On The New Yorker Magazine Blog, The Book Bench, they have a page called Bookspotting, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/bookspotting/. It is not unlike the Metropolitan Diary that appears each Monday in my edition of The New York Times. However, Bookspotting is devoted to observations of people reading in various public settings. Most are quite amusing.
Here is a recent one from the Book Bench:
The Classic
Late Thursday night, on the local train, heading down to Tribeca. We’re weary passengers tonight: the train is half empty, people slumped, clutching their bags, the lights blurring the orange seats. A young woman is holding a Penguin Classic—“Jane Eyre,” to be precise—lips pursed and brow furrowed in perfect concentration. A lovely shade of natural blond frames her face, and she’s still got freckles from the summer, the same size as the umlaut in Brontë on the book’s spine. She’s in a white long-sleeve polo and bluejeans, her legs criss-crossed around a Gap bag. All she needs is a golden retriever, a lacrosse stick, and a Volvo station wagon to complete the picture; all she has is Mr. Rochester and his Thornfield Manor.
I have been making occasional fragmentary observations on the urban scene for years. They are not centered on book reading per se, but here is one about readers that I observed during a recent visit to a restaurant.
Three Readers
Two Japanese American couples entered the dining room with their children. The two sets of parents sat down at one end of the table, the four children at the other. I assumed each couple had two children, all of whom were young girls. The menus arrived, they were inspected, the parents ordered, and chatted with each other once in a while.
Three of the four young girls immediately took out their books and began to read. Not a word was exchanged between them. They read continuously, peering intently at the pages, bent over their books with considerable concentration, completely oblivious to anything else going on around them. The youngest of the four girls had taken out her iPod and listened to something while the others were reading. Thinking the best, I imagined that she was listening to an audio book. The readers continued with their tales until their meal arrived.
They picked up their books once again as soon as they had rapidly finished eating. Meanwhile, at other nearby tables, the young children of American couples nibbled a little of this and that, sans book, sans iPod or game-player, not doing much of anything really, awaiting the arrival of their burger and fries.
There are still a great many readers of literature in this country. Elsewhere I have criticized research reporting the sharp decline of reading in recent years. Readers may read a greater range of materials than is measured in these studies and fluctuations in the frequency of reading and book buying are to be expected. Of course, we cannot infer much from examples of bookspotting. Nevertheless I would welcome any bookspotting observations that you might wish to report. They may be more revealing than you suspect.
12.17.2008
12.16.2008
What Now?
What Now? is the title of the commencement address (and newly published book) that Ann Patchett delivered recently at Sarah Lawrence. It is charming, wise, and funny, just like everything else Patchett has written.
Patchett herself is charming, wise, and funny. Some writers write they way they are, others write the way they would like to be, and then there's the rest of us who are not quite sure who we are or how to write.
I recently heard Patchett speak at Powell’s in Portland on a book tour she was doing for the paperback edition of her recent novel, Run. She ambled in with a coffee mug in hand, wearing casual slacks and sneakers, completely oblivious to the huge crowd that had gathered to hear her but with that knowing grin that lights up her face and everyone else around her.
I believe What Now? (I sometimes refer to as Now What?) can be enjoyed and appreciated by a person at any stage in their life. The following passages in this slim volume should make that clear.
Writing is good for many things, but curing loneliness isn't one of them.
…people need to talk, and often a willingness to sit and listen is the greatest kindness one person can offer to another.
…the activity I'm most likely to be engaged in is staring.
Nothing at all is very much out of fashion these days, as are stillness, silence, and studied consideration.
Catholic school and college and graduate school had prepared me both for how to be part of a group and how to be the group's leader, but none of them had taught me the most important thing: how to be alone.
What now is always going to be a work in progress. What now was never what you think it's going to be and that's what every writer has to learn.
I learned the most from sticking with my dream even when all signs told me it was time to let go.
The secret is finding the balance between going out to get what you want and being open to the thing that actually winds up coming your way.
…at every point in our development we are still striving to grow.
Make up some plans and change them. Identify your heart's truest desire and don't change that for anything.
…the kind of fire that comes from the perfect balance of intelligence and compassion.
Patchett herself is charming, wise, and funny. Some writers write they way they are, others write the way they would like to be, and then there's the rest of us who are not quite sure who we are or how to write.
I recently heard Patchett speak at Powell’s in Portland on a book tour she was doing for the paperback edition of her recent novel, Run. She ambled in with a coffee mug in hand, wearing casual slacks and sneakers, completely oblivious to the huge crowd that had gathered to hear her but with that knowing grin that lights up her face and everyone else around her.
I believe What Now? (I sometimes refer to as Now What?) can be enjoyed and appreciated by a person at any stage in their life. The following passages in this slim volume should make that clear.
Writing is good for many things, but curing loneliness isn't one of them.
…people need to talk, and often a willingness to sit and listen is the greatest kindness one person can offer to another.
…the activity I'm most likely to be engaged in is staring.
Nothing at all is very much out of fashion these days, as are stillness, silence, and studied consideration.
Catholic school and college and graduate school had prepared me both for how to be part of a group and how to be the group's leader, but none of them had taught me the most important thing: how to be alone.
What now is always going to be a work in progress. What now was never what you think it's going to be and that's what every writer has to learn.
I learned the most from sticking with my dream even when all signs told me it was time to let go.
The secret is finding the balance between going out to get what you want and being open to the thing that actually winds up coming your way.
…at every point in our development we are still striving to grow.
Make up some plans and change them. Identify your heart's truest desire and don't change that for anything.
…the kind of fire that comes from the perfect balance of intelligence and compassion.
12.15.2008
Marilynne Robinson
I haven’t read any of Marilynne Robinson’s novels and I am not sure I ever will. As I understand her work, there is a religious overtone to her tales and that rarely finds a receptive audience with me. But I did enjoy reading her recent interview in the Paris Review, No. 198.
I also learned from her views on writing and the writing life she lives. Perhaps you can glimpse why from the following passages I collected. When I review them, as I did now, I'm no longer quite so sure I won't be reading her novels after all. Much of what she says rings true to me. Perhaps that might also be the case with her works of fiction.
I have this sense of urgency about what I want to get done and I discipline myself by keeping to myself.
Teaching is a distraction and a burden, but it’s also an incredible stimulus. And a reprieve, in a way. When you’re trying to work on something and it’s not going anywhere, you can go to school and there’s a two-and-a-half-hour block of time in which you can accomplish something.
The characters that interest me are the ones that seem to pose questions in my own thinking.
Q: Does writing come easily to you?
A: The difficulty of it cannot be overstated. But at its best, it involves a state of concentration that is a satisfying experience, no matter how difficult or frustrating. The sense of being focused like that is a marvelous feeling. It’s one of the reasons I’m so willing to seclude myself and am a little bit grouchy when I have to deal with the reasonable expectations of the world.
I’m kind of a solitary. This would not satisfy everyone’s hopes, but for me it’s a lovely thing. I recognize the satisfactions of a more socially enmeshed existence that I cultivate, but I go days without hearing another human voice and never notice it. I never fear it. The only thing I fear is the intensity of my attachment to it. It’s a predisposition in my family. My brother is a solitary. My mother is a solitary. I grew up with the confidence that the greatest privilege was to be alone and have all the time you wanted. That was the cream of existence. I owe everything that I have done to the fact that I am very much at ease being alone. It’s a good predisposition in a writer. And books are good company. Nothing is more human than a book.
Frankly you get to a certain point in your life where you can do unusual things with your mind. So then, I think, do them.
I also learned from her views on writing and the writing life she lives. Perhaps you can glimpse why from the following passages I collected. When I review them, as I did now, I'm no longer quite so sure I won't be reading her novels after all. Much of what she says rings true to me. Perhaps that might also be the case with her works of fiction.
I have this sense of urgency about what I want to get done and I discipline myself by keeping to myself.
Teaching is a distraction and a burden, but it’s also an incredible stimulus. And a reprieve, in a way. When you’re trying to work on something and it’s not going anywhere, you can go to school and there’s a two-and-a-half-hour block of time in which you can accomplish something.
The characters that interest me are the ones that seem to pose questions in my own thinking.
Q: Does writing come easily to you?
A: The difficulty of it cannot be overstated. But at its best, it involves a state of concentration that is a satisfying experience, no matter how difficult or frustrating. The sense of being focused like that is a marvelous feeling. It’s one of the reasons I’m so willing to seclude myself and am a little bit grouchy when I have to deal with the reasonable expectations of the world.
I’m kind of a solitary. This would not satisfy everyone’s hopes, but for me it’s a lovely thing. I recognize the satisfactions of a more socially enmeshed existence that I cultivate, but I go days without hearing another human voice and never notice it. I never fear it. The only thing I fear is the intensity of my attachment to it. It’s a predisposition in my family. My brother is a solitary. My mother is a solitary. I grew up with the confidence that the greatest privilege was to be alone and have all the time you wanted. That was the cream of existence. I owe everything that I have done to the fact that I am very much at ease being alone. It’s a good predisposition in a writer. And books are good company. Nothing is more human than a book.
Frankly you get to a certain point in your life where you can do unusual things with your mind. So then, I think, do them.
12.14.2008
Andre Aciman
Andre Aciman is among the most aware writers I know. And by “aware” I mean in touch with layers and layers of his internal life--emotions, fictions, and feelings. He describes this world with extraordinary sensitivity and insight. It is his world and impossible to know if anything comparable belongs to anyone else.
But in reading his work, I find myself realizing how often I have felt the same and how rarely have I been aware of it. He is in touch with himself to a remarkable degree and in his essays he lays a path for his readers to discover the deeper layers of their own world.
Aciman grew up in a Jewish family that lived Egypt and eventually moved to Italy, then France, and finally the United States. He has written about his early days in Egypt in Out of Egypt and has also published a good many book reviews, memoirs, and essays, some of which are collected in False Papers.
In Intimacy, published in the Summer 2008 issue of The American Scholar he writes about visiting with his wife and three sons the neighborhood of his youth in Rome. The visit unleashes a cascade of reflections and feelings that took him by surprise.
The neighborhood as he saw it then, and as his family surely saw it too, was not the neighborhood he remembered. More importantly it was never his neighborhood in the first place. For the neighborhood that he lived in during those three years of his youth was entirely a world of his own creation. He writes:
“In that room on the Via Clelia, I managed to create a world that corresponded to nothing outside. My books, my city, myself. All I had to do then was let the novels I was reading lend their aura to this street and drop an illusory film over its buildings…”
And later:
“It dawned on me much later that evening that our truest, most private moments, like our truest, most private memories are made of just such unreal, flimsy stuff. Fictions. Via Clelia was my street of lies.”
Perhaps you have also experienced a desire to return to the neighborhood of your youth. Maybe it was also an ambivalent one as it was for Aciman. After leaving the town where I was born, I have returned to it on several occasions but never once visited the neighborhood where I lived, nor have I ever wanted to. But after reading Aciman’s account, I am giving second thought to that decision, although I dread the inevitable disruption of all that I recall.
