`What an Elixer is This Sound!'

A reader writes: “Thought of you when I saw this quote from Thoreau: `When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.’” Choice Thoreau: celebrative, no axe to grind. He played the flute and often commented on his vulnerability to music. For most nineteenth-century Americans, music meant the human voice, sometimes supplemented by a church organ, piano or fiddle, or the sound of a brass band. It’s difficult to project ourselves into the age before recording technology made Bach or Sidney Bechet instantly, effortlessly listenable. Four years ago I cited the same passage shared by my reader, borrowed from Thoreau’s journal entry for Jan. 13, 1857. It begins: 

“I hear one thrumming a guitar below stairs. It reminds me of moments that I have lived. What a comment on our life is the least strain of music!” 

Think of how layered our memories are with musical associations. Lately I’ve listened to Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations again. It was his recording debut in 1955 and his final recording twenty-six years later, shortly before his death. Listening again to the 1981 version triggers a dense weave of memories beginning in childhood. I attempt the mental discipline of hearing only the sound, turning off the associations, but it’s futile. In the next sentences, Thoreau’s prose gets a little fulsomely Platonic, but I’m sympathetic: 

“It lifts me up above all the dust and mire of the universe. I soar or hover with clean skirts over the field of my life. It is ever life within life, in concentric spheres.” 

Thoreau posits that his response to the guitar “advertises me that there is still some health and immortality in the springs of me.” Contrast this with a line attributed to another great American writer, Ulysses S. Grant, who sounds like his friend Mark Twain: “I know only two tunes: one of them is 'Yankee Doodle', and the other one isn’t.” Thoreau is positively rejuvenated by music: 

“What an elixir is this sound! I, who but lately came and went and lived under a dish cover, live now under the heavens. It releases me; it bursts my bonds. Almost all, perhaps all, our life is, speaking comparatively, a stereotyped despair; i.e., we never at any time realize the full grandeur of our destiny. We forever and ever and habitually underrate our fate.” 

From here, Thoreau swoons into a spiritual rhapsody, a little rarified for my taste, but his company when he’s happy, or when he’s convincing himself he ought to be happy, is always pleasant. It’s when he succumbs to “stereotyped despair,” which he generally turns into kvetching, that I leave the room. Think what Thoreau might have written and how he might have lived if he’d owned a CD player and a stack of Paul Desmond and Jimmy Rushing discs.

`'Tis All He Has Left Me'

On this date, July 30, in 1821, Charles Lamb revealed to his friend John Taylor the identity of the fictional double who forever threatened to displace his reality, Elia, that anagram of a lie: 

“Poor ELIA, the real, (for I am but a counterfeit) is dead. The fact is, a person of that name, an Italian, was a fellow clerk of mine at the South Sea House, thirty (not forty) years ago, when the characters I described there existed, but had left it like myself many years; and I having a brother now there, and doubting how he might relish certain descriptions in it, I clapt down the name of Elia to it, which passed off pretty well, for Elia himself added the function of an author to that of a scrivener, like myself.” 

Lamb published the first of his Elia essays in The London Magazine in 1820, turning out fifty-two of them in five years, all published in book form in Essays of Elia (1823) and Last Essays of Elia (1833). To the latter volume, Lamb appended a preface, “By a Friend of the Late Elia,” in which he writes: “To say truth, it is time he were gone. The humour of the thing, if there was ever much in it, was pretty well exhausted; and a two years' and a half existence has been a tolerable duration for a phantom.” For another two paragraphs he eulogizes his mythical alter ego, who shares with Lamb his stutter, his fondness for tobacco (“the Indian weed”) and an occasional drink (“temperate in his meals and diversions, but always kept a little on this side of abstemiousness”), and general oddness of character. Lamb/Elia writes of Elia/Lamb: “Few understood him; and I am not certain that at all times he quite understood himself. He too much affected that dangerous figure -- irony.” Recounting to Taylor his attempt to have a reunion with Elia, Lamb sounds a note of genuine fictional pathos: 

“I went there the other day (not having seen him for a year) to laugh over with him at my usurpation of his name, and found him, alas! no more than a name, for he died of consumption eleven months ago, and I knew not of it. So the name has fairly devolved to me, I think; and ’tis all he has left me.”

`A Wise Man Will Attend to Each One's Report'

Thoreau in his journal for July 29, 1857: 

“I am interested in an indistinct prospect, a distant view, a mere suggestion often, revealing an almost wholly new world to me. I rejoice to get, and am apt to present, a new view. But I find it impossible to present my view to most people.” 

Unlike Thoreau, I’ve never fancied myself a pioneer, an explorer of the new except when it’s already old. Novelty for its own sake is overrated, luring the impressionable and easily impressed. Thoreau is at least disingenuous when he complains of the impossibility of presenting his “view.” That’s almost all he ever did, even in the privacy of his journal. It’s said a fellow citizen of Concord met Henry on the street and asked how he was doing, and Henry told him, in excrutiating detail, ever the town scold, the cranky Yankee. No mere civility for Henry. 

