Two (?) Classics

I intended to start today by apologizing that my reading and blogging of the last few years doesn’t necessarily live up to the lofty standards implied by the title of this blog. But I just looked over the last few posts looking for examples, and now I’m not sure why I need to apologize. Maybe I was thinking that Infinite Jest is too recent to be considered a classic or a “Great Book” with a capital G and a capital B. And maybe I was thinking of the last time I apologized for this very thing, which I did in a post from October about a history book that included some plagiarism. But the last few months have seen additions to this site commenting on Ariosto, Galsworthy, Trollope, Richard Baxter, Aelred, Philip Sidney, Verne, and Boethius. Yes, Neil Simon found his way in there, too, but for the most part, I really do stick with books at least a hundred years old that have lasted.

Today I want to talk first about some books that are about a thousand years old that haven’t exactly lasted. For about a decade and a half, I’ve been looking forward to reading some of Albertus Magnus (his works must be great books because he’s known as Albert the Great!), known primarily, where he’s known at all, as the teacher of Thomas Aquinas. The volume I bought, called Spiritual Selections, included four little books. I read the first and enjoyed it. Then I read the second, which had some weird, ungrammatical translations. Then I started the third and realized it was just a different translation of the second book; I didn't read it even though the translation looked better. Then the preface to the fourth book said it was doubtful that Albert had written it, so I skipped it. When the compilation a twenty-first-century reader can buy of a thirteenth-century theologian’s writings has such issues, can the work be said to have lasted? And if not, can it be considered classic, as in “classic (adj): having stood the test of time”?

The first book in the anthology dealt with intelligence and the intelligible. Much of it explicitly acknowledged Aristotle and Plato, and much of it anticipated Albert’s famous student. So I was quite familiar with what he had to say. The best part categorized how well we do know and can know various things. Just as the presence of the sun is eminently obvious because of its light while the sun itself is impossible to know through direct observation (no solar filters in the 1200s!), theological objects, says Albert, are the most manifest but the hardest to know. Mathematical things are most firmly known. Physical things “fall away from intellectuality because of privation, matter and motion.” So, as Albert summarizes the situation, “divine things are said to be above the intellect, mathematical things in the intellect, and physical things below the intellect.”

The second treatise was called "Clinging to God." It starts well with glosses on praying in your closet and worshiping in spirit and truth: let images fall away, and worship God in your intellect and will. But it gets Manichean: Albert eventually wants to say that physical objects are unworthy of our attention, and that only spiritual objects have value. I know that if I asked him whether the Incarnation didn’t prove the value of God’s physical creation (as if the repeated phrase “And God saw that it was good” doesn’t do it in the first place), he would temper his statements. But he was a medieval monk who believed that he could not serve God while enjoying itch-free clothing or a comfortable bed, and I don’t have any desire to denigrate his path to godly devotion.

Sir Thomas More’s Utopia is clearly a classic. It’s old. It’s about great things. It’s still available in the book store half a millennium later. And its title has given the language a useful word. I found More’s depiction of a perfect society interesting and ideal, but I couldn’t stop thinking that it wouldn't work. Take the case of criminals who don't reform. If you do repent and make restitution as you are able, you are restored to full citizenship status. But if not, you become a slave of the state. The slaves are treated well and enjoy good, nutritious food, but they have to do all the demeaning work (butchery, for instance) that would lower the characters of citizens. Well, doesn't this kind of labor lower the character of the very people who need uplifting? After all, they haven’t reformed yet, but why not continue to give them a chance? And won't the demeaning work make them lesser in the eyes of citizens so that they end up not being treated well? And why is labor demeaning in the first place? Farmers, plumbers, stonemasons, road builders, and garbage collectors are all heroes of civilization, worthy of our thanks and admiration (and better pay). And the Bible tells of at least one very noble Carpenter. But maybe the book wasn’t meant to be a practical proposal. And I have to admit that I found the best parts inspirational and timely: why execute a man for theft of needed food instead of reforming the economy so that everyone has food?

PS: I don’t know what’s happening. exlibrismagnis now has half a million views. Blogspot no longer lets me see all the referring URLs. A few years ago, I could see a full list with links. Clicking on most of the links took me to pages asking me to pay for porn or betting or something Russian that I didn’t understand. Not that I clicked on “most of the links”! Let me say it a different way. Most of the few links I tried led me, disappointingly, to the abovementioned. Then at some point, Blogspot put in some filters, those links stopped showing up, and my views went way down to what I assumed were all actual views. But now the hits are way up again and I don’t know who they’re coming from. I know that most are from the United States and, of all places, Brazil. But Germany, Bangladesh, and Argentina take up significant portions of that particular pie chart as well. So what constitutes a view? Views seem to be tied to particular posts, hence the “Most Popular Posts” gadgets at the bottom of the page. If you scroll back and the title of a previous post comes up, does that constitute a separate view? The site has 825 posts now, so maybe the views stack up faster and faster as legitimate viewers scroll through looking for a post to spend a minute on. Anyway, half a million views. The world is weird.