You will get a glimpse of Aciman’s prose and an appreciation of the moods he brings to it from a few of the passages I noted in Intimacy:
…to settle into the experience [visiting the Roman neighborhood of his youth], gather my impressions, and unlock memory’s sluice gates, one by one.
Does writing, as I did later that day, seek out words the better to stir and un-numb us to life—or does writing provide surrogate pleasures the better to numb us to experience?
Could parts of us just die to the past so that returning brings nothing back?
The romance of time had fallen flat. There was no past to dig up here…I might as well never have lived here at all.
But then, coming back from the West, perhaps it was I who was the shadow, not this street, not my books, not who I once was.
So why shouldn’t Via Clelia feel dead now? It had never been alive.
The walk from one bookstore to the other without paying attention to the city itself became my way of being in Rome…
I’d grown to love this Rome, a Rome that seemed more in me than it was out in Rome itself, because, in this very Rome I’d grown to love, there was perhaps more of me in it than there was of Rome…
It would take decades to realize that this strange, shadow Rome of my own invention was everyone else’s as well.
We seldom ever see, or read, or love things as they in themselves really are, nor, for that matter, do we even know our impressions of them as they really are. What matters is knowing what we see when we see other than what lies before us.
Ultimately, I wanted to peer into books, places, and people because wherever I looked I was always looking for myself, or for traces of myself or better yet, for a world out there filled with people and characters who could be made to be like me…
What my favorite authors were asking of me was that I read them intimately—not an invitation to read my own pulse on someone else’s work, but to read an author’s pulse as thought it were my own…
I told my wife and sons I was happy they had come with me. I told them it was good to come back, good to be heading back soon, good they didn’t let me come back alone. But I spoke these words without conviction, and would have thought I hadn’t meant them had I not grown used to the notion that speaking without conviction is how I hope to be honest. What roundabouts, though, for what others feel so easily. Roundabout love, roundabout intimacy, roundabout truth. In this, at least, I had remained the same.
But in reading his work, I find myself realizing how often I have felt the same and how rarely have I been aware of it. He is in touch with himself to a remarkable degree and in his essays he lays a path for his readers to discover the deeper layers of their own world.
Aciman grew up in a Jewish family that lived Egypt and eventually moved to Italy, then France, and finally the United States. He has written about his early days in Egypt in Out of Egypt and has also published a good many book reviews, memoirs, and essays, some of which are collected in False Papers.
In Intimacy, published in the Summer 2008 issue of The American Scholar he writes about visiting with his wife and three sons the neighborhood of his youth in Rome. The visit unleashes a cascade of reflections and feelings that took him by surprise.
The neighborhood as he saw it then, and as his family surely saw it too, was not the neighborhood he remembered. More importantly it was never his neighborhood in the first place. For the neighborhood that he lived in during those three years of his youth was entirely a world of his own creation. He writes:
“In that room on the Via Clelia, I managed to create a world that corresponded to nothing outside. My books, my city, myself. All I had to do then was let the novels I was reading lend their aura to this street and drop an illusory film over its buildings…”
And later:
“It dawned on me much later that evening that our truest, most private moments, like our truest, most private memories are made of just such unreal, flimsy stuff. Fictions. Via Clelia was my street of lies.”
Perhaps you have also experienced a desire to return to the neighborhood of your youth. Maybe it was also an ambivalent one as it was for Aciman. After leaving the town where I was born, I have returned to it on several occasions but never once visited the neighborhood where I lived, nor have I ever wanted to. But after reading Aciman’s account, I am giving second thought to that decision, although I dread the inevitable disruption of all that I recall.
You will get a glimpse of Aciman’s prose and an appreciation of the moods he brings to it from a few of the passages I noted in Intimacy:
…to settle into the experience [visiting the Roman neighborhood of his youth], gather my impressions, and unlock memory’s sluice gates, one by one.
Does writing, as I did later that day, seek out words the better to stir and un-numb us to life—or does writing provide surrogate pleasures the better to numb us to experience?
Could parts of us just die to the past so that returning brings nothing back?
The romance of time had fallen flat. There was no past to dig up here…I might as well never have lived here at all.
But then, coming back from the West, perhaps it was I who was the shadow, not this street, not my books, not who I once was.
So why shouldn’t Via Clelia feel dead now? It had never been alive.
The walk from one bookstore to the other without paying attention to the city itself became my way of being in Rome…
I’d grown to love this Rome, a Rome that seemed more in me than it was out in Rome itself, because, in this very Rome I’d grown to love, there was perhaps more of me in it than there was of Rome…
It would take decades to realize that this strange, shadow Rome of my own invention was everyone else’s as well.
We seldom ever see, or read, or love things as they in themselves really are, nor, for that matter, do we even know our impressions of them as they really are. What matters is knowing what we see when we see other than what lies before us.
Ultimately, I wanted to peer into books, places, and people because wherever I looked I was always looking for myself, or for traces of myself or better yet, for a world out there filled with people and characters who could be made to be like me…
What my favorite authors were asking of me was that I read them intimately—not an invitation to read my own pulse on someone else’s work, but to read an author’s pulse as thought it were my own…
I told my wife and sons I was happy they had come with me. I told them it was good to come back, good to be heading back soon, good they didn’t let me come back alone. But I spoke these words without conviction, and would have thought I hadn’t meant them had I not grown used to the notion that speaking without conviction is how I hope to be honest. What roundabouts, though, for what others feel so easily. Roundabout love, roundabout intimacy, roundabout truth. In this, at least, I had remained the same.
12.13.2008
W. H. Auden
W. H. Auden also organized his commonplace book, A Certain World, under thematic headings arranged in alphabetical order. So, for example, the first two are Accidie and Acronyms, while the last two are Word and Writing—apparently he could not come up with anything worthy of citation for X, Y, and Z. Auden does not comment on every entry, preferring instead to keep his own reflections, particularly those that might be viewed as autobiographical, “to a minimum and let others more learned, intelligent, imaginative and witty than I, speak for me.”
Nevertheless, his intermittent annotations are far from impersonal. For example, before listing passages from Proust, Ruskin, Goethe and others in the section on Ageing, Auden writes:
"I was both the youngest child and the youngest grandchild in my family. Being a fairly bright boy, I was generally the youngest in my school class. The result of this was that, until quite recently, I have always assumed that, in any gathering, I was the youngest person present….It is only in the last two or three years that I have begun to notice, to my surprise, that most of the people I see on the streets are younger than I. For the first time, too, though still in good health, I am almost able to believe that I shall die."
What could be more autobiographical than that? And a few pages later, before quoting a poem, Park Concert, under the heading Bands, he recalls:
"When I was young, brass-band concerts were a regular attraction in the public parks of cities. Am I mistaken in thinking that they have become rarities? All I know is that this poem fills me with nostalgia."
And under his last heading, Writing, after citing several passages concerning this topic, he comments: “Most of what I know about the writing of poetry, or, at least, the kind I am interested in writing, I discovered long before I took an interest in poetry itself.” He continues with a two-page recollection of various experiences that influenced his work as a poet.
In a review of A Certain World, Benjamin DeMott considers one of the questions that led me to look closely at my own commonplace book, namely what it might reveal about the underlying patterns of a person’s life. DeMott suggests one can learn a great deal about the kind of person Auden is from the entries in his commonplace book. He writes that aside from what we already know about him,
"You make out too that he’s not young, that he’s often melancholy and self accusatory, that he finds life short. And you can assume only a little speculatively, that he lends excitement to the lives of his friends not alone through his writing…..[and is] a rueful, deep, humorous, loving man."
It would not be a stretch to conclude that Auden’s comments in his commonplace book are a good deal more personal than he is willing to admit. So too, I imagine are the entries in most commonplace books.
Nevertheless, his intermittent annotations are far from impersonal. For example, before listing passages from Proust, Ruskin, Goethe and others in the section on Ageing, Auden writes:
"I was both the youngest child and the youngest grandchild in my family. Being a fairly bright boy, I was generally the youngest in my school class. The result of this was that, until quite recently, I have always assumed that, in any gathering, I was the youngest person present….It is only in the last two or three years that I have begun to notice, to my surprise, that most of the people I see on the streets are younger than I. For the first time, too, though still in good health, I am almost able to believe that I shall die."
What could be more autobiographical than that? And a few pages later, before quoting a poem, Park Concert, under the heading Bands, he recalls:
"When I was young, brass-band concerts were a regular attraction in the public parks of cities. Am I mistaken in thinking that they have become rarities? All I know is that this poem fills me with nostalgia."
And under his last heading, Writing, after citing several passages concerning this topic, he comments: “Most of what I know about the writing of poetry, or, at least, the kind I am interested in writing, I discovered long before I took an interest in poetry itself.” He continues with a two-page recollection of various experiences that influenced his work as a poet.
In a review of A Certain World, Benjamin DeMott considers one of the questions that led me to look closely at my own commonplace book, namely what it might reveal about the underlying patterns of a person’s life. DeMott suggests one can learn a great deal about the kind of person Auden is from the entries in his commonplace book. He writes that aside from what we already know about him,
"You make out too that he’s not young, that he’s often melancholy and self accusatory, that he finds life short. And you can assume only a little speculatively, that he lends excitement to the lives of his friends not alone through his writing…..[and is] a rueful, deep, humorous, loving man."
It would not be a stretch to conclude that Auden’s comments in his commonplace book are a good deal more personal than he is willing to admit. So too, I imagine are the entries in most commonplace books.
Commonplace Books
It isn't often that I read about commonplace books on the literary or scientific blogs that I read. But a couple of months ago I did see the term used in a blog known as The Front Cortex (http://scienceblogs.com/cortex) written by Jonah Lehrer, the author of Proust was a Neuroscientist.
In his September 9th blog on Mania, Lehrer writes about an Oliver Sacks essay on manic depressive disorder that was published in the New York Review of Books. After quoting a couple of paragraphs in Sack's essay, Lehrer says:
"I would love Sacks to create a commonplace book featuring all those quotes that he so effortlessly places throughout his prose. (Auden wrote a great one.)"
What a fine idea I thought, although I can't imagine publishers would be interested in publishing a person's commonplace book on a single or set of topics, unless of course they were well known like Sacks and Auden.
I could readily put together a book on the major themes of my Commonplace Book. But in today’s “market” even highly respected authors would have difficulty publishing such a volume.
In his September 9th blog on Mania, Lehrer writes about an Oliver Sacks essay on manic depressive disorder that was published in the New York Review of Books. After quoting a couple of paragraphs in Sack's essay, Lehrer says:
"I would love Sacks to create a commonplace book featuring all those quotes that he so effortlessly places throughout his prose. (Auden wrote a great one.)"
