling hand and yearning soul, pay gratefully the humble first-fruits of our minds, as we must, to the Queen Mother, the benefactress of all nature! [1]

[1] From Daley, S.J., Brian E. tr. On the Dormition of Mary: Early Patristic Homilies. St. Vladimir's Seminary Press. Crestwood, NY: 1998.

St. John of Damascus (676-749), by the way, is awesome. You should read more about him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Damascus

Equivocal Richness and Evensongs

Writes Harold Bloom in The Art of Reading Poetry:

Language, to a considerable extent, is concealed figuration: ironies and synecdoches, metonymies and metaphors that we recognize only when our awareness increases. Real poetry is aware of and exploits these ruined tropes, though it is both a burden and a resource, for later poets in a tradition, that language ages into this wealth of figuration. The major poets of the twentieth century, in Britain and America, were those who could best exploit this equivocal richness: Thomas Hardy, W. B. Keats, D. H. Lawrence, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Hart Crane among them. [1]

For some reason this afternoon the word evening suddenly struck me. It's a great word. The word afternoon is so exact and straightforward that it lacks any mystery. There is something businesslike about it that fits. But evening has something mysterious about it, something almost sinister (The Evening would make for a perfect name for a triller on the New York Times Bestseller list). The name suggests movement, action. Something is going on. It's a good name for a time of day whose cousin is twilight.

I've been trying to think of how evening is used in poetry and I can think of two examples, even without the aid of Google.

There is a prayer by St. Patrick that I like a lot, whose title is usually translated "The Breastplate of St. Patrick" though not always. The following lines are taken from a version, with Victorian liberties taken, by the nineteenth century Anglican hymn writer Cecil Frances Alexander:

I bind unto myself today
The virtues of the starlit heaven,
The glorious sun's life-giving ray,
The whiteness of the moon at even,
The flashing of the lightning free [2]

The line that is most memorable to me is "The whiteness of the moon at even." As the original's version is much less verbose ("étrochtai ésci" is all it takes for St. Patrick to say the same thing [3]), Oliver Davies' translation "in Moon's radiance" is more accurate [4], and I like the simplicity (how else can you describe such great and intricate things, sometimes, without simplicity). And let's face it, not many people go for the Victorian aesthetic these days. But there is something haunting about the line "the whiteness of the moon at even."

The Anglicans might have been onto something for calling Vespers Evensong, which reminds me of another hymn, an ancient beautiful hymn, from Vespers:

O Joyful Light of the holy glory of the immortal, heavenly, holy blessed Father, O Jesus Christ. Having come to the setting of the sun, having beheld the evening light, we hymn the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God. Meet it is at all times to hymn Thee with reverend voices, O Son of God, Giver of Life, wherefore the whole world doth glorify Thee. [5]

Chesterton wrote once that "Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because he has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight." [6] And somehow the evening with its mystery and its sanity, which is so important for those of us who during the day do the world's work the best we can with keyboards and coffee and office cubes and copiers, is wrapped up in and evoked by its name, which is kind of neat.

Good night.

[1] Bloom, Harold. The Art of Reading. Perennial. New York, NY: 2005. And great little book, which as has the advantage of being little. You don't have to buy it; you can just read it in the coffee shop of your local corporate bookstore.

[2] http://wikisource.org/wiki/St._Patrick%27s_Breastplate

[3] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/St._Patrick's_Breastplate

[4] translated by Oliver Davies in Celtic Spirituality (The Classics of Western Spirituality). Paulist Press. Mahwah, NJ: 1999.

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phos_Hilaron

[7] chapter 2 of Orthodoxy

two really good sentences

So I found my copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The first paragraph has two of my favorite sentences:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

And:

The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.

The Adoration of the Precious and Life-giving Cross

Today is the Sunday of the Veneration of the Holy Cross. From Saturday's Great Vespers:

Hail! life-giving Cross, the fair Paradise of the Church, Tree of incorruption that brings us the enjoyment of eternal glory: through thee the hosts of demons have been driven back; and the hierarchies of angels rejoice with one accord, as the congregations of the faithful keep the feast. Thou art an invincible weapon, an unbroken stronghold; thou art the victory of kings and the glory of priests. Grant us now to draw near to the Passion of Christ and His Resurrection.

