Annie Dillard and Seeing

 If passing people say anything when they see me reading while I walk, it’s usually to ask me how I’m capable of such bizarre behavior or to tell me I have a gift or some such thing. But every once in a while, someone asks, “Why aren’t you enjoying the beautiful day?” Really?! Just outright judgment? One woman pointed to the trees above us as she asked the question; I took her gesture to mean that the proper way for civilized humans to fulfill the categorical imperative known as “enjoying the day” is to stare constantly at the leaves. I am enjoying the day when I walk. I’m out experiencing the light, the temperature, the fresh air, the exercise, and the endorphin rush. And I do look up from my book from time to time to catch a tree or a bird or a squirrel or a weed or a rock. Or a curb. After all, the idea of walking while reading for the ADD brain is that it limits the booming shouts of the periphery for attention; it doesn’t eliminate them altogether.

These days, my morning constitutional usually involves a stroll along the parkway skirting the north border of Great Smoky Mountain National Park. And I feel really good about concentrating on a book while walking along at the feet of grandeur and not, you know, guilty at all or anything. Lately, I’ve been reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which – and I find I’m not alone in this at all – reminds me of Thoreau’s Walden. And when she talks about taking a stroll every morning to the creek to look at frogs and fish and insects and grass and wildflowers, I keep looking at her book while walking by my lovely mountain stream, and I suppress the irony without any difficulty at all. Because the conflict only pops up in my mind two or three times every sentence.

But then I remember that Thoreau’s heir entitled one early chapter, “Seeing,” and I have to confess that the guilt catches up to me. (I’ve never been one to run very fast from that particular huntsman.) She talks about relearning to interpret what she sees in order to catch things that ordinary people miss. I, on the other hand, don’t see any eggsacs on tree trunks; I don’t usually even see the tree trunks. She describes the experiences of people born blind who receive sight through medical procedures and then outlines her own attempts to see the flat patches of color the newly sighted report. The patches at the corner of my eye may technically seem flat, but only because they’re at the corner of my eye and not in the center of my vision. No, I spend my time walking along the woods with my nose in a book – a book that tells me to point my nose at the woods.

OK, Guilt, fair enough. But now let me present my defense, paltry though it may seem (at first). As Dillard explains it, the point is not to let the previous training of your eyes dictate what your mind engages with. She even mentions mystics who teach the ADD in all of us to acknowledge the constant distracting chatter of the senses and mind and to look “above” the noise with both active commitment and passive receptiveness. Well, while I walk, I engage with the mountains in my own way. I take in the colors of the leaves, the sound of the water rushing over rocks, and the feeling of the negative ions producing extra seratonin, and I make these the foundation above which I look with intention. And these mornings, what I see above that horizon are Dillard’s ideas.

Does Galsworthy Sell Out?

 John Galsworthy’s novels are sometimes known collectively as The Forsyte Saga. But properly, the title only applies the first three of the stories about the Forsytes and their descendants. Galsworthy wrote a trilogy of trilogies; the second he entitled A Modern Comedy, and the third, End of the Chapter. The mad plan for my third decade of planned reading includes reading one of the installments in this grand series each year for the first nine years. So, this being year 4 in the plan, I just started the second set of three: A Modern Comedy. And since I had passed to a new act in the drama, I looked up some information just to get some context, see when books 4 to 6 were written, and garner some spoilers on what generation I might read about these next three years.

I was sorry to find in multiple places that critics thought the quality of the books declines at this point. I didn’t agree; after a slow first few chapters, I enjoyed book 4, The White Monkey, as much as or more than any of the preceding offerings. I was especially surprised to find that the critics’ problem centered on the character of Soames Forsyte. It seems that the consensus – did my feeble research really uncover widespread, well recognized consensus? I wouldn’t count on it – that the consensus is that Soames changes from being loathsome to inciting our sympathy, and it appears that they condemn Galsworthy for giving up his critique of the rich and turning conservative. And, as my tenth-grade English teacher taught me to do, I have three paragraph-long responses.

First, I didn’t read the first three books as critical of the rich per se. It seems clear to me that what Galsworthy opposes is not wealth but a certain relationship to beauty. For a Forsyte, all beautiful things are nothing more than commodities. Whether the beauty in question is found in a painting, a literary movement, an author, a wife, or a daughter, the Forsytes can only see the practical side of it. Soames has some legitimate critical skills when it comes to artworks; he recognizes a beautiful painting when he sees it. But he isn’t attracted to the beauty itself; he only sees an investment, never understanding that the price only goes up if somewhere along the line someone actually likes the picture. Authors are prizes to be collected and shown off at dinner parties. A Forsyte isn’t attracted to a beautiful woman as a woman, only to her beauty as an achievement and mark of success. It’s a fascinating, tragic, and sadly common trait, and I’ve known Forsytes who weren’t particularly rich. So I reject the premise that Galsworthy abandoned his critique of wealth, because I find my stubbornly logical mind can’t think that a man can abandon a position he has never held.

Second, doesn’t finding the sympathetic in Soames just make the character more human and the author more humane? Yes, Soames became more sympathetic in The White Monkey. But I saw that as a strength, not a weakness. And I mean a strength in the art of the book, not just a strength in Soames. Isn’t Othello better as it is, with the Moor’s tragic regrets at the end, than it would be if he just killed his wife and then got hauled off in a rage? And it’s not like Soames Forsyte is suddenly a good guy. But he is a deeper and more interesting character now. I have to add that Galsworthy’s decisions challenge to me to search for the human depth in the Forsytes I know, an exercise that would be good for me.

Finally, how can any book that tells the story of the Bickets be conservative? If Galsworthy is sympathetic to Soames, he’s absolutely in love with the Bickets, and the Bickets are anything but rich. Mr Bicket works in the distribution room of a publishing house and steals books in order to help pay for his sick wife’s care. (Brilliant! The purloined volumes of poetry have only monetary value for Bicket, yet how much his attitude differs from that of a Forsyte!) He’s caught and loses his job, but he can’t bear to tell his wife that he was fired and does his best to assure her that selling balloons on a street corner actually represents an improvement in their condition. But Mrs Bicket has a secret herself. After she recovers, she makes some money by posing for a painter in, well, in a way that she doesn’t wish to admit to her husband. I won’t say more about the plot details of this story that reminded me so much of “The Gift of the Magi” except to say that its climax includes the line, “Never mind, as long as you’re fond of me.” But, again, how can Galsworthy be accused of hard-hearted conservatism when he so movingly reveals the plight of this couple destitute in everything but love?

And, by the way, are Dr. Johnson and Kipling bad writers just because they’re conservative?

In any case, that’s what I think about the idea that Galsworthy sells out around book 4. Of course, I’m not trained in literary criticism. I’m just a guy who reads to learn as well as to be entertained and who finds that John Galsworthy, in the manner of a prophet, made his world better by pointing out its faults.