What a fine idea I thought, although I can't imagine publishers would be interested in publishing a person's commonplace book on a single or set of topics, unless of course they were well known like Sacks and Auden.
I could readily put together a book on the major themes of my Commonplace Book. But in today’s “market” even highly respected authors would have difficulty publishing such a volume.
12.12.2008
Muriel Barbery
There are three pages of reviewer’s comments (all of them laudatory, of course) before the first page of Muriel Barbery’s novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog. One of them quotes a psychotherapist who is prescribing the novel to her patients:
“Hedgehog or Prozac? At first, the question may seem absurd. But it becomes less so when one learns that a Parisian psychotherapist is prescribing Muriel Barbery’s bestselling novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog to her patients. ‘Yes, I am prescribing it, and I do mean prescribing. This book can do a lot of good…[it’s] a real toolbox that one can look into to resolve one’s problems.’ …And, indeed, all women, at least once, even Carla Bruni, have lived through the kind of psychological self-denigration that Renee inflicts on herself in the opening scene of the book. The ultimate celebration of every person’s invisible part.”—L’Express
I was both startled and pleased to read this as I have recently become interested in the application of literature in therapeutic settings. Not much is known about this and there has been very little written on the topic. Toward the end of Barbery’s novel I began to understand the reasons the therapist is using the novel in her practice. One wonders what effects it might be having.
Barbery’s work is said to be a “novel of ideas.” It took me a while to notice that, but I did eventually begin to record several ideas, some very excellent ones indeed. The tale concerns a concierge of an apartment house in the St. Germain neighborhood in Paris Renee, the concierge, is a closet intellectual who is eventually found out by a sweet and brilliant adolescent and a newly arrived Japanese millionaire, both of whom befriend her and come to appreciate her quiet intellect. Here are a few of the passages I recorded; perhaps they indicate why the therapist recommended the book to her clients.
…mankind, doomed to its own ruin through desire.
…my eyes filling with tears, in the miraculous presence of Art.
People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl.
I think lucidity gives your success a bitter taste, whereas mediocrity still leaves hope for something.
…my own personal Everest will be an intellectual endeavor.
With the exception of love, friendship and the beauty of Art, I don’t see much else than can nurture human life.
I have read so many books…And yet, like most autodidacts, I am never quite sure of what I have gained from them.
In Japanese wabi means “an understated form of beauty, a quality of refinement masked by rustic simplicity.”
…intelligence, in itself, is neither valuable nor interesting. Very intelligent people have devoted their lives to the question of the sex of angels, for example.
What is the purpose of intelligence if it is not to serve others?
I should scarcely have believed that between two people there could exist such a congruity of tastes and thought patterns.
…maybe that’s what life is about: there’s a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is not longer the same.
We can be anything we want to be.
“Hedgehog or Prozac? At first, the question may seem absurd. But it becomes less so when one learns that a Parisian psychotherapist is prescribing Muriel Barbery’s bestselling novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog to her patients. ‘Yes, I am prescribing it, and I do mean prescribing. This book can do a lot of good…[it’s] a real toolbox that one can look into to resolve one’s problems.’ …And, indeed, all women, at least once, even Carla Bruni, have lived through the kind of psychological self-denigration that Renee inflicts on herself in the opening scene of the book. The ultimate celebration of every person’s invisible part.”—L’Express
I was both startled and pleased to read this as I have recently become interested in the application of literature in therapeutic settings. Not much is known about this and there has been very little written on the topic. Toward the end of Barbery’s novel I began to understand the reasons the therapist is using the novel in her practice. One wonders what effects it might be having.
Barbery’s work is said to be a “novel of ideas.” It took me a while to notice that, but I did eventually begin to record several ideas, some very excellent ones indeed. The tale concerns a concierge of an apartment house in the St. Germain neighborhood in Paris Renee, the concierge, is a closet intellectual who is eventually found out by a sweet and brilliant adolescent and a newly arrived Japanese millionaire, both of whom befriend her and come to appreciate her quiet intellect. Here are a few of the passages I recorded; perhaps they indicate why the therapist recommended the book to her clients.
…mankind, doomed to its own ruin through desire.
…my eyes filling with tears, in the miraculous presence of Art.
People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl.
I think lucidity gives your success a bitter taste, whereas mediocrity still leaves hope for something.
…my own personal Everest will be an intellectual endeavor.
With the exception of love, friendship and the beauty of Art, I don’t see much else than can nurture human life.
I have read so many books…And yet, like most autodidacts, I am never quite sure of what I have gained from them.
In Japanese wabi means “an understated form of beauty, a quality of refinement masked by rustic simplicity.”
…intelligence, in itself, is neither valuable nor interesting. Very intelligent people have devoted their lives to the question of the sex of angels, for example.
What is the purpose of intelligence if it is not to serve others?
I should scarcely have believed that between two people there could exist such a congruity of tastes and thought patterns.
…maybe that’s what life is about: there’s a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is not longer the same.
We can be anything we want to be.
12.11.2008
David Cecil
In 1975 David Cecil published Library Looking Glass that is an anthology of literary passages with extensive annotations that is in many respects a commonplace book at its very best. The passages are drawn from well known literary works, they are provocative, and most are followed with critical comments that are both autobiographical and a pleasure to read. Like Auden’s A Certain World and Charles Curtis’ A Commonplace Book, Cecil's volume has arranged his topics alphabetically beginning with Art and ending with Wordsworth, leaving blank X, Y, and Z.
Some of the letters have more than one topic, as in "C" with entries on Change of Key, Child in the House, Colour Sense, Comedy, Class System, Classics, Commitment, Complaints, Comparative, Conservation, Content, Contrasts, and Criticism. In addition, more often than not, several passages have been listed for each topic. For example, Cecil has listed nine separate poetry passages for Autumn, while English Landscape has eleven
Cecil was an English aristocrat, literary scholar, and biographer who taught at Oxford for many years. In an amusing introduction to the volume Cecil takes issue with those who recoil from the practice of writing in printed books. He says it is really a compliment to its author saying "It treats him as a living man, with whom one wants, as it were, to converse." In an echo of my own practice, as well as those of most contemporary readers who keep a commonplace book, Cecil writes:
…when anything in the text has especially struck me, I have noted on the end-paper the number of the page where this has occurred. Sometimes my note simply indicated admiration…The passage referred to was beautiful or comical or well-written in ways that had a peculiar appeal to my own taste, or it stated a view which I found especially illuminating; or it stimulated in me a fruitful train of thought.
In a Library Looking Glass, Cecil has assembled a selection of these passages and has usually added a comment suggesting why they have evoked his interest. Cecil admits that his reasons were largely personal and for this reason his anthology can be thought of as a "sort of self-portrait; myself, as mirrored in the looking-glass of my reading."
While his volume may be autobiographical, because there is no temporal order to the alphabetical ordering of the topics, it is difficult to read through from beginning to end, as one would read a personal history. Instead, I prefer to dip into it from to time and skip around from topic to topic in no particular order. Whenever I do this, I find the passages Cecil has selected and his thoughtful commentaries a continuing source of pleasure.
Here is an example of one such annotated passage on the topics of The Classics:
The study of the Classics…teaches us to believe that there is something rally great and excellent in the world, surviving all the shocks of accident and fluctuations of opinion, and raises us above that low and servile fear which bows only to present power and upstart authority…we feel the presence of that power which gives immortality to human thoughts and actions, and catch the flame of enthusiasm from all nations and ages
It is hard to find in minds otherwise formed, either a real love of excellence, or a belief that any excellence exists superior to their own.
William Hazlitt, The Round Table
Cecil comments:
As a teacher of English literature I was sometimes asked what was the use of my subject. Hazlitt answered the question here better than I ever did.
There is a provinciality in time as well as in space. To feel ill-at-ease and out of place except in one’s own period is to be a provincial in time. But he who has learned to look at life through the eyes in turn of Chaucer, of Donne, of Pope and of Thomas Hardy is freed from this limitation. He has become a cosmopolitan of the ages, and can regard his own period with the detachment which is a necessary foundation of wisdom.
Some of the letters have more than one topic, as in "C" with entries on Change of Key, Child in the House, Colour Sense, Comedy, Class System, Classics, Commitment, Complaints, Comparative, Conservation, Content, Contrasts, and Criticism. In addition, more often than not, several passages have been listed for each topic. For example, Cecil has listed nine separate poetry passages for Autumn, while English Landscape has eleven
Cecil was an English aristocrat, literary scholar, and biographer who taught at Oxford for many years. In an amusing introduction to the volume Cecil takes issue with those who recoil from the practice of writing in printed books. He says it is really a compliment to its author saying "It treats him as a living man, with whom one wants, as it were, to converse." In an echo of my own practice, as well as those of most contemporary readers who keep a commonplace book, Cecil writes:
…when anything in the text has especially struck me, I have noted on the end-paper the number of the page where this has occurred. Sometimes my note simply indicated admiration…The passage referred to was beautiful or comical or well-written in ways that had a peculiar appeal to my own taste, or it stated a view which I found especially illuminating; or it stimulated in me a fruitful train of thought.
In a Library Looking Glass, Cecil has assembled a selection of these passages and has usually added a comment suggesting why they have evoked his interest. Cecil admits that his reasons were largely personal and for this reason his anthology can be thought of as a "sort of self-portrait; myself, as mirrored in the looking-glass of my reading."
While his volume may be autobiographical, because there is no temporal order to the alphabetical ordering of the topics, it is difficult to read through from beginning to end, as one would read a personal history. Instead, I prefer to dip into it from to time and skip around from topic to topic in no particular order. Whenever I do this, I find the passages Cecil has selected and his thoughtful commentaries a continuing source of pleasure.
Here is an example of one such annotated passage on the topics of The Classics:
The study of the Classics…teaches us to believe that there is something rally great and excellent in the world, surviving all the shocks of accident and fluctuations of opinion, and raises us above that low and servile fear which bows only to present power and upstart authority…we feel the presence of that power which gives immortality to human thoughts and actions, and catch the flame of enthusiasm from all nations and ages
It is hard to find in minds otherwise formed, either a real love of excellence, or a belief that any excellence exists superior to their own.
William Hazlitt, The Round Table
Cecil comments:
As a teacher of English literature I was sometimes asked what was the use of my subject. Hazlitt answered the question here better than I ever did.
There is a provinciality in time as well as in space. To feel ill-at-ease and out of place except in one’s own period is to be a provincial in time. But he who has learned to look at life through the eyes in turn of Chaucer, of Donne, of Pope and of Thomas Hardy is freed from this limitation. He has become a cosmopolitan of the ages, and can regard his own period with the detachment which is a necessary foundation of wisdom.
12.10.2008
Haruki Murakami
I have read several short stories that Haruki Murakami has written for The New Yorker and a couple of his books—those that I could make sense of anyway for most of novels are highly allegorical. His latest book that was excerpted in a recent New Yorker is called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, (with permission of Raymond
Carver).