Hail! life-giving Cross, unconquerable trophy of the true faith, door to Paradise, succour of the faithful, rampart set about the Church. Through thee the curse is utterly destroyed, the power of death is swallowed up, and we are raised from earth to heaven: invincible weapon, adversary of demons, glory of martyrs, true ornament of holy monks, haven of salvation bestowing on the world great mercy.[1]

We venerate Your Cross, O Christ, and Your holy Resurrection we glorify!


[1] The Lenten Triodion. tr. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware. St. Tikhon's Seminary Press. 2002.

When freewill kicks in again

For some reason a couple amusing quotes jumped into my head this week, quotes which I hadn't thought of for a while. I suppose I thought of them because I was trying to remember what it was like being a senior in college again.

1. The first is from Kurt Vonnegut's triumph of popular fabulation [1], Timequake:

Trout again confronted him, saying, "Wake up! Wake up! You've got free will again, and there's work to do!" And so on.

Nothing.

Trout had an inspiration! Instead of trying to sell the concept of free will, which he himself didn't believe in, he said this: "You've been very sick! Now you're well again. You've been very sick! Now you're well again."

That mantra worked!

2. From the late nineteenth century Chinese and Japanese Art scholar Kakuzo Okakura's The Book of Tea:

Charles Lamb, a professed devotee, sounded the true note of Teaism when he wrote that the greatest pleasure he knew was to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident. For Teaism is the art of concealing beauty that you may discover it, of suggesting what you dare not reveal. It is the noble secret of laughing at yourself, calmly yet thoroughly, and is thus humour itself,--the smile of philosophy.

3. Here is another one that I just remembered from Denise Levertov ("I learned that her name was Proverb"). I wouldn't call it 'amusing' like the first two, but it is nice:

those we meet for only
one crucial moment, gaze to gaze
or for years know and don't recognize

but of whom later a word
sings back to us
as if from high among leaves
still near but beyond sight

drawing us from tree to tree
towards the time and the unknown place
where we shall know
what it is to arrive

[1] If anyone from Berkley Publishing Group is reading this, please feel free to put "'A triumph of popular fabulation' --Matt Reed" on the back of any future printings of the novel.

I have travelled a good deal in Oakland

The American poet William Carlos Williams wrote in Asphodel, That Greeny Flower:

I cannot say
that I have gone to hell
for your love

but often
found myself there
in your pursuit

I do not like it
and wanted to be
in heaven. Hear me out.

Do not turn away.[1]

My high-priced liberal education tells me he is alluding to the Homeric Epic and in particular Virgil's Aeneid. I think I kind of know what Aeneas and Dr. Williams were going through, because today I got separated from friends in the Carnegie Natural History Museum. One of the neat things about getting lost in a natural history museum is that in a single half hour, you feel as though you've traveled the world in search of your objective. So, when I finally found my friends (gazing peacefully and innocently at Japanese prints in an entirely different building), I had searched for them through the arid deserts and dark tombs of Egypt and Mesopotamia, through prehistoric forests of what would become modern Denmark, by the bones of all manner of extinct mammals, the cold igloos of the Inuit Arctic, through the gritty streets of London's lesser known neighborhoods, through cathedral portals of Gothic France, and past a multitude of depressingly plastic people.

But the entire day was worth it because in a hallway of glass cases filled with extinct avian taxidermy, examples of primitive stone tools, and suchlike I saw a poster with the following helpful advice:

Don't feel bad for neolithic woodcutters!

Indeed.




[1] (from Asphodel, That Greeny Flower & Other Love Poems, New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1938.) Forgive me: I can't get the formatting correct in Html and the lines look different in the original. Anyway, later on in the same poem, he gives us this gem:

It is difficult

to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack

of what is found there.

What makes a song good? (Opening Remarks)

I've been formulating a response to the question 'What makes a song good?' and thought I'd vet some ideas here before I respond. I thought I'd start with another question: what makes a sentence good?

The key quotes for me are:

1. T. S. Eliot in The Little Gidding:

...And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together).
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning...

2. Alexander Pope in his Essay on Criticism:

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
'Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

3. I once formulated a General Theorem of Poetry:

(Sound > Sight > Trope > Metaphor > Subject)
AND
(Sound = Sight = Trope = Metaphor = Subject)

Sad but true

Tonight's quote is from the inimitable P. G. Wodehouse:

If girls realized their responsibilities they would be so careful when they smiled that they would probably abandon the practice altogether. There are moments in a man's life when a girl's smile can have as important results as an explosion of dynamite.

Alas.