Keeping Up Appearances

I had just a little bit to say about Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances. But when I sat down to write, I wondered if I could tie in the exquisite British sitcom Keeping Up Appearances in any way. And I’m pleased to say I can! Hyacinth Walton has married a man named Richard Bucket. Now to most Brits, the name Bucket has connotations; its homonymity with a practical piece of farming equipment brings to mind a sense of respectable yeomanry, a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy, a comfortable and reliable goodness. But Hyacinth has a delusional sense that she occupies by natural right a higher position in the traditional British social hierarchy than the place of respectable yeoman. So she pronounces the name “Bouquet,” a name that doesn’t just mean an arrangement of flowers; it’s a French word and carries with it overtones of elegance and nobility and carefully trained charm. It’s a good joke, and it’s funny in every single episode.

Owen Barfield, also, was interested in the connotations and overtones in words. The first Barfield book I read, Poetic Diction, I enjoyed so much I read it twice. Here, basically, Barfield says that older languages reveal that their speakers had a richer view of the world than we do. Ancient and New Testament Greek is sometimes said to be a poetic language because every noun has both a literal and a figurative meaning. Pneuma, for instance (you’ll forgive me for transliterating instead of using Greek script), actually means “breath” and “wind” but figuratively means “spirit” or “life force.” A common view (at least I’ve heard it’s common: I haven’t actually read any linguistic history that says this) says that early people saw a person breathing and saw a tree swaying in the wind and came up with a word for the motion of air and then later imagined an unseen entity and, with poetically minded people leading the way, decided that the word for the concrete thing could be applied to the immaterial or abstract thing as well. On the contrary, Barfield argues that early speakers of Greek didn’t see these as two different meanings: they thought of an immaterial life force being carried by wind and breath, they came up with a word for the conglomerate, and they meant everything all at once when they used the word pneuma. Barfield was a friend of Lewis and Tolkien and a frequent attendee of the Inklings meetings at the Eagle and Child in Oxford. I admire Lewis and Tolkien; I liked Barfield’s argument about language; ergo, I concluded Barfield was a reasonable, respectable guy. A Bucket, if you will.

Saving the Appearances begins by saying the same thing from a different angle. Here, Barfield starts with the planets. Ancient people looked at the lights that moved against the background stars and, believing in gods or angels and crystalline spheres, “saw” all of these things when they looked up. We register the same points of light, but we “see” globes of rock or gas revolving around the sun according to laws discovered by Kepler and Newton and Einstein. Now, Barfield claims that the earlier view is one that views material objects as connected to immaterial things; in his words, he says that the ancients viewed concrete things as “participating” in the abstract. (I suppose he got his term from Plato, who taught that beautiful things “participate” in the ideal of Beauty.) Science, Barfield says, has pulled apart the meanings of the sight and dismissed the immaterial part. I’d like to point out that Kepler’s laws are every bit as immaterial as angels or Plato’s ideals. But I get Barfield’s point: the ancients saw meanings actually existing in words and in things that we think of only as poetic, symbolic references. The same patterns of light waves may strike my retina and Julius Caesar’s, but we see different things. So far so good.

But halfway through Saving the Appearances, Barfield becomes a crank, and he lost me. He says that our view of the planets, our thought that we now actually know what they are, is a form of idolatry, since we don’t actually know the real nature of the unseen particles that make up the planets. The ancients were wrong, but only in that they saw the planets as participating in the wrong things. To escape our idolatry, we have to have a new stage of participation, one that “realizes the directionally creator relation.” He apologizes for the awkward phrase but confesses that he can find no better way to describe what humanity needs. Near the end of the book he says that a new morality, surpassing Christian morality as much as Christian morality surpassed pagan, involves man’s obligation to awaken to “final participation” (our intentional reshaping of the way we see things – I think). Jesus’s explanation of the Parable of the Sower talks about the ears to hear and about eyes that don’t see, and Barfield says that, at last, we can now understand Jesus’s words, that we now know that He meant hearing and seeing in Barfield’s way of looking at things. (Barfield reminded me of Hegel at this point: the goal of the unfolding of the universe across eons is for humans to see things the way Barfield sees them. So humble.) Original participation, he says, was paganism, and the Scientific Revolution should be thanked for leading us to the idolatry of the images so we could break free and fulfill our purpose to “realize the directionally creator relation.”