I have been a runner for much of my adult life and while I don’t run as long or as intensely as Murakami does, many of his musings about running struck a responsive chord. They also illustrated how much one learns from the experience of running--responding to pain, competitive pressures, and in Murakami’s case, writing itself. In the largest sense running is a laboratory for learning.
I made note of a number of passages in his volume, especially those that describe an experience I have had while running or in between runs. Indeed, a shared experience or idea is often characterizes the passages I make note of in the books I read. Here are a few from the Murakami volume:
I can't grasp much of anything without putting my thoughts in writing, so I had to actually get my hands working and write these words. Otherwise, I'd never know what running means to me.
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
Sometimes when I think of Life, I feel like a piece of driftwood washed up on the shore.
…beating somebody else just doesn't do it for me. I'm much more interested in whether I reach the goals that I set for myself, so in this sense long-distance running is the perfect fit for a mindset like mine.
I'm the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I'm the type of person who doesn't find it painful to be alone.
Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.
The happiest thing about becoming a professional writer was that I could go to bed early and get up early.
…what's the next most important quality is for a novelist, that's easy too: focus.
As I run in the morning along the river I often see the same people at the same time.
I can try all I want, but I doubt I'll ever be able to run the way I used to. I'm ready to accept that. It's not one of your happier realities, but that's what happens when you get older.
…this memory of so long ago suddenly comes back to me.
Carver).
I have been a runner for much of my adult life and while I don’t run as long or as intensely as Murakami does, many of his musings about running struck a responsive chord. They also illustrated how much one learns from the experience of running--responding to pain, competitive pressures, and in Murakami’s case, writing itself. In the largest sense running is a laboratory for learning.
I made note of a number of passages in his volume, especially those that describe an experience I have had while running or in between runs. Indeed, a shared experience or idea is often characterizes the passages I make note of in the books I read. Here are a few from the Murakami volume:
I can't grasp much of anything without putting my thoughts in writing, so I had to actually get my hands working and write these words. Otherwise, I'd never know what running means to me.
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
Sometimes when I think of Life, I feel like a piece of driftwood washed up on the shore.
…beating somebody else just doesn't do it for me. I'm much more interested in whether I reach the goals that I set for myself, so in this sense long-distance running is the perfect fit for a mindset like mine.
I'm the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I'm the type of person who doesn't find it painful to be alone.
Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.
The happiest thing about becoming a professional writer was that I could go to bed early and get up early.
…what's the next most important quality is for a novelist, that's easy too: focus.
As I run in the morning along the river I often see the same people at the same time.
I can try all I want, but I doubt I'll ever be able to run the way I used to. I'm ready to accept that. It's not one of your happier realities, but that's what happens when you get older.
…this memory of so long ago suddenly comes back to me.
12.09.2008
On Beauty
Why do we call something beautiful? Why do we say Florence is a beautiful city? Or why is a person said to be beautiful? What is it that we mean when we say something is beautiful?
In an October 2, 2006 New Yorker article on String Theory Jim Holt writes:
“The gold standard for beauty in physics is Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. What makes it beautiful? First there is its simplicity…Then there is its surprise: who could have imagined that this whole theory would flow from the natural assumption that all frames of reference are equal...? Finally, there is its aura of inevitability. Nothing about it can be modified without destroying its local structure. The physicist Steven Weinberg has compared it to Raphael’s Holy Family, in which every figure on the canvas is perfectly placed and there is nothing you would have wanted the artist to do differently.”
I like that: Simplicity. Surprise. Inevitability, although I like that less than the first two.
Later Holt writes:
“In the post-modern era, we are told, aesthetics must take over where experiment leaves off. Since string theory does not deign to be tested directly, its beauty must be the warrant of its truth."
And later:
“The idea that beauty is truth, truth beauty may be a beautiful one, but is there any reason to think it is true? Truth, after all, is a relationship between a theory and the world, whereas beauty is a relationship between a theory and the mind. Perhaps, some have conjectured, a kind of cultural Darwinism has drilled it into us to take aesthetic pleasure in theories that are more likely to be true.”
But that can’t explain the enormous variability of what individuals regard as beautiful. One person’s beauty is another person’s ugly.
David Hume wrote:
“Beauty is not a quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”
Hume has got it just right, as usual.
And in The Maytrees Annie Dillard writes:
“In her last years Lou puzzled over beauty…She never knew what to make of it. Certainly nothing in Darwin, in chemical evolution, in optics or psychology or even cognitive anthropology gave it a show. Having limited philosophy’s objects to certainties…”
And so I continue to ponder the meaning of beauty. How about you? Have you given much thought to the concept? What does it mean to you?
I do know this: that I am grateful for the beauty that surrounds me. I was reminded of how grateful I am by Theodore Dalrymple’s sentiment
“…gratitude for the beauty of the things that sustain us.”
In an October 2, 2006 New Yorker article on String Theory Jim Holt writes:
“The gold standard for beauty in physics is Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. What makes it beautiful? First there is its simplicity…Then there is its surprise: who could have imagined that this whole theory would flow from the natural assumption that all frames of reference are equal...? Finally, there is its aura of inevitability. Nothing about it can be modified without destroying its local structure. The physicist Steven Weinberg has compared it to Raphael’s Holy Family, in which every figure on the canvas is perfectly placed and there is nothing you would have wanted the artist to do differently.”
I like that: Simplicity. Surprise. Inevitability, although I like that less than the first two.
Later Holt writes:
“In the post-modern era, we are told, aesthetics must take over where experiment leaves off. Since string theory does not deign to be tested directly, its beauty must be the warrant of its truth."
And later:
“The idea that beauty is truth, truth beauty may be a beautiful one, but is there any reason to think it is true? Truth, after all, is a relationship between a theory and the world, whereas beauty is a relationship between a theory and the mind. Perhaps, some have conjectured, a kind of cultural Darwinism has drilled it into us to take aesthetic pleasure in theories that are more likely to be true.”
But that can’t explain the enormous variability of what individuals regard as beautiful. One person’s beauty is another person’s ugly.
David Hume wrote:
“Beauty is not a quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”
Hume has got it just right, as usual.
And in The Maytrees Annie Dillard writes:
“In her last years Lou puzzled over beauty…She never knew what to make of it. Certainly nothing in Darwin, in chemical evolution, in optics or psychology or even cognitive anthropology gave it a show. Having limited philosophy’s objects to certainties…”
And so I continue to ponder the meaning of beauty. How about you? Have you given much thought to the concept? What does it mean to you?
I do know this: that I am grateful for the beauty that surrounds me. I was reminded of how grateful I am by Theodore Dalrymple’s sentiment
“…gratitude for the beauty of the things that sustain us.”
12.08.2008
Harold Bloom
I am an admirer of Harold Bloom. Oh, that I had his erudition. In a recent New York Review of Books essay, (The Glories of Yiddish New York Review 11/6/08), he reviews a book by Max Weinreich titled History of the Yiddish Language. While I do not speak Yiddish (or Hebrew or any other foreign language very well), I was fascinated by Bloom’s review.
There were two elements of his analysis of Yiddish that struck a responsive chord. The first is that “irony is endemic” to the language and second that questioning is one of its central features. Endless irony and questioning, both ways of speaking and writing I like to employ. Heavens knows why.
Earlier I wrote about the continuous questioning in the language of Night Train to Lisbon. It was the reason I liked the book so much, a style of speaking and writing that seems rare today, like Yiddish. As far as I can tell, neither Prado or Gregorious was Jewish and I doubt Mercier, the author of Night Train to Lisbon, is either. Who knows?
I greatly enjoyed reading Bloom’s review, The Glories of Yiddish and collected several passages. There follows a selection:
But then, irony is endemic in the very nature of Yiddish, a fusion always conscious of its otherness…
“Yiddish speakers speak not so much with individual referring words as with such clusters of relations, ready-made idioms, quotations and situational responses. Since each word may belong to several heterogeneous or contradictory knots, ironies are always at hand.” Uriel Weinreich
It is not the denotations that the language covers but the emotive and semantic directions of the hearer’s empathy. In this mode of discourse, the overt clash, ironic or clever, between words of different stock languages in one sentence is a major source of meaning, impact, and delight.
The fate of an American Jewish culture that possesses no distinctive spiritual and aesthetic components is difficult either to describe or to prophesy.
If assimilation is defined as a minority’s adoption of the customs, values, and habits of the majority, the American Jews are leagues beyond mere absorption into the cultural diffuseness of their country. I can no longer know (or care) which of my many students are more-or-less Jewish, and many of them do not know either. Should this be deplored? Increasingly I am uncertain.
…my classes are filled by many Asians and Asian-Americans who have replaced Jews as the most alert and able of students.
…the Talmud always is close by, helping to make Yiddish perhaps uniquely the language of questions.
The uncanny familiarity of Yiddish for Jewish…has something to do with its insinuating, questioning quality. Yiddish is the Hamlet of languages: the Prince of Denmark’s play abounds with questionable enigmas and a plethora of instances of the word “questions.”
Though Yiddish and Talmud share the style of generally answering questions with fresh questions, I cannot imagine the Talmud written in Yiddish.
Neither American nor Israeli Jews are now a text-centered people, any more than American Gentiles are. Deep reading wanes, and bilingualism is a vanishing phenomenon.
The vibrant Yiddish language, fused and open, questioning and celebrating, someday soon will be no more.
There were two elements of his analysis of Yiddish that struck a responsive chord. The first is that “irony is endemic” to the language and second that questioning is one of its central features. Endless irony and questioning, both ways of speaking and writing I like to employ. Heavens knows why.
Earlier I wrote about the continuous questioning in the language of Night Train to Lisbon. It was the reason I liked the book so much, a style of speaking and writing that seems rare today, like Yiddish. As far as I can tell, neither Prado or Gregorious was Jewish and I doubt Mercier, the author of Night Train to Lisbon, is either. Who knows?
I greatly enjoyed reading Bloom’s review, The Glories of Yiddish and collected several passages. There follows a selection:
But then, irony is endemic in the very nature of Yiddish, a fusion always conscious of its otherness…
“Yiddish speakers speak not so much with individual referring words as with such clusters of relations, ready-made idioms, quotations and situational responses. Since each word may belong to several heterogeneous or contradictory knots, ironies are always at hand.” Uriel Weinreich
It is not the denotations that the language covers but the emotive and semantic directions of the hearer’s empathy. In this mode of discourse, the overt clash, ironic or clever, between words of different stock languages in one sentence is a major source of meaning, impact, and delight.
The fate of an American Jewish culture that possesses no distinctive spiritual and aesthetic components is difficult either to describe or to prophesy.
If assimilation is defined as a minority’s adoption of the customs, values, and habits of the majority, the American Jews are leagues beyond mere absorption into the cultural diffuseness of their country. I can no longer know (or care) which of my many students are more-or-less Jewish, and many of them do not know either. Should this be deplored? Increasingly I am uncertain.
