YOU LEARN
by Jorge Luis Borges
After a while
you learn the subtle difference
between holding a hand and chaining a soul,
and you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning
and company doesn’t mean security.
And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts
and presents aren’t promises,
and you begin to accept your defeats
with your head up and your eyes open
with the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child,
and you learn to build all your roads on today
because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans
and futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight.
After a while you learn
that even sunshine burns if you get too much.
So you plant your garden and decorate your own soul,
instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure.
That you really are strong.
And you really do have worth.
And you learn. And learn.
With every good-bye you learn.
The Bad Taste (and other faults) of Genius
“The modern novel has reached such a pitch of competence and shapeliness that we are shocked at the disorderliness of the masterpieces. In the modern novel we are looking at a neatly barbered suburban garden; in the standard works how often do we have the impression of bowling through the magnificent gateway of a demesne only to find the house and gardens are unfinished or are patched up anyhow, as if the owner had tired of his money in the first few 
weeks and after that had passed his life in a daydream of projects for ever put off. We feel the force of a great power which is never entirely spent, but which cannot be bothered to fulfill itself. In short, we are up against the carelessness, the lethargy, the enormous bad taste of genius, its liability to accident, it’s slovenly and majestic conceit that anything will do. Don Quixote falls in half, the Chartreuse and Le Rouge et le Noir go shockingly to pieces, Tolstoy stuffs a history book into War and Peace, Fielding and Dickens pad and Dostoevsky wanders into ideological journalism.…”
That’s a quote from V.S. Pritchett’s essay on Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. It corresponds exactly, or almost exactly, with impressions I have gathered over a lifetime of reading. How often have I come across passages in Balzac where he seems to lose interest or even be falling asleep (he wrote at night, using pots of coffee to keep him going). How often have I fumed at those places in Dickens’s novels where he seems to decide he has to throw in some romantic melodrama, and the quality of the writing falls off a cliff.
But, well-wrought as they may be, modern novels are not exempt from this type of inferiority. They achieve it despite the artistry Pritchett has correctly attributed to them. But their own shortfalls are not the result of sloppiness or lethargy or any of the other vices Pritchett attributes to Tolstoy & Co. Simply put, few if any of them are Tolstoys or Balzacs. This process of passing off artistry for art and literary tidiness for genius has been accelerated by the intrusion of the university into the writing process. Now we have not only well-wrought prose, no matter how boring the content; we have it mass-produced and regularized not just according to form but by content as well.
This is a bug I’ve had in my bonnet for some time, and the quote from Pritchett which I came across recently only gave me the impetus to write about it. My friends have been hearing me hold forth on the subject for longer than they would care to remember. What I had on my mind more recently, though, was 
something similar with regard to poetry. I made the mistake of buying the Oxford Book of English Verse a few years back. It has in it some of the world’s best poetry, of course, but it also has a great deal, perhaps most of it, that is decidedly second-rate. But that was not the thing that struck me when reading through the contents more or less at random. My revelation was not that there was a great deal of mediocre poetry produced and passed off as first first-rate over the centuries, but that the very best poems themselves contain mediocre, and sometimes worse, lines which no English teacher I ever had pointed out as such.
The sum total of my impression from these readings is that even a great poem is usually the result of a handful or even just a few great lines. True, those other bits may be workmanlike enough, but if, like myself, you look for greatness from the first line to the last you will be hard put to find very many, if any poems that meet that standard.
Pritchett’s statement that the great prose of the 19th century is deeply flawed, the result of laziness and even low artistic standards, along with my impression that the achievements of the great poets are due to a few lucky hits, seemed to be related. (I happen to think, by the way, that there are a few perfect, or near-perfect poems, my own choice being Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child,” among them.) But the sum total of these observations actually seems to me to be heartening. If the great were as slovenly and careless as he says, that may not excuse them or us for similar failings but it does place the premium where it belongs–on what they did achieve–and seems to reinforce the opinion that no amount of formal training can give someone the ability to create a character like Anna Karenina or Cousin Pons or Uncle Nickelby or Jane Eyre or Heathwood or…pick-your-favorite. It may, indeed, have just the opposite effect.
Perfection, in other words, it is not a prerequisite or even a characteristic of great art. The onus of perfectibility may be more of an impediment to achieving something substantial that it is a goad to that end. Walter Kaufmann, best known as Friedrich Nietzsche’s translator, pointed out that all the great philosophers have been amateurs. Kaufmann wrote that in the 1950s, but in the last sixty-some years I don’t think the world has produced anyone to rival 
Immanuel Kant, Plato or Nietzsche himself. This may not be an accident. I think it may point to a correspondence between amateurism and greatness. This is hard for us to accept, we who believe that achieving anything worthwhile is always the result of hard work.