So I was wrong, I suppose, in thinking that Barfield was a reliable yeoman. No, no! Barfield was a Bouquet among Buckets. Well, if that’s so, I’m happy being a Bucket.

Recent Audiobooks

Over the last year-and-a-half, while I’m out to pick up my grandkids from school, I’ve been listening to audiobooks in the car. In the first few months of this year, I’ve listened to Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (as read by the wonderful Mil Nicholson and available for free on Librivox), Stephen Lawhead’s Pendragon, Patrick O’Brian’s The Yellow Admiral, Edna Ferber’s So Big, and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.

City driving is not the most conducive to paying careful attention to an audiobook: so many interstate entrance ramps, so many stop lights, so many intersections with no stop lights or stop signs whatsoever (a curious feature of Spokane streets), and, during one recent period, so many girl scouts selling cookies! I found my mind wandering a lot during Pendragon, but then I thought that it was not nearly so good as the first three books in the series (and the internet seems to agree with me). I found my mind wandering a lot during The Yellow Admiral, but then I thought that it was not nearly so good as the first seventeen books in the series (and again the internet seems to agree). Still, with so many hundreds of words just floating past me and not registering, I started wondering if I should just stick with music during the twenty-minute commutes. But then I remembered that I had been very focused on Our Mutual Friend, and it occurred to me that neither of the more recent authors is nearly so good as Dickens. (I haven’t consulted the internet on that question. I know I’m right.)

Over the last three or four weeks I’ve listened to two early twentieth-century books about people in small rust-belt towns, and I haven’t had any trouble following either one. I had heard that Ferber’s So Big, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1925, was about a woman who runs a farm. And I suppose it is that, but it’s so much more. As I listened over the course of about three weeks, I heard about the shift in turn-of-the-century America from rural life to urban life. I heard about philosophical conflicts between money and beauty. I heard about birth and death, about happy marriages and unfortunate marriages. I heard about young people from more than one generation imagining what they wanted to do in life and then changing directions because of (or being changed by) unfolding circumstances. I heard about Americans of several generations acclimating to a culture of ad agencies, automobiles, celebrities, skyscrapers, fashion magazines, and world war. When characters learned to adjust, the book was heart-warming. When they didn’t, it was movingly tragic. I can see why it won the big prize, even though Ferber’s use of informal “you” drove me nuts. She writes at one point, “She smiled then so that you saw the funny little wrinkle across her nose.” Why couldn’t she just say that the smile drew a funny little wrinkle?

Have you (I know who you are, so that wasn’t an informal use of “you”!) ever looked at a list of American classic literature – say, the contents of the Norton Anthology that you bought for a college lit class or a beautiful list that your favorite high-school substitute gave you – and found yourself not sure you could remember which works were written by Upton Sinclair and which by Sinclair Lewis? Do Bret Harte and Hart Crane become confused in your mind? Do Robert Sherwood and Sherwood Anderson get smooshed together into some sort of hyphenated monster? I was thinking about this curious pattern in authors’ names just the other day, and that very evening we watched a Jeopardy! episode that included an “Authors Before and After” category! One contestant earned several hundred dollars for enunciating the very improbable question, “Who is Upton Sinclair Lewis?”