“In effect, it would seem that they do not wish to take a new view in any case. Heat lightning flashes, which reveal a distant horizon to our twilight eyes. But my fellows simply assert that it is not broad day, which everybody knows, and fail to perceive the phenomenon at all. I am willing to pass for a fool in my often desperate, perhaps foolish, efforts to persuade them to lift the veil from off the possible and future, which they hold down with both their hands, before their eyes.” 

Henry the haranguer, self-appointed enlightener of the benighted masses, the meddler and know-it-all adolescent. The type today is epidemic. 

“The most valuable communication or news consists of hints and suggestions. When a truth comes to be known and accepted, it begins to be bad taste to repeat it. Every individual constitution is a probe employed in a new direction, and a wise man will attend to each one’s report.” 

The least important thing I can know about you is your opinion. Tell me what you know and what you do, and for most of us that won’t take long.

`A Fine Word for a Hateful Thing'

Daniel Mark Epstein’s “The Cataract” (The Traveler’s Calendar: New Poems, 2002):  

“Lately the world seems darker,

Especially in the evenings,

And I light more lamps

To see no better than ever

Familiar faces and things:” 

Not so much darkness as diminished acuity, softness of focus, like the petroleum jelly early directors smeared on the lens of their cameras. Street signs and numbers on office doors blur. Reading becomes translating. I watch as my brain fills in meanings, refusing gaps in perception, a silent process my ophthalmologist confirmed. 

“Wayworn works of Art,

Books known almost by heart.

Is this the cataract, what

The Romans used to call

A portcullis or waterfall  

“Descending to subtract

From the sum of my seeing?

A fine word for a hateful thing,

Though now the doctors say

They can lift the veil in a day.” 

More like twenty or thirty minutes per eye. The doctor works Thursdays, and I’ll take off the Fridays to recover. Epstein, translator of Plautus, traces the word back to cataracta: “waterfall, portcullis, floodgate.” An opacity in the lens of the eye.  

“Who takes joy in the word

For a blur that steals his light?

The power is its own reward

And a gift of second sight,

This joy to build a tower,  

“Without fear or self-pity,

Of words for the horror

That attends the end of light,

A castle to stand bright

In the ruins of a city.” 

The power to name is its own reward. Cataract is densely packed with inference and history – a one-word poem. Think of Lear and the Fool on the heath: 

“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!

You sulph'rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o' th' world,
Crack Nature's moulds, all germains spill at once,
That makes ingrateful man!”

`The Stutterer is a Born Stylist'

In expansive moods, writers speak of words “flowing,” as in water, blood and sewage. Here’s a trade secret: Even on a good day, good writers stammer on the page or screen, and then clean up the mess. More than twenty years as a newspaper reporter left me fast and fluent but sloppy, at least in the first draft. By nature I’m fussy. I clean up as I go, correcting typos and solecisms along the way (one of the enduring gifts of word processing over typewriting). At the end I do a final mopping up, always with the goal of precision and concision, always with the knowledge that I’ve missed something. At that point, I’m a taker-outer, seldom a putter-inner, a Beckett not a Proust. E.M. Cioran writes in The New Gods (trans. Richard Howard, University of Chicago Press, 2013): “The more we stammer, the more we struggle to write better. Thus we take revenge for not having been able to be an orator. The stutterer is a born stylist.” 

An honest writer strives for articulation, not approximation, the right fitting of word to thought. Few of us can do this spontaneously. There seems only tenuous connection between conversational and written fluency. Consider some writers who stuttered: Charles Lamb, Charles Darwin, Henry James (though not in French), Machado de Assis, Elizabeth Bowen, John Updike – each a rare stylist (and little more in Updike’s case), each prolific. Style, Cioran suggests, is compensatory. If you can’t speak fluently, write artfully. William Dean Howells said he found in his friend Henry James’ style “perpetual delight in his way of saying things.”

`I Live in Light'

Hot, drought-ridden Houston is still a relief after three years of exile in Seattle. It never storms up there; it drips. The sky is low and opaque, like a bowl of gray milk. The sun shines for three days in August. Moss displaces grass, and mold displaces moss. The population is peevish and surly. Rereading E.M. Cioran after long absence proves, yet again, confounding. In Tears and Saints (trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, University of Chicago Press, 1995) he writes: 

“Sunlight is not a good topic for poetry. You can be grateful for the sun, but can you sing its praises? The Egyptians made the sun a god so that they could compose hymns in its honor. Light is indiscreet, and when you are unhappy it is downright vexing. The sun describes a curb of happiness, but plenitude has never been a source of poetry.” 