…my classes are filled by many Asians and Asian-Americans who have replaced Jews as the most alert and able of students.
…the Talmud always is close by, helping to make Yiddish perhaps uniquely the language of questions.
The uncanny familiarity of Yiddish for Jewish…has something to do with its insinuating, questioning quality. Yiddish is the Hamlet of languages: the Prince of Denmark’s play abounds with questionable enigmas and a plethora of instances of the word “questions.”
Though Yiddish and Talmud share the style of generally answering questions with fresh questions, I cannot imagine the Talmud written in Yiddish.
Neither American nor Israeli Jews are now a text-centered people, any more than American Gentiles are. Deep reading wanes, and bilingualism is a vanishing phenomenon.
The vibrant Yiddish language, fused and open, questioning and celebrating, someday soon will be no more.
11.24.2008
Shirley Hazzard Ancient Shore
I have always enjoyed the novels and nonfiction works of Shirley
Hazzard. And I have a bit of familiarity with her experiences
in Italy, mostly around Naples and on the island of Capri. It was a pleasure, for example, to read her recent work Greene on Capri where she reminiscences about the good times she and her husband Frances Steegmuller had with Graham Greene when he was there. How often do we
find ourselves in such a lovely place with a charming and knowledgeable person who we seem to get along with so well?
In their latest book, Ancient Shore, Hazzard and Steegmuller wax wistfully about the city of Naples and what has happened to it over the centuries and the far from pleasant encounter they had while there during a recent visit. The book reminded me, of course, of the many summers I have spent in Italy--no less memorable than theirs, although they are far more eloquent than I in conveying the remarkable beauty and spirit of that country and its people. Here are my favorite passages from Ancient Shore.
Life in Italy is seldom simple. One does not go there for simplicity but for interest: to make the adventures of existence more vivid, more poignant. I have known that country through dire as well as golden times and have dwelt in town and country, north and south. Whether I wake these mornings in Naples to the Mediterranean lapping the seawall or on Capri to the sight of a nobly indifferent mountain, it is never without realizing, in surprise and gratitude, that I—like Goethe, like Byron—am living in Italy.
It was in reading that one could truly live: in one's mind, in books, in the world. A form of pilgrimage.
The variety and interest of existence had struck us, through literature, as being more real than our factual origins.
"We change our skies, not our souls." Horace
Literature has prepared us to expect the release of new aspects of ourselves in the presence of the fabled and unfamiliar.
Continuity, the charm and genius of Italy, has taken some nasty knocks, at Naples, as elsewhere.
Time is long here, but a town with a volcano is no place to forget mortality.
The puritan view that a sense of pleasure cannot be justified amid visable affliction is meaningless to Neapolitan—who knows that pleasure cannot be deferred for ideal circumstances.
I wonder at the stroke of fortune that first brought me here to live in intimacy with this civilized spirit and to share its long adventure.
Italy, which harbors mysteries and arouses imagination, does not supply solutions.
…we are encouraged to stop defining life, and to live it. The element of chance regains importance; we recover the capacity for astonishment, and the gift of taking some things for granted.
In their latest book, Ancient Shore, Hazzard and Steegmuller wax wistfully about the city of Naples and what has happened to it over the centuries and the far from pleasant encounter they had while there during a recent visit. The book reminded me, of course, of the many summers I have spent in Italy--no less memorable than theirs, although they are far more eloquent than I in conveying the remarkable beauty and spirit of that country and its people. Here are my favorite passages from Ancient Shore.
Life in Italy is seldom simple. One does not go there for simplicity but for interest: to make the adventures of existence more vivid, more poignant. I have known that country through dire as well as golden times and have dwelt in town and country, north and south. Whether I wake these mornings in Naples to the Mediterranean lapping the seawall or on Capri to the sight of a nobly indifferent mountain, it is never without realizing, in surprise and gratitude, that I—like Goethe, like Byron—am living in Italy.
It was in reading that one could truly live: in one's mind, in books, in the world. A form of pilgrimage.
The variety and interest of existence had struck us, through literature, as being more real than our factual origins.
"We change our skies, not our souls." Horace
Literature has prepared us to expect the release of new aspects of ourselves in the presence of the fabled and unfamiliar.
Continuity, the charm and genius of Italy, has taken some nasty knocks, at Naples, as elsewhere.
Time is long here, but a town with a volcano is no place to forget mortality.
The puritan view that a sense of pleasure cannot be justified amid visable affliction is meaningless to Neapolitan—who knows that pleasure cannot be deferred for ideal circumstances.
I wonder at the stroke of fortune that first brought me here to live in intimacy with this civilized spirit and to share its long adventure.
Italy, which harbors mysteries and arouses imagination, does not supply solutions.
…we are encouraged to stop defining life, and to live it. The element of chance regains importance; we recover the capacity for astonishment, and the gift of taking some things for granted.
11.19.2008
Philip Roth
Philip Roth’s recent books have dealt with death, dying and the “massacre” of growing old. They include The Dying Animal, recently made into the movie Elegy, Everyman and Exit Ghost. His latest, Indignation, is the tale of a young college student. How odd I thought. Why is Philip writing about the experiences of a young man growing up, yes, in Newark who tries to emerge from his, yes, Jewish family, by heading off, yes, against his father’s wishes, to a second rate college far from home? While I bought the book and had read a few reviews, I wasn’t at all certain I would get past page 10. How wrong I was!
As usual Roth writes forcefully, energetically and makes this rather mundane and oft repeated tale, far more than interesting. However, it took me a while to figure out what he was getting at. It was only when I reviewed the passages I made note of that the theme of Indignation made itself known to me.
The majority in my collection revealed that once again Roth is confronting the never ending battle between feelings and conscience, between doing what you’d like and doing what is right, between what in olden times used to be called the id and the superego. These are battles that are not confined to the young. How often have I confronted this conflict! How often everyone has and that surely includes the aging but no less vigorous Philip Roth. Here are a few of the sentences that I copied from this rather slim volume.
That’s what I learned from my father and what I loved learning from him: that you do what you have to do.
I was always working on myself. I was always pursuing a goal.
Is that what eternity is for, to much over a lifetime’s minutiae?
Or is it something long buried that has come to the surface?
…endure what is and make it work.
…a conscience that can be your enemy
…other people’s weakness can destroy you just as much as their strength can. Weak people are not harmless. Their weakness can be their strength.
You be greater than your feelings.
Feelings can be life’s biggest problem. Feelings can play the most terrible tricks.
…who deserts a goddess because his mother tells him to?
…rectitude tyrannizing my life.
The urge to be heard, and nobody to hear me!
To provoke no response no matter how painstaking the attempt to unravel and to be revealed. All minds gone except my own. No response. Profoundly sad.
…the incomprehensible way one’s most banal incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.
As usual Roth writes forcefully, energetically and makes this rather mundane and oft repeated tale, far more than interesting. However, it took me a while to figure out what he was getting at. It was only when I reviewed the passages I made note of that the theme of Indignation made itself known to me.
The majority in my collection revealed that once again Roth is confronting the never ending battle between feelings and conscience, between doing what you’d like and doing what is right, between what in olden times used to be called the id and the superego. These are battles that are not confined to the young. How often have I confronted this conflict! How often everyone has and that surely includes the aging but no less vigorous Philip Roth. Here are a few of the sentences that I copied from this rather slim volume.
That’s what I learned from my father and what I loved learning from him: that you do what you have to do.
I was always working on myself. I was always pursuing a goal.
Is that what eternity is for, to much over a lifetime’s minutiae?
Or is it something long buried that has come to the surface?
…endure what is and make it work.
…a conscience that can be your enemy
…other people’s weakness can destroy you just as much as their strength can. Weak people are not harmless. Their weakness can be their strength.
You be greater than your feelings.
Feelings can be life’s biggest problem. Feelings can play the most terrible tricks.
…who deserts a goddess because his mother tells him to?
…rectitude tyrannizing my life.
The urge to be heard, and nobody to hear me!
To provoke no response no matter how painstaking the attempt to unravel and to be revealed. All minds gone except my own. No response. Profoundly sad.
…the incomprehensible way one’s most banal incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.
11.11.2008
Rachel Cusk's Arlington Park
Even though the story is about five women living in a suburb outside London, Rachel Cusk’s novel, Arlington Park, is also the story of my own life, the life of one man who had lived most of his life more than 5,000 miles away in the urban center of Portland, Oregon.
First there was the weather, the weather that matched in every way the mood of the town I had lived in for so long. All you had to do was look outside to glimpse the scene Cusk was describing in Arlington Park, the suburb depicted in her novel.
The clouds came from the west: clouds like dark cathedrals, clouds like machines, clouds like black blossoms flowering in the arid starlit sky.
It was so grey, so grey and unavailing! It was like sorrow: it seemed to preclude every possibility, every other shade of feeling.
In the hall she took their wet coats and bags and umbrellas. They prised their water stained shoes, muddy, perilously garnished with soaked leaves, from their feet. It was messy work, the unending struggle to maintain separation between outside and in.
Eventually, to be more exact, forty years after I arrived, I left that town that I never felt comfortable calling my home. None of the women in Cusk’s novel leave their home nor, given their age and the age of the children, are they likely to do so in the foreseeable future.
Then there is the tedious, deadly feeling that sweeps over one living day after day in the suburbs. Cusk beautifully describes this mood, a mood that is not uncommon to me or most anyone, I think, regardless of where they live.
How are you, Christine said, and Juliet nearly replied, Actually, I’m dead. I was murdered a few years ago, nearly four years ago to be exact.
…air of empty seclusion was complete.
It was a mysterious place, Arlington Park: it was a suburb, a sort of enormous village really, yet even here the force of life came up strong, dealing out its hard facts, its irrepressible, universal dimension.…It was civilization, and yet to Juliet it seemed uncivilized to the core. It lacked art: worse, it lacked any conception of justice. It was just getting and having—look at them all, backed up in their cars all the way to the park, jostling, fighting get and to have.
Each of the women express their malaise somewhat differently. It was Juliet’s that interested me most, perhaps because of the solace she sometimes found in literature.
Never, never did she feel in life the sense of recognition, the companionship, the great warm fact of solidarity that she found between the covers of a book.
She wondered whether the books she loved consoled her precisely because they were the manifestations of her own isolation.
But even that was not enough:
You realize you’re waiting for something, Juliet said, that’s never going to happen. Half the time you don’t even know what it is. You’re waiting for the next stage. Then in the end you realize that there isn’t a next stage. That is all there is.
Most of the women tried to confront the emptiness of their days with the customary experiences of modern life—home, marriage, children, shopping. Cusk makes it clear that none of these can do the job either.
Her car was her true companion: it was clean and spacious and mechanically discreet, and it did her bidding powerfully, efficiently, and with silent approval of her style of command. When she was in her car she had a feeling of infinite passage.