Which puts me in mind of a short story by Anton Chekhov called “The Artist.” It’s about a chronic drunk who every Easter time rouses himself to create an elaborate structure (I forget the exact name for it) on the frozen river of his village. He goes at it for days on end, hardly stopping to sleep or eat. The rest of the year he spends in idleness and intoxication. I don’t think Chekhov was being entirely ironic by the title he gave the story. He probably knew all too well how, despite his own industriousness, art is dependent on something we moderns would call “play” or irresistible urges and how little on the kind of industry Chekhov came to pride himself on.
A Nation of Ignorants
My latest piece for Eclectica.
“I recently read there are plaques, brass plates, embedded in the sidewalks of Berlin, that contain the names of people who were removed from those addresses and taken to Nazi concentration camps. This got me to wondering what our own cities would look like if we commemorated in a similar fashion the human beings America has systematically killed or enslaved….” (read more)
It’s about the way we not only fail to acknowledge our own, American genocides but how we use our immigrants as facilitators for our denial.
Let me know what you think.
Religion 2.0
Another essay, a kind of companion piece to “Faith,” the one most recently published in Eclectica.org. And, like that essay, this is not about “religion” religion but an attempt to broaden the perspective to include something bigger than that word typically conveys:
There is always a story, and a hero. A Jesus, a Buddha, a Moses or Muhammad. A Joseph Smith, a Persephone. The stories are miraculous, tragic, silly. It’s what comes later that is interesting—the cantatas, the NGOs, the Haj.
But first there is a story: the man-god Redeemer, the Chosen People, the last and greatest Prophet, the Lost Tribe, the Big Bang.
Even atheists have Nature, all-powerful, destructive as a hurricane, gentle as a mother robin. Evolution is the plodding agent of Her will. Evolution holds the master plan that used to be the prerogative of Zeus and Jehovah, executing it through Natural Selection in an infinitely complex way over unimaginably long stretches of time. There’s a whimsical, perverse aspect to Evolution, a God with the most serious intentions who chooses merely to start the ball rolling and then sits back for billions of years to see how things pan out…. (Read more)
Dixie as the Third World
A Journey in the Back Country
by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.
If you are anything like me this book will, if not stand on its head, at least knock down your picture of the American South in the years just before the Civil War. Olmsted, the same Frederick Law Olmsted who designed New York City’s Central and Prospect parks as well as hundreds of others, decided to take a journey through the Cotton Belt in 1853 and write an account of the economic system there. He did not initially intend to produce an exposé of its slave system about which he had been largely ignorant. What he produced was both… (Read more)
Dirty Linen
“Dirty Linen” (click on “Essays and Reviews” on the panel at the top of this page) is something I wrote several years back and then updated for publication in Ecelectica (where all the essays on this blog, so far, were originally published). It’s the longest and most ambitious essay I’ve written. Sadly, it still seems relevant, and that’s why I’m including it here halfway through Black History month.
The idea for the piece was originally generated out of the O.J. Simpson trial, but that was just the launching point for my thoughts and feelings on the subject. I think it’s difficult to gain a perspective, any real objectivity, on a phenomenon as deeply embedded in our social fabric as is “race” (you’ll understand why I insist on the quotation marks if you read the essay). It’s like trying to examine the back of your own head. I made an attempt to do so in this piece not because I am any more free of this social pathogen than anyone else but because the subject has preoccupied me for as long as I can remember. Writing is largely a matter of exorcising old demons and realizing what frequently lies below the level of consciousness. If you’re lucky, you find readers who share your possessions and enjoy or at least are willing to suffer through the birthing of those realizations. Hopefully, that will be you.
BAN HUCKLEBERRY FINN (AGAIN)!
It’s already one of the most banned books in the United States. Why bother to ban it all over again?
These days it’s mostly the “N” word that gets the book taken off school library shelves. There are still plenty of people, mostly of the older generation, for whom that word is so fraught that they don’t want to see or hear it used under any circumstances, even in a work of literature. Perhaps in past days the reason Huckleberry Finn was kept from the impressionable minds of the young had more to do with its presenting the South in an unfavorable light. But my contention after four readings of the book is that it should be banned now, right now, because it contains downright seditious material.
It should be prohibited on at least two grounds: First, the book is unpatriotic, is in fact anti-American. Second, it is immoral. In fact it goes right to the heart of the bedrock of our morality and makes of it a mockery.
I’ll address the second offense first. I’m referring, of course to the episode in one of the small towns along the Mississippi that Huck visits. A local storekeeper is being harassed by a fellow townsmen who stands outside his store and holds him up to scorn. The shopkeeper warns the man that if he doesn’t desist he will be shot dead. The harasser does not desist, and the shopkeeper shoots him, much to the delight of the other townspeople, who seem to enjoy a good killing to break up the monotony.
The scene then shifts to the shopkeeper’s home outside of which an old-fashioned lynch mob has gathered (both these scenes could have been lifted out of a Hollywood Western, no doubt inspired those Westerns, however indirectly). The shopkeeper, a man of few words who means what he says, appears on his porch with a gun and challenges the crowd to do what they have come for. He not only challenges, he ridicules, telling them that one or two of their number are “half a man,” but the rest are no better than an “army” which — and here comes the sedition — is no better than a “mob of cowards“!