One understands the attraction of contrariness, the will to provocation. Who wants to drone with the rest? But here Cioran is mistaken. Sunlight and plenitude may be the only good topics for poetry. When Dante, guided by Beatrice, visits the Sphere of the Sun in Paradise, he encounters the souls of twelve wise men, including St. Thomas Aquinas, Boethius and King Solomon. “I live in light,” Helen Pinkerton says in “Degrees of Shade” (Taken in Faith, 2002). And then there’s this beautiful line from “Paho at Walpi” by Pinkerton’s friend Janet Lewis: “The sunlight pours unbroken through the wind.” 

My ten-year-old asked the other day what would happen if the sun suddenly disappeared. He knows about the eight minutes it takes light to travel from the sun to Earth. How soon would we feel its absence? Eight minutes? Then what happens? Would we see the darkness before life blinked out of existence? And what about gravity? Relativity teaches that gravity moves at the speed of light. Would the earth, without the sun and its gravitational pull, go tumbling out of orbit through space? Would the next most powerful source of gravity (Jupiter?) yank us away from the empty center of the solar system? I’ll stick with Dante and his wise men. 

`They Say Eyes Clear With Age'

The first of several eye tests left me with a momentary lightshow I could control with the blink of an eye – electric green quadrilaterals with eyes closed, the same shapes in magenta and yellow when open. I pointed this out to the ophthalmologist, who delivered an informative lecture on the retina’s light-sensitive cells and their tendency to send data to the brain even with the lights turned off. I like doctors’ shop talk and I like asking a lot of questions. It takes my mind off cataract surgery, though the doctor assured me eyes have no pain receptors. 

He raised an unexpected possibility: After two surgeries, one for each eye, and an outpatient “scraping” of the cornea, I might no longer need glasses. There was a time when that would have seemed like a gift. I’ve worn glasses since I was eleven or twelve, prescribed that first time by a Hungarian optometrist with witheringly bad breath, and bifocals since I was forty. They’re an extension of me, almost a prosthesis, and I can’t imagine life without them. I thought of vulnerable Mr. Sammler who “in his goggles was troubled in focusing.” Lens-less, I’m too befuddled. I declined. The cataracts come off in September. 

Philip Larkin, owlishly spectacled, once likened his head to “an egg sculpted in lard, wearing goggles.” A 1955 poem, “Long Sight in Age” (The Complete Poems, 2012), addresses vision in several senses and that chilling phrase “They say”: 

“They say eyes clear with age,

As dew clarifies air

To sharpen evenings,

As if time put an edge

Round the last shape of things

To show them there;

The many-levelled trees,

The long soft tides of grass

Wrinkling away the gold

Wind-ridden waves- all these,

They say, come back to focus

As we grow old.”

`Books Are People Talking About Other People'

If remembered at all, Merrill Moore (1903-1957) is pigeonholed as one of the more prolific and less accomplished Fugitive poets, the doctor who dabbled in sonnets, analyst to Robert Frost and Robert Lowell. He was, certainly, a sport of nature, a sonnet-machine whose lifetime output of fourteen-liners may have exceeded 40,000. In 1938 he published M: One Thousand Autobiographical Sonnets, followed by Clinical Sonnets (1949), Illegitimate Sonnets (1950), Case-Record from a Sonnetorium (1951) and More Clinical Sonnets (1953) He called his office the “sonnetorium.” I remembered my discovery of Moore forty years ago thanks to another poet and a critic, all by way of a friend. On Monday, Nige wrote about his rereading of Keats and Embarrassment by Christopher Ricks, perhaps the single most readable book of literary criticism published in my lifetime. Read it and you’ll never think about blushing in quite the same way. I pulled out the book again and read the chapter “Somebody Reading,” in which Ricks quotes the wonderful letter Keats wrote to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana on Sept. 20, 1819: 

“Writing has this disadvantage of speaking one cannot write a wink, or a nod, or a grin, or a purse of the lips, or a smile law! One cannot put one's finger to one’s nose, or yerk [OED: “a smart blow or stroke”] ye in the ribs, or lay hold of your button in writing ; but in all the most lively and titterly parts of my letter you must not fail to imagine me, as the epic poets say, now here, now there ; now with one foot pointed at the ceiling, now with another ; now with my pen on my ear, now with my elbow in my mouth.” 

Rick contrasts Keats’ understanding of the act of writing, its inadequacies and joys, with the theorizing of a psychologist and a sociologist. He writes: 

“Keats set such store by the attempt to imagine a writer or reader because doing so will release reading and writing from the inevitable anxieties of solitude—narcissism, solipsism, lonely indulgent fantasizing. It is for such reasons that many of us set such store by the public discussion of literature. To write about literature, argue about it, teach it; these, though they bring other anxieties, are valued because they can help to restore a vital balance of private and public in our relation with literature.” 