Ad Infinitum

In the last few years, I’ve come to realize with my love for old books, I’ve neglected some recent fiction. I’ve checked a lot of lists online of “Best Recent Novels,” “Best Twentieth Century Novels,” “Best Novels of the Last Fifty Years,” “Best Novels of the Twenty-First Century,” and whatever else comes up. One novel that comes up on almost every list that encompasses 1996 is David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. It’s a long one: over a thousand pages. But I got off to a good, quick start this year and had the time on my schedule. So I jumped in about a week before the Winter Olympics began.

Now you’d think (and I did think) that this would be the kind of novel I’d really like. It has footnotes. It has footnotes that have footnotes. It’s satire of our civilization includes the notion that time itself is now sponsored by corporations: most of the action takes place during the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. The best high schools mainly teach sports, and any kid who likes to learn things like – you know – science or literature is looked down upon as virtually insane. The main character of this book goes to a tennis school, and his college draft committee senses a problem when they see that his grades slipped from A-plusses to mere A’s one semester. See, as I describe it, and it sounds good to me.

But Infinite Jest has a very dark streak running right down the middle. Everyone in the book is either using drugs or in rehab. Everyone using drugs resorts to crime. One poor recovering addict gets into the crossfire of a robbery gone wrong, and when he goes to the hospital, he’s unable to speak (because he’s been intubated? I could never quite tell) and can't tell the doctors not to give him narcotics because he’s an addict. And everyone accepts the idea that suicide is a reasonable response to the world.

I can see why some people consider it their favorite book and report having read it multiple times. And I don’t think you have to be crazy, addicted, or suicidal to like it. But it wasn’t for me. Especially as a book to read in between Olympic events!

Some American Poetry

After my quadrennial Winter Olympics marathon, I had some reading to catch up on. And now I have some blogging to catch up on.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve read (among other things) some poetry by Carl Sandburg and some by Robert Frost. In each case, I bought an anthology of a few hundred pages and read most of the book. Carl Sandburg’s wasn’t what I thought it was going to be, and maybe because I felt rushed, I didn’t give myself the time fully to enjoy it for what it was. It was mostly free verse, and after having studied and worked to understand meter, I was at sea again. So much attention directed itself at the lines of varying length and at trying to confirm that there really, truly was no hidden meter, there wasn’t always enough left attention for assimilating the meaning of the text. But I did get the drift. The poems had a lot of praise for manual laborers (who can never have enough light shining on their dignity), for industrial advances (which haven’t always proven to be, shall we say, unalloyed blessings), and for the way the prairie land of Illinois shapes the lives of people living there (I’ll take his word for it). It didn’t grab me like the poetry of, say, William Cowper and William Cullen Bryant did. (Those two came up in earlier years of my project of planned reading.) But I definitely have a clearer picture of Sandburg as a whole now, where previously I really only knew the poet as the guy who wrote a poem about fog and little cat feet.

Robert Frost’s poetry sank in more easily, perhaps because he often wrote in iambic pentameter. But there were some surprises. From the little bits of Frost that I had read in anthologies or that I had heard quoted, I had previously thought of him as a nature poet. But most of the poems in the collection I read were narratives – or at least I should say that most of the pages are devoted to longer narrative poems rather than the one-pagers that might or might not be about nature. Another surprise: the narrative poems are full of dialog, with people speaking so plainly, the pentameter can barely be heard:

Our hens and cows and pigs are always better
Than folks like us have any business with.
Farmers around twice as well off as we
Haven’t as good. They don’t go with the farm.

Admittedly, the meter jumps out in that first line with the hens and cows and pigs getting naturally accented. But I needed the context for the last two lines, which I would say are typical.

It’s easy to understand why a poet would get known for one type of poem more than another more abundant type if the scarcer type is typically shorter: they’re easier to quote and anthologize. And I guess I’ll carry on with the skewing by giving more space to a shorter poem. Here’s one I found especially pretty:

Spring Pools

These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.
The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods---
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.

I have to say first that I know from the meter “flowers” needs to be pronounced “flours,” which sounds more elegant to me somehow. (Knowledge of meter makes a difference!) I like the casual rhyme scheme: the rhymes come sometimes one line after another (reflect/defect) and sometimes in alternation (shiver/gone/river/on). That changing pace seems to suit the walk of a contemplative man through the winter woods. The poem has no elevated vocabulary as a poem from a century earlier would have had. But in the context, common words seem to take up meaning into the very shapes of the sounds. “Chill” and “shiver” sound cold with their sibilants and short “i” sounds. (Say “shiver” and “river” and tell me the first one doesn’t sound colder.) And while all of the first lines portray a picture in whites and light colors, doesn’t line 6 suddenly sound darker with its “oo” and long “o” sounds? I think Frost, despite his name and the topic of his most famous poem, would be happy in summer woods as well. But I like his warning to the trees to think twice during the winter. Don’t be hasty, as Treebeard would say. Let these fresh pools and the delicate flowers beside them, in them, and under them have their day and show us their picture. Plus, I like any celebration of life and color during winter instead of portraying it in the old, tired way as dead and gray.

I guess that’s part of why I watch the Winter Olympics every four years.