What an enormous kitchen! cried Sally Gibson, following Christine and Dinky in. In that moment Amanda knew that her kitchen was too large. She would not have thought such a thing was possible, but entering it now she knew that it was true. They had knocked through until they had created not space but emptiness. They had gone too far: nobody had told them to stop.
The room, the house, even Arlington Park itself increasingly wore for her the lineaments of a lived past into which future possibilities were unable to intrude; of a fundamental sadness that was the unalterable relic of experience.
How did Cusk manage to describe so accurately the situation that many people find themselves in today? Did it spring from the conditions of her own life? Who can ever know such things? What does it matter? She has got it just right. I know the weather, the boredom that can just as readily occur in the heart of the city as the suburbs, and the despair that sometimes descends upon one. Each experience comes and goes. There are some days where the weather is bearable, where something brings you alive, and where that elemental melancholy momentarily disappears. And then the winter begins again.
First there was the weather, the weather that matched in every way the mood of the town I had lived in for so long. All you had to do was look outside to glimpse the scene Cusk was describing in Arlington Park, the suburb depicted in her novel.
The clouds came from the west: clouds like dark cathedrals, clouds like machines, clouds like black blossoms flowering in the arid starlit sky.
It was so grey, so grey and unavailing! It was like sorrow: it seemed to preclude every possibility, every other shade of feeling.
In the hall she took their wet coats and bags and umbrellas. They prised their water stained shoes, muddy, perilously garnished with soaked leaves, from their feet. It was messy work, the unending struggle to maintain separation between outside and in.
Eventually, to be more exact, forty years after I arrived, I left that town that I never felt comfortable calling my home. None of the women in Cusk’s novel leave their home nor, given their age and the age of the children, are they likely to do so in the foreseeable future.
Then there is the tedious, deadly feeling that sweeps over one living day after day in the suburbs. Cusk beautifully describes this mood, a mood that is not uncommon to me or most anyone, I think, regardless of where they live.
How are you, Christine said, and Juliet nearly replied, Actually, I’m dead. I was murdered a few years ago, nearly four years ago to be exact.
…air of empty seclusion was complete.
It was a mysterious place, Arlington Park: it was a suburb, a sort of enormous village really, yet even here the force of life came up strong, dealing out its hard facts, its irrepressible, universal dimension.…It was civilization, and yet to Juliet it seemed uncivilized to the core. It lacked art: worse, it lacked any conception of justice. It was just getting and having—look at them all, backed up in their cars all the way to the park, jostling, fighting get and to have.
Each of the women express their malaise somewhat differently. It was Juliet’s that interested me most, perhaps because of the solace she sometimes found in literature.
Never, never did she feel in life the sense of recognition, the companionship, the great warm fact of solidarity that she found between the covers of a book.
She wondered whether the books she loved consoled her precisely because they were the manifestations of her own isolation.
But even that was not enough:
You realize you’re waiting for something, Juliet said, that’s never going to happen. Half the time you don’t even know what it is. You’re waiting for the next stage. Then in the end you realize that there isn’t a next stage. That is all there is.
Most of the women tried to confront the emptiness of their days with the customary experiences of modern life—home, marriage, children, shopping. Cusk makes it clear that none of these can do the job either.
Her car was her true companion: it was clean and spacious and mechanically discreet, and it did her bidding powerfully, efficiently, and with silent approval of her style of command. When she was in her car she had a feeling of infinite passage.
What an enormous kitchen! cried Sally Gibson, following Christine and Dinky in. In that moment Amanda knew that her kitchen was too large. She would not have thought such a thing was possible, but entering it now she knew that it was true. They had knocked through until they had created not space but emptiness. They had gone too far: nobody had told them to stop.
The room, the house, even Arlington Park itself increasingly wore for her the lineaments of a lived past into which future possibilities were unable to intrude; of a fundamental sadness that was the unalterable relic of experience.
How did Cusk manage to describe so accurately the situation that many people find themselves in today? Did it spring from the conditions of her own life? Who can ever know such things? What does it matter? She has got it just right. I know the weather, the boredom that can just as readily occur in the heart of the city as the suburbs, and the despair that sometimes descends upon one. Each experience comes and goes. There are some days where the weather is bearable, where something brings you alive, and where that elemental melancholy momentarily disappears. And then the winter begins again.
11.06.2008
Survey
As part of my recent study of Commonplace Books I designed a survey for individuals who responded positively to my request to complete it. I invite you to consider completing it as well. Please send the completed form to me directly at rkatzev@gmail.com.
This survey is designed to learn about your commonplace book, what form it takes, and the role it plays in your reading experiences. Your answers will be of value to me as I try to gauge the nature and extent of commonplacing among contemporary readers. Your response will be kept strictly confidential. Please write me if you have any questions at rkatzev@teleport.com
1. For how many years have you kept a Commonplace Book?
2. In what form do you keep it—written notebook, typed pages, computer document?
3. Approximately what size is the page and how many pages have you collected to date?
4. What are your reasons for keeping a Commonplace Book?
5. What types of materials do you draw upon in selecting passages for your Commonplace Book? Check all that apply:
Fiction (novels & short stories) Quotations
Non-fiction (essays & memoir) Poems
Quotations Periodicals
Others (please specify) Newspapers
6. How often do you review previous entries?
7. Do you annotate the selections added to your Commonplace Book? If so, can please describe your practice?
8. Have you organized or analyzed the contents of your Commonplace Book in any way? If so, please explain.
9. Do you have an electronic version of your Commonplace Book? Yes No
10. As part of my research, I will be performing a statistical analysis of a small number of Commonplace Books. Would you be willing to have yours included in this analysis with assurance of complete confidentially? If so, would you be able to transmit it by e-mail?
11. Please add any further comments about the role of your Commonplace Book in your reading experience.
Thank you so much for taking the time to complete this survey. I am very grateful for the information you have provided.
This survey is designed to learn about your commonplace book, what form it takes, and the role it plays in your reading experiences. Your answers will be of value to me as I try to gauge the nature and extent of commonplacing among contemporary readers. Your response will be kept strictly confidential. Please write me if you have any questions at rkatzev@teleport.com
1. For how many years have you kept a Commonplace Book?
2. In what form do you keep it—written notebook, typed pages, computer document?
3. Approximately what size is the page and how many pages have you collected to date?
4. What are your reasons for keeping a Commonplace Book?
5. What types of materials do you draw upon in selecting passages for your Commonplace Book? Check all that apply:
Fiction (novels & short stories) Quotations
Non-fiction (essays & memoir) Poems
Quotations Periodicals
Others (please specify) Newspapers
6. How often do you review previous entries?
7. Do you annotate the selections added to your Commonplace Book? If so, can please describe your practice?
8. Have you organized or analyzed the contents of your Commonplace Book in any way? If so, please explain.
9. Do you have an electronic version of your Commonplace Book? Yes No
10. As part of my research, I will be performing a statistical analysis of a small number of Commonplace Books. Would you be willing to have yours included in this analysis with assurance of complete confidentially? If so, would you be able to transmit it by e-mail?
11. Please add any further comments about the role of your Commonplace Book in your reading experience.
Thank you so much for taking the time to complete this survey. I am very grateful for the information you have provided.
11.05.2008
Richard Bausch's Peace
Richard Bausch's short volume, Peace has nothing to do with peace. Instead, it recounts a tragic tale of a small group of American soldiers struggling to stay alive as they fought their way to the top of Monte Cassino in Italy during World War II.
There is a passage in Peace that describes an experience I seem to be having more often lately. A soldier thinks back on the life he had lived in America:
"His life there now seemed a hundred years ago. Or it was worse than that: sometimes, now in the nights, it felt like something he must have imagined. It no longer carried with it the weight of memory but was marbled with the insubstantial feeling of imagination when the faculty for imagining is sketchy or false. He could not really believe it happened, any of it."
How often have you felt that way? In an essay I recently wrote about my experience teaching, I describe a similar feeling:
"But my days in the classroom and the laboratory seem so very long ago, like something that happened to another person, in another time or world. Maybe I have dreamed it all. I do recall it, of course, but I must confess it is hard to believe any of that ever happened to me. I have that feeling now for many of the things I did when I was a younger person."
Peace is beautifully written. As I was reading it, I made note of a few passages including:
They had lived with confusion for so long. Nobody said anything about it.
That man had been in the other war, the first one, fighting on the other side. Asch talked about going from the Ardennes Forest, shooting at French and English and American soldiers, to a living room in Brockton—with a grandson about to join the army to go fight the Hun. It was ridiculous.
In the lucid water of the sea, in the brightness and calm of the beach, it was difficult to believe in the war.
He kept this all inside and never showed any of it to anyone.
He had again the obliterating sense that everything of his memory, everything of his knowledge and his dreams and the hopes and aspirations of his lived life, was in a kind of gray, lifeless suspension. Even the wish to be generous and to seek the good opinion of others. It was all elsewhere.
Crouched close to the fire, in the woods beyond the snowfield, Corporal Marson thought of the futility of money, and then he was thinking of the futility of everything.
There is a passage in Peace that describes an experience I seem to be having more often lately. A soldier thinks back on the life he had lived in America:
"His life there now seemed a hundred years ago. Or it was worse than that: sometimes, now in the nights, it felt like something he must have imagined. It no longer carried with it the weight of memory but was marbled with the insubstantial feeling of imagination when the faculty for imagining is sketchy or false. He could not really believe it happened, any of it."
How often have you felt that way? In an essay I recently wrote about my experience teaching, I describe a similar feeling:
"But my days in the classroom and the laboratory seem so very long ago, like something that happened to another person, in another time or world. Maybe I have dreamed it all. I do recall it, of course, but I must confess it is hard to believe any of that ever happened to me. I have that feeling now for many of the things I did when I was a younger person."
Peace is beautifully written. As I was reading it, I made note of a few passages including:
They had lived with confusion for so long. Nobody said anything about it.
That man had been in the other war, the first one, fighting on the other side. Asch talked about going from the Ardennes Forest, shooting at French and English and American soldiers, to a living room in Brockton—with a grandson about to join the army to go fight the Hun. It was ridiculous.
In the lucid water of the sea, in the brightness and calm of the beach, it was difficult to believe in the war.
He kept this all inside and never showed any of it to anyone.
He had again the obliterating sense that everything of his memory, everything of his knowledge and his dreams and the hopes and aspirations of his lived life, was in a kind of gray, lifeless suspension. Even the wish to be generous and to seek the good opinion of others. It was all elsewhere.
Crouched close to the fire, in the woods beyond the snowfield, Corporal Marson thought of the futility of money, and then he was thinking of the futility of everything.