The act of forever recalibrating the balance of inner and outer, private and public, seems to be the essence of living with books, reading and enjoying them, sharing our enjoyment and applying their lessons (on blushing, for instance). So much remains unshared and interior – and it must. But so much is talked and written about, in emails, blogs, book chat, book reviews and scholarly articles. Ricks then quotes a sonnet by Moore written in 1941, “Eyes in Libraries,” collected posthumously in Poems of American Life (Philosophical Library, 1958):

“I observe peculiarities

In the movements of the human eyes

Over desks of special libraries. 

“Eyes there rove a bit more than is wise,

Often show inquisitiveness or surprise,

Notice gloves and shoes and socks and ties

And even query whose and whats and whys. 

“You can notice peculiarities

In the motions of the people's eyes

In and near to public libraries. 

“Men and women go there to sit and read

But they squirm and rove, survey each other

Not as sister, quite, and not as brother,

But more with nervous desire or anxious dread.” 

Among other things, Moore’s sonnet suggests the erotic crackle often felt in libraries, the heightened sense of connection and possibility. Libraries, I’ve often thought, are sexual places because “books are people talking about other people.” Here’s another sonnet by Moore, “Books Are Men”: 

“Millions of people talking about other people

In book-shop talk and literary reviews,

Passing gossip, criticism, trade-news 

“Like church organs whose chimes are set in the steeple

To scatter down when crowds congregate within

The battle cries of unknown soldiers lost

In wars lamenting the ultimate gain and cost 

“Of whether the right were good and evil were sin

And who did just what thing in just what way,

Millions of volumes dusty on millions of shelves 

“And everywhere dust, settling down and grey

On faces that might have shown white in the bright moonlight

Somewhere once, perhaps on a certain night.

Books are people talking about other people.”

`A Mystery Writer With a Touch of Magic'

In a 1951 letter to his English publisher, Hamish Hamilton, Raymond Chandler admits that “as a rule I admire the good second-raters” among fellow writers, citing as examples John P. Marquand, Irwin Shaw and Herman Wouk. The latter two are unreadable but we know what Chandler’s getting at: “I like to read them and while I read them they seem very good. It is only afterwards that the quality fades” (Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, 1981). But not always. Chandler himself is at least a “good second-rater,” and probably a little better, and his standing for this reader has only grown with time.

All honest readers with sense are hierarchical readers. We instinctively rank writers and books as lousy, good or excellent; essential, optional or a waste of time. There’s no serious argument about, say, Gogol or Henry James, but placing Chandler is trickier. To call him “the greatest American novelist” as at least one enthusiast has done is stupid and provincial. But to dismiss him as “merely a gifted genre writer,” as another misguided reader has done, is equally obtuse. Who wouldn’t prefer reading Chandler over Ann Beattie, Robert Coover or Joan Didion, to cite three overinflated reputations almost at random? 

I almost never read crime writers, and detest Hammett and most of his imitators, but Chandler, like Ross Macdonald, I’ve been rereading for more than forty years and they stick with me. Think of the face of the corpse, “a swollen pulpy gray white mass without features,” floating to the surface in The Lady in the Lake (1943). Or the smell of scorched flesh in “Goldfish” (1936). Or Candy, Roger Wade’s houseboy in The Long Goodbye (1953), looking at his passed-out boss and saying to Marlowe: “`Pobrecito,’ he murmured as if he meant it. `Borracho como una cuba,’” and Marlowe replying: “`He may be drunk as a sow but he sure ain’t little. You take the feet.’” Chandler’s metaphors and scenes upholster my memory more thoroughly and with more accompanying pleasure than anything written by such soft-headed sentimentalists as Steinbeck or Vonnegut. In the same letter to Hamilton, Chandler writes: 

“Well, all this matters nothing, except that a writer to be happy should be a good second-rater, not a starved genius like Laforgue. Not a sad lonely man like Heine, not a lunatic like Dostoevski. He should definitely not be a mystery writer with a touch of magic and a bad feeling about plots.” 

Chandler was born on this date, July 23, in 1888, in Chicago, and died March 26, 1959, in La Jolla. Go here to see a clip of Chandler’s cameo in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), based on the novel by James Cain, with a screenplay by Wilder and Chandler.

`Going Into a Drawing-Room Without My Shoes'

Staring, we’re taught, is rude, and that lesson is mostly true but not always easy to practice. We stare at a beautiful woman (ogling, leering), an ugly woman (gawking), an automobile wreck (rubbernecking), a spectacular sunset (gazing). Such events have one thing in common – each is out of the ordinary. They are wondrous, arousing or appalling, never merely routine. Three of these four acts of staring are discouraged as voyeuristic, full of dubious pleasure at another’s expense. Morally, they’re related to theft. But is staring always a questionable act? Are there occasions when to avert one’s eye would be inappropriate, morally dubious, making staring a positive good? 