Maybe my confusion will resolve a bit now that I’ve finally been reading (i.e. listening to) Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. This set of linked short stories appeared in section III of Miss Engler’s list: “those works on a difficulty and interest level which require greater maturity on the part of the student.” A lot of sex happens in this book. A teacher is accused of pedophilia. A preacher enjoys peeping at a naked woman in the house next to the church. Several casual trysts occur. One man sends his wife away after he finds that she has committed adultery, and the woman’s mother brings her back to the husband’s house and takes off her (the daughter’s) clothes in front of him. Now I see why Miss Engler told us to wait! But she recommended reading books from section III in college, and I would have hated this book when I was college-age. I wasn’t lonely and desperate and didn’t know anybody who was (or, rather, didn’t know that they were), and I would have wondered why twentieth-century authors couldn’t all write nice stories like So Big about relatable, realistic, sympathetic people. I would have thought that Anderson (See? I remember which is which now! Robert Sherwood wrote that play about Lincoln) was saying that all people were desperate and lonely. I might have thought Anderson was telling me that people should be desperate and lonely because that’s all life can offer or deserves. I might have thought that Anderson himself was desperate and lonely and should have gotten some help instead of writing a book about “unrealistic” characters. Miss Engler just didn’t know how much maturity it would take on my part. I’m way past college age now; I’m even way past the age of teaching college. Finally I know that a lot of people feel isolated and defeated. I know that almost everybody feels this way sometimes. I know that authors don’t always approve of the characters they put front and center in their books; not every book is about a hero. And I have a lot more experience, by grace, showing compassion towards people with these problems instead of shock or disbelief or bewilderment.

I’m having one difficulty, though, in listening to Winesburg, Ohio. More disturbing to me than the characters are the narrators and their bizarre ideas of what an Ohio accent sounds like (one fellow thinks a Maine accent will do) and their weirdly overwrought dramatizations of the characters’ lines. I wish Miss Engler had said, “The works in section III will be suitable for you when you’re retired, but don’t listen to them in the car.”

Rereading Pascal

I have an idea of what I want to write about today, but the topic depends on the story of my life. If we can divide people into those who at least think about writing an autobiography and those who don’t, I would fall in the first group. But today is not the day either for me to write this imaginary book or for you to read it. But here’s the summary as it will no doubt appear in future book reviews.

When I was a kid, I was happy. When I was in high school, I was still happy, but, even more, I was convinced that I was right to be happy and that people who weren’t as ebullient as I were somehow wrong. I started attending a church that taught what would now be called a prosperity gospel, where I heard that God loves us and wants our happiness always. My life concurred.

Then things changed. I can point to three main events in my life around the time I turned 20 that reshaped my thinking. But I also have evidence that my brain chemistry altered. For decades, my favorite Bible verse was Ezekiel 36:32: “It is not for your sake that I will act, says the Lord GOD. . . . Be ashamed and confounded for your ways.” I became convinced that being sad was right and that people who weren’t as melancholy as I was were somehow wrong. I started going to a different kind of church, but still people there would tell me from time to time that I needed more of the joy of the Lord, and I would respond, “King Solomon, inspired by the Spirit of God, said, ‘With much wisdom there is much sorrow.’ ”

I see now that I said much of this more clearly and more efficiently in this post about Chesterton. Today I must say that Pascal’s Pensées helped me as much as Orthodoxy. Here was another intelligent (understatement of the year) Christian telling me that I was correct in being ashamed and confounded in my ways. Pascal’s never-written book (this masterpiece comes to us as notes scribbled on little bits of paper!) moved me profoundly like no other book I’ve ever read. When I reread it some twenty years later, I came face to face again with an overwhelming Power that made me join Job in covering my mouth.

At some point, after thirty years of feeling miserable, it occurred to me to try an antidepressant. The first day I took one, I actually felt (I know people say this, but I really felt it!) a great weight being lifted from my shoulders. Hour by hour, it seemed to me that the folds of an enormously heavy curtain were being raised off of me, one by one. From that day Easter has been more of a celebration for me than ever: I consider myself to have lived a thirty-year season of Lent. Every once in a while, I have days when the pill doesn’t work. The world doesn’t get so dark because I know that I will be better the next day, but I think on those days, “No wonder I was so miserable all those years: I felt like this all the time.”

Last month, I read the Pensées again for a third time, and it seemed different. The sharp insight into human nature, the love of God, the brilliant, powerful writing were still there. I was still aware that I stood in the presence of one of the Greatest of the Great Books. But the experience didn’t move me to drop to my knees in humility and godly sorrow this time. And I started to wonder: have I lost something valuable by taking an antidepressant?