10.28.2008
Private Commonplace Books
Most commonplace books, and there aren’t many of those, are private collections of notable passages. Very few have been published and those are primarily the collections of well known individuals—Thomas Jefferson, John Milton, W. H. Auden, Alex Guinness, etc. However, I suspect a relatively modest number have been published privately, probably less today than in previous centuries. Who can ever know these things?
George Herrick was one of the respondents to my commonplace book survey. You’ve never heard of him? Not many have. In 1997 he published Winter Rules: A Commonplace Book, where he discusses for a couple of pages the commonplace book tradition and then presents selections from his very own. He organized the passages around a set of topics reflecting his interests—Habits of Painters, Hymns, Picnics, Games, etc. There are only a few passages for each such topic, sometimes one, never more than three or four. He sent me a copy of the book, along with a privately printed short (10 pages) collection of passages titled Sun Burn.
It is Sun Burn that interests me most, not because of the passages, passages that are as odd as those in Winter Rules, but rather because of his reasons for printing it (copying would be more accurate). In the Preface he writes that every now and then it is time to arrange his passages for his friends. What a nice idea, I thought. In an e-mail he told me that he prints only a few copies and distributes them to his friends and family as Christmas presents. I was greatly intrigued by this practice. Again I thought what an interesting idea; maybe I should do something like that. And then I thought that my friends and family would probably have about as much interest in my collection as those I found in Herrick’s, especially since they were hoping I’d give them an iPhone.
George Herrick was one of the respondents to my commonplace book survey. You’ve never heard of him? Not many have. In 1997 he published Winter Rules: A Commonplace Book, where he discusses for a couple of pages the commonplace book tradition and then presents selections from his very own. He organized the passages around a set of topics reflecting his interests—Habits of Painters, Hymns, Picnics, Games, etc. There are only a few passages for each such topic, sometimes one, never more than three or four. He sent me a copy of the book, along with a privately printed short (10 pages) collection of passages titled Sun Burn.
It is Sun Burn that interests me most, not because of the passages, passages that are as odd as those in Winter Rules, but rather because of his reasons for printing it (copying would be more accurate). In the Preface he writes that every now and then it is time to arrange his passages for his friends. What a nice idea, I thought. In an e-mail he told me that he prints only a few copies and distributes them to his friends and family as Christmas presents. I was greatly intrigued by this practice. Again I thought what an interesting idea; maybe I should do something like that. And then I thought that my friends and family would probably have about as much interest in my collection as those I found in Herrick’s, especially since they were hoping I’d give them an iPhone.
10.21.2008
Night Train to Lisbon
Night Train to Lisbon was one of the finest novels I have read this year and maybe one of the all time greats in my short and happy reading history. I started reading the book again a while ago, something I rarely do and the only reason I did was because I simply couldn't find anything else worth reading following Pascal Mercier's thought-provoking novel. It inspired me, if you will, to write an short essay about its dialogistic style and led me to make note of well over 100 passages from its richly endowed pages.
In my thinking about commonplace books and the passage-collecting habits of other readers, I wondered whether or not those who read the same book would copy similar passages. A friend recently sent me the passages she collected from Night Train to Lisbon which, although the sample is miniscule, gave me a chance to do that.
My friend only recorded eight passages which is significantly different than the number I recorded. Even with a small sample the likelihood of this outcome occurring by chance must be about .000000000001. Further, in comparing her selections with mine, I note that there was absolutely no overlap. Namely, I did not record a single passage that she did, in spite of the fact that I recorded over 100. Given that number, one might have expected that we would have at least one in common. But no, we didn't.
What is one to make of this? I confess it pleases me. Readers read so differently. The same text can mean something different for each reader. One person's literary truth is another person's banal cliché. I think of books, a good book, at least, as a cornucopia of meanings that vary widely between readers. Is it any wonder the reading experience is such a cherished experience?
This issue brings to the fore the reasons why individuals mark passages. Why do we mark and then record a passage? Does it serve any particular function or functions? Let us imagine a clever witty, passage. One reader marks it, the other doesn't, yet both regard the passage as clever and witty. Why does one reader mark it, while the other doesn't?
Of course the same question could be asked for any passage, from the philosophical to the mundane. Questions like these intrigue me. They are the sort of questions Prado might have asked, for his way of thinking was one of questioning. In a nutshell, that's why Night Train to Lisbon meant so much to me. Plus, the questions were largely unanswerable.
In my thinking about commonplace books and the passage-collecting habits of other readers, I wondered whether or not those who read the same book would copy similar passages. A friend recently sent me the passages she collected from Night Train to Lisbon which, although the sample is miniscule, gave me a chance to do that.
My friend only recorded eight passages which is significantly different than the number I recorded. Even with a small sample the likelihood of this outcome occurring by chance must be about .000000000001. Further, in comparing her selections with mine, I note that there was absolutely no overlap. Namely, I did not record a single passage that she did, in spite of the fact that I recorded over 100. Given that number, one might have expected that we would have at least one in common. But no, we didn't.
What is one to make of this? I confess it pleases me. Readers read so differently. The same text can mean something different for each reader. One person's literary truth is another person's banal cliché. I think of books, a good book, at least, as a cornucopia of meanings that vary widely between readers. Is it any wonder the reading experience is such a cherished experience?
This issue brings to the fore the reasons why individuals mark passages. Why do we mark and then record a passage? Does it serve any particular function or functions? Let us imagine a clever witty, passage. One reader marks it, the other doesn't, yet both regard the passage as clever and witty. Why does one reader mark it, while the other doesn't?
Of course the same question could be asked for any passage, from the philosophical to the mundane. Questions like these intrigue me. They are the sort of questions Prado might have asked, for his way of thinking was one of questioning. In a nutshell, that's why Night Train to Lisbon meant so much to me. Plus, the questions were largely unanswerable.
8.24.2008
On Annotating
Aside from reading, the elements involved in keeping a commonplace book are marking passages, recording them, and then reviewing and thinking about them from time to time. The one additional element that is almost always ignored is annotating. To be sure there is never enough time to thoughtfully annotate passages, even the most provocative of them. I am as guilty of that as anyone and yet I feel that the real benefit of the commonplace experience comes during the process of annotating. It is there that you really confront the meaning of the passage, why it was selected, and its implications for your beliefs and actions. It also consolidates the memory process so that the passages can be called up in other situations where they are
relevant.
As William Coe put it in an article on commonplace books in the New York Times: The key word for the commonplace book is "annotated." It is not just an anthology; the compiler reacts to the passages he has chosen or tells what the passages have led him to think about. A piece of prose, a poem, an aphorism can trigger the mind to consider a parallel, to dredge something from the memory, or perhaps to speculate with further range and depth on the same theme.
relevant.
As William Coe put it in an article on commonplace books in the New York Times: The key word for the commonplace book is "annotated." It is not just an anthology; the compiler reacts to the passages he has chosen or tells what the passages have led him to think about. A piece of prose, a poem, an aphorism can trigger the mind to consider a parallel, to dredge something from the memory, or perhaps to speculate with further range and depth on the same theme.
8.10.2008
On Reading Commonplace Books
I’ve never read another person’s commonplace book. I’ve skimmed a few of those that have been printed and the first page or so of an unpublished commonplace book of another reader. But I’ve yet to read one from page to page as one would read a book. I would like to do so, however, and is my want undertake a study along the lines suggested by a friend—“To read someone else's commonplace book is to stand at a keyhole and peer into who they are.” What a difficult task that would be.” Like another person’s letters or journals, it is one approach to beginning to understand someone, at least, insofar as they are not simulating in these forms of personal expression. Perhaps a person’s commonplace book might even be more truthful, since it is unlikely the keeper would believe it would ever be examined by someone else. I also think it would be instructive for each keeper to analyze their own commonplace book with an eye to knowing themselves a little better.
8.05.2008
Commonplace Books
I speak of the collected volume of passages that I have transcribed from the books I’ve read as a commonplace book. So does Andre Bernard who edits a “Commonplace Section” for each issue of the American Scholar. Bernard collects extracts from various authors who have written about a particular topic and simply lists them on two pages of this publication without commentary or analysis. For example, recent topics have included Loafing, Change, Failure, and Marriage.
Yet a collection of this sort is quite different than the way “commonplace book” is formally defined. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as:
A book in which ‘commonplaces’ or passages important for reference were collected, usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement.
My collection was never intended to be a reference book, nor have I organized the material under separate “heads” or topics. Yet that was the way commonplace books were originally conceived. The term “common place” can be traced to the Greeks who referred to the group of philosophical arguments and discussion topics used by statesman and orators as koinoi topoi (“general points). The Romans translated the phrase as communes loci (general areas of discussion) that scholars and orators also drew upon in composition or speaking. According to Gilbert Highet “some tasteless fellow Englished the term into “commonplaces.” The sense in which the headings were “common” signifies their acceptance as the fundamental beliefs and moral principals of the times. It is ironic that in popular speech the term has come to mean something rather ordinary and unremarkable since there is clearly nothing the least bit ordinary or common in the commonplace books that stretch back to classical antiquity and the Renaissance.
According to Earle Havens Aristotle referred to the collected passages as: “the principal tools of any logical and systematic interrogation of the truth or falsity of an opinion.” It is in this sense that commonplace books were originally considered to be organized sources of knowledge and practical wisdom. In Roman times Cicero carried on the tradition by drawing his commonplace material from the works of philosophers, orators, and poets and subsequently applied them in his public speaking and courtroom presentations. In the Middle Ages Scholastic philosophers continued the practice but turned away from secular applications and substituted instead theological and religious words of wisdom as the materials for their commonplace books.
From all accounts the commonplace book tradition reached its peak of popularity during the Renaissance. This was associated with the revival of classical learning and the emergence of the humanistic critique of Scholasticism. Havens writes:
Renaissance humanists, teachers, and students were among the first to deliberately invoke the term “commonplace book” to describe collections of quotations organized for the express purpose of demonstrating the best moral wisdom and rhetorical felicity of ancient Greek and Latin authors.
Erasmus was perhaps the most influential advocate of drawing upon classical learning in this fashion and formulated several different methods for organizing the material. He was also instrumental in promoting commonplace books as an important educational tool, particularly in guiding students to a more disciplined method of reading.
During the Renaissance commonplace books were developed for a wide range of disciplines including literature, law, philosophy, and science. But with the rise of science and the diminishing importance of proof by authority, the value of commonplace book collections declined fairly rapidly. This process was accelerated by the development of comprehensive encyclopedias as sources of reference during the Enlightenment. Havens summarizes evidence that fewer and fewer printed commonplace books appeared during the eighteenth century, “a period marked by greater public familiarity with other distinct forms of text compilation—verse anthologies, concordances, encyclopedias…”
Over the course of the next centuries, commonplace books continued to be published although their character changed significantly. Rather than sources of knowledge, they became more personal collections of literary extracts, occasionally followed by brief comments, but largely unorganized and highly idiosyncratic in subject matter. Insofar as the passages in these printed collections were gathered together under specific topics or themes, they still deviated significantly from the earlier forms of commonplace books that were structured and indexed in a rather systematic fashion. In a word, the nature of commonplace books evolved from a resource for argument and persuasion in antiquity, to a reference for knowledge and wisdom that flourished during the Renaissance, into its contemporary version of a personal collection of memorable literary quotations without any formal conceptual scheme.