Flannery O’Connor thinks so, in a special sense. In “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose) she writes: “The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.” She is addressing the way writing is taught in universities. Several sentences earlier she writes: “A mind cleared of false emotion and false sentiment and egocentricity is going to have at least those roadblocks removed from its path.” She urges writers to cleanse “cheapness” from their minds and work, the easy, proven formulas, the pre-fab emotions.  One way to do this is to stare, to peer attentively at the world. “Any discipline,” she says, “can help your writing: logic, mathematics, theology, and of course and particularly drawing. Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look.” 

On the other hand, O’Connor, a connoisseur of the Southern grotesque, says nothing about those who wish to be stared at, the exhibitionists of the world, even writers, who specialize in attention-seeking cheapness. O’Connor knew and admired Dr. Johnson, and probably approved of this exchange reported by Boswell on Sept. 30, 1769: 

“Boswell. `Is it wrong then, Sir, to affect singularity, in order to make people stare?’ Johnson. “Yes, if you do it by propagating errour; and, indeed, it is wrong in any way. There is in human nature a general inclination to make people stare; and every wise man has himself to cure of it, and does cure himself. If you wish to make people stare by doing better than others, why make them stare till they stare their eyes out. But consider how easy it is to make people stare, by being absurd. I may do it by going into a drawing-room without my shoes.’”

`The Skill to Free the Leaden Words'

Several weeks ago the Irish-born poet Greg Delanty sent a note thanking me for writing about his poem “Loosestrife” in a post last year. He also acknowledged my fondness for Dr. Johnson, in particular his “Works of the English Poets’—I have a first edition of the whole, more than 50 volume set.” As if that weren’t enough, Delanty had shipped me three of his books – Collected Poems 1986-2006 (Carcanet, 2007), Loosestrife (Fomite, 2011) and The Greek Anthology Book XVII (Carcanet, 2012). All are inscribed, and on the title page of the Collected volume Delanty writes: “For Patrick K, through The Mystery p94—Best Wishes, Greg.” The reference is to “The Composing Room,” a poem in seven twelve-line sections first published in The Hellbox (1998). 

Born in Cork in 1958, Delanty comes from a family of hot-metal printers. In “The Composing Room” he deploys the argot of printing – “dingbat,” “quoin,” “hellbox” (respectively, a printer’s ornament, a block used by printers to lock up a form within a chase, and the box that holds broken or worn-out type). I entered newspapering in the last of the last days of the old, pre-digital typesetting era (electric typewriters!), and thought of printers as a Masonic guild, heirs to centuries of arcane wisdom. In his poem, Delanty writes of composing as a metaphor for his own craft, making poems. Like many another writer, he confesses, “every time I read the word world I wonder/ is it a typo and should I delete the l?” Printing, he suggests, gave him a feel for the physicality, the heft, of words – an excellent apprenticeship. "The Mystery” he refers to in his inscription refers to the last of the poem’s final stanzas: 

“grant me the skill to free the leaden words

from the words I set, undo their awkwardness,

the weight of each letter of each word

so that the words disappear, fall away 

“or are forgotten and what remains is the metal

of feeling and thought behind

and beyond the cast of words

dissolving in their own ink wash. 

“Within this solution we find ourselves,

meeting only here, through The Mystery,

but relieved nonetheless to meet, if only

behind the characters of one fly-boy’s words.” 

In a print shop, the “fly-boy” catches the printed sheets as they come off the press.

`The Downward World is Prodigally Rich'

I missed the birthday this week of the English poet Elizabeth Jennings. She was born in Boston, Lincolnshire, on July 18, 1926, and died Oct. 26, 2001, in Bampton, Oxfordshire. She’s buried in Wolvercote Cemetery alongside Isaiah Berlin, J.R.R. Tolkien and James Murray, founding editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. I sense her work has never been well-known in the U.S. and is mostly forgotten in the U.K. Though a woman, her demographics have never been fashionable. She was a serious Roman Catholic, not an academic, an elastic formalist and never conspicuously political. She was also popular, by poetry market standards. Her Selected and Collected volumes of 1979 and 1986, respectively, sold more than 86,000 copies. When Nicholas Lezard reviewed her hefty Collected Poems last year, he called her work “accessible without being shallow,” as though such a distinction were necessary. She takes her rightful place among the most gifted of her English contemporaries – Smith, Enright, Larkin, Sisson, Gunn and Hill. Take “Green World” from Extending the Territory (1985), in which she reclaims “green” from the ideologues and returns it to the world of Shakespeare’s comedies: 

“The green world stands in its accomplished guise

Under elusive suns. Our gardens reach

Up to the cruising clouds. Before our eyes

The downward world is prodigally rich.