But my first reason for banning the book is even more serious. The incident with the shopkeeper could possibly be written off, with some expert academic help, as not really the author’s opinion but only that of the character. But Huck Finn’s long wrestle with his conscience about allowing Jim the slave to go free, to aid and abet him in the quest for that freedom, occupies much too great a part of the book not to question the author’s intent. When, despite knowing it is not only criminal but morally wrong to deprive someone of their property, in this case their human property, Huck Finn does so anyway, accepting the fact of his guilt, even of his condemnation to hellfire, as a consequence, he makes it clear he has done exactly what his conscience told him not to do.
What’s a conscience for if not to guide us toward good and away from evil? Do we really want to give our young people the message that conscience is only a repository for whatever society accepts as right or wrong at that particular moment? If so, are we prepared to take the consequences?
I say it isn’t worth the risk. Therefore, I submit Huckleberry Finn should be removed from all public and academic library shelves, with the exception of special permission to be granted for its perusal by accredited and approved scholars whose intent is the study of seditious literature for the purpose of protecting society from its corrosive effects.
I hope you will write your congressperson to urge him or her to pass appropriate legislation without delay.
1 rm w/pov
I just finished rereading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.
Is there a better piece of nonfiction prose in the English language? Although, what it most reminds me of is the craftsmanship of Plato’s Apology (she knew Greek and Latin). I was a mediocre student of Greek. I rarely completed any of the assignments. But, for reasons I won’t go into here, I did do justice to the Apology, and have been grateful I did ever since. I don’t have much use for Plato’s philosophy. It seems to me to have been the root of most mischief in the Western world, or at least provided the rationalization for that mischief. But, by God, the man could write.
The other comparison that comes to mind, of course, is Montaigne. There is the same leisurely presentation, a meandering approach which reveals the process of creation as it happens rather than presenting us with elegant Ciceronian argument. But, it’s one thing to read a great writer like Montaigne in translation and quite another to experience Woolf’s achievement in one’s own language.
And I haven’t even mentioned the subject of the book. I have followed the feminist movement from my mother’s knee, you could say. She came to adulthood at the ripening point of the women’s suffrage movement in the early part of the 20th century. I don’t know how conscious she was of that movement, but like every woman alive at that time she must have been profoundly influenced by it. Hers was the first generation to “bob” their hair, and she once told me her own mother never came to breakfast without first putting on her corset. My mother’s honeymoon portrait, taken in the late 1920s, is very much that of a “liberated” woman. Her short dress was as flimsy as a slip, and the saucy expression on her face is as different from that of women in wedding portraits of the previous generation as anyone could imagine. I was exposed to the residue of that early 20th-century feminism through for her several years before the feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s.
I am not well read in the subject. Even so, I find it hard to imagine anyone putting the case better than it appears in A Room of One’ s Own. Woolf was writing almost a decade after British women had achieved the franchise. There must have been the same sense of generational difference between women her own age and those in her audience as we observe nowadays between women who remember when our society was not just de facto but institutionally anti-woman and the younger generations who can take for granted the rights won by their elders.
Even so, in 1928 the gains, however momentous, were still precarious. A woman needed financial independence more than anything else. Woolf categorically states that between receiving the franchise and receiving notice that she had inherited 500 pounds a year for life, she still considered the latter to be clearly of more importance. Hence, the title and the necessity for a room of one’s own, with a lock, which implies the financial wherewithal to pay rent as well as to pay for the other necessities of life.
But, as I say, the essay is not an argument, and is even less a polemic. It’s what today we call a personal essay. It’s even cast in a semi-fictional form, which is to say she warns the audience she is going to treat the material in a narrative form that does not strictly adhere to facts, at least not facts as a court of law might see them. But the “fiction” is more along the line of journalistic license rather than fabrication. I have no doubt she really did visit the British Museum and try to read that big stack of books about women, all written by men, or that she really was chased off the lawn by the beadle at “Oxbridge.” In fact, she could never have achieved the impact one feels in reading this essay if she had not experienced what she narrates or had used any other form to express it. She was too much of an artist to proceed in any other fashion.
If I were in charge of any kind of higher-education curriculum, I would insist this book be part of it. It belongs there certainly as a literary achievement, but there is so much more to it. And I find it hard to imagine a better starting, or ending, place than this for any study of feminism. I only wish my mother had lived long enough for us to share it together.
I Am So Loving the Cello
So, who is not loving the cello? My father is who… Actually, the father of the narrator of this story, originally published in Eclectica and included in my collection The Jew’s Wife & Other Stories (as in, You don’t have to be Jewish to…).
Click on the “Short Stories” link on the panel at the top of this page and then on the story title to read it. And…zei gezunt!