Yet a collection of this sort is quite different than the way “commonplace book” is formally defined. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as:
A book in which ‘commonplaces’ or passages important for reference were collected, usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement.
My collection was never intended to be a reference book, nor have I organized the material under separate “heads” or topics. Yet that was the way commonplace books were originally conceived. The term “common place” can be traced to the Greeks who referred to the group of philosophical arguments and discussion topics used by statesman and orators as koinoi topoi (“general points). The Romans translated the phrase as communes loci (general areas of discussion) that scholars and orators also drew upon in composition or speaking. According to Gilbert Highet “some tasteless fellow Englished the term into “commonplaces.” The sense in which the headings were “common” signifies their acceptance as the fundamental beliefs and moral principals of the times. It is ironic that in popular speech the term has come to mean something rather ordinary and unremarkable since there is clearly nothing the least bit ordinary or common in the commonplace books that stretch back to classical antiquity and the Renaissance.
According to Earle Havens Aristotle referred to the collected passages as: “the principal tools of any logical and systematic interrogation of the truth or falsity of an opinion.” It is in this sense that commonplace books were originally considered to be organized sources of knowledge and practical wisdom. In Roman times Cicero carried on the tradition by drawing his commonplace material from the works of philosophers, orators, and poets and subsequently applied them in his public speaking and courtroom presentations. In the Middle Ages Scholastic philosophers continued the practice but turned away from secular applications and substituted instead theological and religious words of wisdom as the materials for their commonplace books.
From all accounts the commonplace book tradition reached its peak of popularity during the Renaissance. This was associated with the revival of classical learning and the emergence of the humanistic critique of Scholasticism. Havens writes:
Renaissance humanists, teachers, and students were among the first to deliberately invoke the term “commonplace book” to describe collections of quotations organized for the express purpose of demonstrating the best moral wisdom and rhetorical felicity of ancient Greek and Latin authors.
Erasmus was perhaps the most influential advocate of drawing upon classical learning in this fashion and formulated several different methods for organizing the material. He was also instrumental in promoting commonplace books as an important educational tool, particularly in guiding students to a more disciplined method of reading.
During the Renaissance commonplace books were developed for a wide range of disciplines including literature, law, philosophy, and science. But with the rise of science and the diminishing importance of proof by authority, the value of commonplace book collections declined fairly rapidly. This process was accelerated by the development of comprehensive encyclopedias as sources of reference during the Enlightenment. Havens summarizes evidence that fewer and fewer printed commonplace books appeared during the eighteenth century, “a period marked by greater public familiarity with other distinct forms of text compilation—verse anthologies, concordances, encyclopedias…”
Over the course of the next centuries, commonplace books continued to be published although their character changed significantly. Rather than sources of knowledge, they became more personal collections of literary extracts, occasionally followed by brief comments, but largely unorganized and highly idiosyncratic in subject matter. Insofar as the passages in these printed collections were gathered together under specific topics or themes, they still deviated significantly from the earlier forms of commonplace books that were structured and indexed in a rather systematic fashion. In a word, the nature of commonplace books evolved from a resource for argument and persuasion in antiquity, to a reference for knowledge and wisdom that flourished during the Renaissance, into its contemporary version of a personal collection of memorable literary quotations without any formal conceptual scheme.
1.30.2008
Ian McEwan's Saturday
I marked forty-five separate passages in Ian McEwan’s Saturday, an intellectually rich novel about a single day in the life of Henry Perowne, a British neurosurgeon. http://www.ianmcewan.com/bib/books/saturday.html Perowne is a deeply reflective man. He muses, ruminates, broods and wonders about one thing or another--the nature of his discipline, his family the routine chores that occupy his day, and the troublesome times in which he lives during the early years of the 21st century. The changing conditions of the contemporary world are a constant worry, as is the apparent decline of Western values and ideals. McEwan describes “the drift, the white noise of [Perowne’s] solitary thought” and at one point characterizes his state as a “folly of overintrerpretation.”
In turn, I was led to reflect on those same topics as I paused to place my marks in the margin and then to ponder his musings and the extent to which I agreed with them or not. As a result, although it was not a very lengthy novel, it took me forever to read—a pleasure devoutly treasured by this reader. McEwan speculates a good deal about the origins of human behavior and difficulties of identifying them with any precision. Since I have been concerned with those very same issues throughout my professional life, I marked a goodly number where McEwan writes about this issue.
Parental Influence
It’s a commonplace of parenting and modern genetics that parents have little or no influence on the characters of their children. You never know who you are going to get. Opportunities, health, prospects, accent, table manners—these might lie within your power to shape.
We hear much doubt expressed today about the direct impact of parents on their children's personality and adult behavior, indeed, whether or not they matter at all or matter as much as their peers. It is said, for example, that parental influence on their children has been overestimated. Studies of identical twins (reared apart or together) are cited to show that genetic factors control about a half of a person's intellect and personality. Other studies of fatherless children are said to be consistent with this evidence. Rearing a child without an adult male in the household appears to have very little particular impact on children. Instead, factors associated with income, frequency of moving, and peer relationships are said to matter more.
My own feeling is that these claims say less about the influence of parents on their children and far more about the methods used to obtain the evidence, especially the methods used to assess adult behavior and personality. Frankly, I do not believe these methods tap the important dimensions of human personality and intellectual ability. Nor do I think the findings have a very high degree of generality
I also believe whatever influence parents have on their children is not likely to be very specific. Instead, their influence has much more to do with very general personality and character dimensions rather than specific behaviors, table manners included. We learn from our parents very general aspects of character and motivation. We learn to value learning, not any particular discipline. We see what it means to be generous and helpful, not any particular instance of these acts. In short, our parents provide exemplars for those deeper aspects of human character and feeling that find are expressed in the sort of person we become.
In turn, I was led to reflect on those same topics as I paused to place my marks in the margin and then to ponder his musings and the extent to which I agreed with them or not. As a result, although it was not a very lengthy novel, it took me forever to read—a pleasure devoutly treasured by this reader. McEwan speculates a good deal about the origins of human behavior and difficulties of identifying them with any precision. Since I have been concerned with those very same issues throughout my professional life, I marked a goodly number where McEwan writes about this issue.
Parental Influence
It’s a commonplace of parenting and modern genetics that parents have little or no influence on the characters of their children. You never know who you are going to get. Opportunities, health, prospects, accent, table manners—these might lie within your power to shape.
We hear much doubt expressed today about the direct impact of parents on their children's personality and adult behavior, indeed, whether or not they matter at all or matter as much as their peers. It is said, for example, that parental influence on their children has been overestimated. Studies of identical twins (reared apart or together) are cited to show that genetic factors control about a half of a person's intellect and personality. Other studies of fatherless children are said to be consistent with this evidence. Rearing a child without an adult male in the household appears to have very little particular impact on children. Instead, factors associated with income, frequency of moving, and peer relationships are said to matter more.
My own feeling is that these claims say less about the influence of parents on their children and far more about the methods used to obtain the evidence, especially the methods used to assess adult behavior and personality. Frankly, I do not believe these methods tap the important dimensions of human personality and intellectual ability. Nor do I think the findings have a very high degree of generality
I also believe whatever influence parents have on their children is not likely to be very specific. Instead, their influence has much more to do with very general personality and character dimensions rather than specific behaviors, table manners included. We learn from our parents very general aspects of character and motivation. We learn to value learning, not any particular discipline. We see what it means to be generous and helpful, not any particular instance of these acts. In short, our parents provide exemplars for those deeper aspects of human character and feeling that find are expressed in the sort of person we become.
1.29.2008
Scientific Truth
In Saturday and elsewhere McEwan has expressed his optimism about the ability of science to unravel the mysteries of the brain and the truth about consciousness. There are several passages in Saturday that deal with general matters of scientific inquiry and method. I was especially struck by this succinct remark.
…statistical probabilities are not the same as truths.
This claim is at the heart of the disenchantment I began to experience with psychology. Psychologists seek to establish very general laws of human thought and action. Yet I never understood how evidence derived by averaging the scores of a group of individuals could serve as the foundation for a science of individual behavior. Laws based on aggregate data tell us very little about specific individuals and serve only to obscure crucial features of human variability and uniqueness. Further, the many exceptions to these laws severely limits their generality. So, it is impossible to say with assurance that they hold for a particular individual at a particular time and place.
This conclusion is not unlike one often voiced in judicial proceedings where the legal standing of psychological research is called into question. Legal cases are decided on an individual basis and so, even when the weight of evidence clearly supports the relevant social science generalization, the courts still require "proof" that it applies in the case being adjudicated. When judges ask psychologists to link the general principle to the specific case, it is difficult, if not impossible for them to do so with certainty. But that is what the law requires. Psychologists can provide relevant case knowledge and guidance, but the information they present is rarely, if ever, decisive in judicial decision-making.
Similarly, I know enough about psychology to be wary of psychological generalizations and the statistical methods used to analyze “supporting” data. You can never be entirely confident about the applicability of evidence derived from this approach. I have come to believe that psychology will always have to be content with this sort of limitation. Laws based on group means hold for some people, some of the time, but one never can be sure on any given occasion if they apply to a particular individual in the situation at hand.
…statistical probabilities are not the same as truths.
This claim is at the heart of the disenchantment I began to experience with psychology. Psychologists seek to establish very general laws of human thought and action. Yet I never understood how evidence derived by averaging the scores of a group of individuals could serve as the foundation for a science of individual behavior. Laws based on aggregate data tell us very little about specific individuals and serve only to obscure crucial features of human variability and uniqueness. Further, the many exceptions to these laws severely limits their generality. So, it is impossible to say with assurance that they hold for a particular individual at a particular time and place.
This conclusion is not unlike one often voiced in judicial proceedings where the legal standing of psychological research is called into question. Legal cases are decided on an individual basis and so, even when the weight of evidence clearly supports the relevant social science generalization, the courts still require "proof" that it applies in the case being adjudicated. When judges ask psychologists to link the general principle to the specific case, it is difficult, if not impossible for them to do so with certainty. But that is what the law requires. Psychologists can provide relevant case knowledge and guidance, but the information they present is rarely, if ever, decisive in judicial decision-making.
Similarly, I know enough about psychology to be wary of psychological generalizations and the statistical methods used to analyze “supporting” data. You can never be entirely confident about the applicability of evidence derived from this approach. I have come to believe that psychology will always have to be content with this sort of limitation. Laws based on group means hold for some people, some of the time, but one never can be sure on any given occasion if they apply to a particular individual in the situation at hand.
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