Summer wins from Nature her vast prize. 

“Elegiac moods, nostalgia too

Are absent and we live in strong today,

Watching the green stride and sustain a view.

The very light is eagerly at play

And there are silences for me and you. 

“Silence broken by the planning birds,

Their peaceful bickering. The winds are light

Yet strong enough to give refrains to words

And whisper through the star-decisive night.

The sunlight also holds us on strong cords,

The green world bows before admiring sight.” 

With gardens we accommodate ourselves to the world. Our reward is green. Charles Lamb writes in one of his Essays of Elia, “New Year’s Eve”: “I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here.”

`An Instance of This Deplorable Merriment'

The lunatic asylum now known as the Bethlem Royal Hospital was founded as a priory in London in 1247, during the reign of Henry III. Since 1403 it has served as a madhouse, a place where the mentally ill have been treated or at least confined. From its name, earlier the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem, we get bedlam. Like all good, useful words it has mutated. The Oxford English Dictionary gives eleven alternate spellings across almost eight-hundred years, and seven definitions. The most common usage today is probably the fourth, one that almost cancels its roots in insanity: “A scene of mad confusion or uproar.” That is, a mosh pit or a kindergarten class. In his Anatomy of Melancholy (1620), Robert Burton deploys the word in a sense closer to its unhappy origins: “Such raging Bedlams as are tied in chaines.” In the eighteenth century, for the cost of two pence, one could visit the hospital. On this date, July 19, in 1784, William Cowper (1731-1800) wrote to his friend the Rev. John Newton: 

“In those days when Bedlam was open to the cruel curiosity of holiday ramblers, I have been a visitor there. Though a boy, I was not altogether insensible of the misery of the poor captives, nor destitute of feeling for them. But the Madness of some of them had such a humorous air, and displayed itself in so many whimsical freaks, that it was impossible not to be entertained, at the same time that I was angry with myself for being so. A line of Bourne’s is very expressive of the spectacle which this world exhibits, tragic-comical as the incidents of it are, absurd in themselves, but terrible in their consequences; 

“Sunt res humanae flebile ludibrium. [Human affairs are a joke to be wept over.] 

“An instance of this deplorable merriment has occurred in the course of the last week in Olney. A feast gave the occasion to a catastrophe truly shocking.” 

A month later, on Aug. 14, Cowper refers elliptically to the “catastrophe” in a letter to the Rev. William Unwin: “Some neighbours of ours, about a fortnight since, made an excursion only to a neighbouring village, and brought home with them fractured sculls [sic] and broken limbs, and one of them is dead.” No further explanation. 

What’s striking in the July 19 letter is Cowper’s frankness. He was no stranger to the madhouse himself, but admits to finding the behavior of the inmates “humorous.” It was “impossible not to be entertained,” and yet he felt guilty about the pleasure he took in their madness. “Bourne” is Vincent Bourne (1695-1747), once Cowper’s teacher, a classicist who wrote poetry in Latin and English, and was much admired by Charles Lamb. The Latin line neatly distills Cowper’s vision, at once anguished and comic. In “Hatred and Vengeance, My Eternal Portion” (also known as "Lines Written During a Fit of Insanity") he writes:  

“Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors,

I’m called, if vanquished, to receive a sentence

                           Worse than Abiram’s.” 

In Numbers, Chapter 16, Abiram leads a revolt against Moses and is punished by being swallowed by the earth.

`This Idiot Had Been at the Moment Inspired'

We assumed the grownups were smarter than us, even when they behaved stupidly. Oafishness masked their true selves, which were brilliantly incisive and witty. When we got older, we would understand the subterfuge and adopt it ourselves, becoming comparably incisive and witty. But then we slowly woke to our delusion. The grownups were at least as dumb as we were. The mystery eluded them, too. Each of us, we learned with bitterness, remains an indelible amalgam of accomplishment and near-idiocy, and our insights into the true nature of others are pathetically incomplete and self-serving. We’re strangers to ourselves and others. 

In 1739, the satirical painter and printmaker William Hogarth was visiting the home of Samuel Richardson, author of Clarissa. Hogarth observed a stranger standing at the window, “shaking his head, and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner. He concluded that he was an idiot, whom his relations had put under the care of Mr. Richardson, as a very good man.” 

The stranger was Samuel Johnson and the author of the anecdote was his future biographer, James Boswell. Johnson soon joined the conversation with Hogarth and Richardson, condemning George II as “unrelenting and barbarous.” Boswell adds, “In short, [Johnson] displayed such a power of eloquence, that Hogarth looked at him with astonishment, and actually imagined that this idiot had been at the moment inspired.” The painter and lexicographer-poet became friends, and after Hogarth’s death in 1764, Johnson wrote four lines about him, quoted in a footnote by Boswell: 

“The hand of him here torpid lies,

That drew the essential form of grace;

Here clos’d in death the attentive eyes,

That saw the manners in the face.” 

Boswell, the greatest of biographers, remains misunderstood, dismissed as a pox-ridden drunk, an idiot savant of literature. Privately, Boswell questioned his own gifts and suspected he was the fraud his detractors have dismissed. In his diary on Dec. 22, 1775 (Boswell: The Ominous Years 1774-1776), he writes, in a passage many of us could claim as our own: 

“There is an imperfection, a superficialness, in all my notions. I understand nothing clearly, nothing to the bottom. I pick up fragments, but never have in my memory a mass of any size. I wonder really if it be possible for me to acquire any one part of knowledge fully. I am a lawyer. I have no system of law. I write verse. I know nothing of the art of poetry. In short I could go through everything in the same way.”

`I Owe Everything to Suzanne'

On this date, July 17, in 1989, Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil died in Paris, age eighty-nine. We remember her because she married Samuel Beckett. They met in 1929 while playing tennis. A decade later they became lovers. They fled Paris forty-eight hours before the Nazis marched down the Champs-Elysées, and joined the Resistance. They married in 1961. You can read the details, some fairly unpleasant, in Anthony Cronin and James Knowlson. The latter tells us Beckett judged her “merely likable and interesting” at the time of their first meeting. Knowlson notes Déchevaux-Dumesnil was six years older than Beckett, a pianist with perfect pitch and a seamstress, “attractive in a slightly masculine way.” The biographer goes on: 

“She was an unusual mixture: practical, a first-rate dressmaker, yet totally uninterested in cooking; down-to-earth, yet with a belief in some of the most bizarre practices of `alternative’ medicine. Generous and kind to the poor and underprivileged, she sympathized with failure [“fail better”] and hated success. Yet she could be jealous and intolerant, sharp and dismissive of anyone she did not like.” 

Knowlson says Déchevaux-Dumesnil’s role in Beckett’s life was maternal, that she was a teetotaler and criticized his drinking. However, “she had enormous respect for Beckett’s talents and total belief in his genius.” Knowlson credits her “quick intelligence and practical nature” with saving their lives several times during the Occupation. For two years they lived underground in Roussillon in the Vaucluse. Knowlson quotes Beckett as writing shortly after her death: 

“I owe everything to Suzanne. She hawked everything around trying to get someone to take all three books [Mercier and Camier, Molloy, Malone Dies] at the same time. That was a very pretentious thing for an unknown to want.” 

Overreaching critics have seen Sam and Suzanne in Estragon and Vladimir. Beckett was a rare writer who wrote feelingly and with insight about women, old women in particular. Think of Happy Days, Come and Go, Rockaby. The last is a one-woman play written in 1980. The sole character, known as “W,” was described by the playwright as “Prematurely old. Unkempt grey hair. Huge eyes in white expressionless face.” She listens to a recording of her own voice, "V": 

“time she stopped

going to and fro

time she went and sat
at her window

quiet at her window

facing other windows

so in the end

close of a long day” 

Beckett died five months after Déchevaux-Dumesnil, on Dec. 22, 1989, in a Paris nursing home. They are buried together in the Cimetière de Montparnasse.

`Give Me No High-Flown Fangled Things'

A friend in Dallas is reading Edward Seidensticker’s Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake (1983). I haven’t yet read the book and know Seidensticker only as the translator of Kawabata, Mishima and Tanizaki, but my friend sent me a passage by the Japanese writer Nagai Kafū (1879-1959) he thought I might enjoy. It’s from Kafū’s Hiyori-geta (Good-weather Footgear, also translated as Fairweather Clogs), a collection of essays about his walks around Tokyo, published in 1914: 

“I love weeds.  I have the same fondness for them as for the violets and dandelions of spring, the bell flowers and maiden flowers of autumn. I love the weeds that flourish in vacant lots, the weeds that grow on roofs, the weeds beside the road and beside the ditch. A vacant lot is a garden of weeds. The plumes of the mosquito-net grass, as delicate as glossed silk; the plumes of foxtail, soft as fur; the warm rose-pink of knotgrass blossoms; the fresh blue-white of the plantain; chickweed in flower, finer and whiter than sand: having come upon them does one not linger over them and find them difficult to give up?” 

As Seidensticker notes, “Kafū could be lyrical on the subject of vacant lots.” One is tempted at first to see something distinctly Japanese in the appeal of scorned plants, except similar sentiments can be found in Western writers as various as John Clare, Thoreau, Chesterton and Richard Mabey. Weeds possess the qualities we admire in paintings and poems – eloquent humility, enduring toughness, an absence of pretention and overreaching for significance, a mingling of plainness and complexity too often mistaken for simplicity. Weeds are elemental, nature distilled. Give me a mullein over a hothouse orchid any day. In “The Flitting,” Clare defines an aesthetic by way of nature: “Give me no high-flown fangled things, / No haughty pomp in marching chime,” and says of weeds: 

“Een here my simple feelings nurse

   A love for every simple weed,

 And een this little shepherd's purse

   Grieves me to cut it up; indeed

 I feel at times a love and joy

   For every weed and every thing.” 

Shepherd’s purse is Capsella bursa-pastoris, a member of the mustard family. In Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants (HarperCollins, 2010), Mabey writes: 

“The common garden weed shepherd’s purse is named for its seed heads, which resemble the little pouches or skrips worn by medieval peasants (there’s a typical skrip in Brueghel’s painting The Peasant Dance). Open up a purse and the seeds spill out like tiny golden coins. They’re cover with a thin layer of gum, which becomes stickier still when it’s moistened -- as for instance by contact with the soil – so that it can cling to the feet of birds.” 

Getting back to Japan, the Festival of Seven Herbs or Seven Grasses Day (Nanakusa no sekku) is observed on Jan. 7 by eating seven-herb rice porridge, including nazuna, or shepherd’s purse.

`That Was the Kind of Day It Was'

“Last week, there was a day I hesitate to call perfect only because I’d hate it if the truly perfect day had already come and gone in my life.” 

Agreed, but a day can be judged perfect only in memory. No one recognizes perfection as it happens. The day’s aches and gripes and mundane contingencies distract from emergent perfection. The perfect day must be seen, like fine jewelry, in the appropriate setting – that is, among the more conventional days surrounding it. Perfection, paradoxically, is relative. The quote above, Verlyn Klinkenborg’s, from More Scenes from the Rural Life (Princeton Architectural Press, 2013), is followed by this: 

“I’d like it to remain somewhere ahead in my reckoning. But when that perfect day comes it will probably resemble the one last week. The western breeze had cleaned the sun and purified the light, which fell mote-less on the farm.” 

Note that Klinkenborg doesn’t confuse the day’s perfection with wealth, conquest, love or the grosser pleasures, perfection’s hackneyed attributes to the callow unimaginative. For him a breeze and sunlight qualify. At the beach in Galveston on Sunday, we had a hot wind that mitigated the humidity, and intermittent sun, but the breeze was tangy with brine, the waves subdued, our fellow beach-goers mostly quiet. They provided the scent of barbecue. The sand was buff-colored and fine. We collected shells and beach glass and I pulled a dead horseshoe crab from the water, holding it by the tail and chasing my ten-year-old, pretending it was one of the face-huggers from the Alien movies. 

My oldest son was married last week in New York City. My middle son is attending a computer camp with his best friend near Seattle, and in six weeks leaves for boarding school in Canada. A perfect day is not getting what you want but appreciating what you have. Klinkenborg writes: 

“These are pure-sun, western-breeze thoughts, steam rising from compost. But on the day I mean, it seemed like a toss-up. Either everything was sentient along with me, or we are all sharing a vital insentience. I sat in the shade watching the bees come and go in the sunshine a few feet away, a nectared, pollened, purposeful cloud. That was the kind of day it was.”

`The Purpose of a Bird'

In the honeysuckle that grows on a trellis beside the garage we found a nest holding three mottled eggs. Because of the drought, the leaves have been turning brown and falling, the only reason the vine thinned enough to make the nest conspicuous. The blossoms and their scent, so cloying in the spring, are gone. Why, we wondered, would a bird build a nest next to the barbecue grill, fifteen feet from the back door? What species would be so gracious (to us) and so reckless (to its young)? 

On Thursday, getting out of the car, I saw a bird swoop out of the honeysuckle across the backyard and into the crepe myrtle. It was a female northern cardinal, less flashy but rivaling the male in beauty. On Saturday, we twice saw her shoot from the nest. This is probably her second brood of the year, and may answer a lingering mystery from last spring, when we found the dog chewing on an unfledged bird and had no idea where it came from. 

Every American recognizes the cardinal, at least the gaudy male. Its Latin name, Cardinalis cardinalis, is the first many of us learn. It’s the state bird of seven states, more than any other species. Their song is unmistakable. To a drably pragmatic human, the multimedia beauty of a cardinal, male or female, seems bafflingly gratuitous. To reduce its color and song to mere reproductive advantage, a tool of natural section, is doltish. In its emphatic dazzle, the cardinal is our living reproach. Richard Wilbur writes “In a Bird Sanctuary” (The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems, 1947): 

“It’s hard to tell the purpose of a bird;

for relevance its does not seem to try.

No line can trace no flute exemplify

its traveling; it darts without the word.

Who will devoutly to absorb, contain,

birds give him pain.”