Top 100 – Part VII

What?! 700 posts on exlibrismagnis.com?! Yes, even with my slower pace over the last few years, I have made it to my seven-hundredth contribution to this blog. Every hundred posts, I’ve departed from writing about current reading to offer moments from my past reading, ideas and stories and images that I think about often. My original idea for the subseries was to outline my hundred favorite books, but that idea quickly changed. These books are not necessarily in my top 100 books, in spite of my misleading title. In fact, if I were ever to put such a list into black and white, at least four of these titles wouldn’t make it. (I don’t even remember one of the titles.) Maybe if I get to 1000 posts I’ll actually try to decide what my favorite 100 books are.

• Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy. At Thanksgiving a few years ago, a distantish relative (the exact description of our relationship would involve the phrase “in-law” three times) wanted to talk at me about the Commedia. Knowing my education, he still assumed I knew nothing of this greatest of all classics, and tried to explain to me that no one reads anything but the Inferno because the other parts aren’t enjoyable. I told him that I read all three parts every few years and actually preferred Purgatorio and Paradiso. He corrected my pronunciation of commedia and moved on to his next topic. I think of many passages from all three parts of the epic poem often, but for now, I want to mention just one moment, when Dante gets to the empyrean heaven and sees all the concentric spheres of the heavens turned inside out so that God is at the center while everything else revolves around Him in a dance of love. I fail in all my attempts to put the image into words, and yet the topographical oxymoron shines clearly and distinctly in my inner eye. It is the master image in my mind of the God who encompasses all things, is at the center of all things, and yet stays separate from all his creation, the God who rules by orderly love. I love Dante, and I love God more because of Dante.

• John Milton, Paradise Lost. While we’re on the subject of epic poetry about Heaven and Hell, let’s talk about Milton a minute. In book IV, Satan visits Paradise. Many readers have thought that Milton makes Satan too sympathetic in these passages. Perhaps the poet, seeing his own antimonarchical bent in the archfiend who rebelled against the Divine Throne, injected too much of himself into the character. In any case, Satan’s sympathetic moment (“Warring in Heaven against Heaven’s matchless King! / Ah, wherefore? He deserved no such return / From me”) works for me and makes his next scene even more powerful. The Deceiver now takes the form of a cormorant and sits on the walls of the Garden of Eden, viewing first the flowers, the fruit, and then our first parents. “Ah! gentle pair,” he says, “ye little think how nigh /  Your change approaches, when all these delights / Will vanish, and deliver ye to woe.” An unforgettable turn!

• H. W. Brands, TR. President Teddy Roosevelt is visited by a French ambassador and takes him on his daily rugged walk. After crossing a river, the President looks back to see his visitor, still on the opposite bank stripping naked except for a pair of pink gloves. “Why did you remove your clothes?” asks Roosevelt once his fellow hiker completes the crossing. “I do not think we will meet any ladies out here,” replies the Frenchman. “Then why did you keep the gloves on?” “Just in case we do.” I hope the story is completely true.

• John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University. I love Newman’s description of the properly educated mind and aspire to approach its condition. “It is almost prophetic from its knowledge of history; it is almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature; it has almost supernatural charity from its freedom from littleness and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith, because nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation.” Without the “almost,” the description would be heresy. With it, it is merely overly optimistic: I believe in the vision of this mind, but how could even the best university ever produce it?

• Malcom Gladwell, Blink. Forget careful, prolonged judgment of new people and situations, advises Gladwell. The human mind is equipped to make reasonable judgments in the blink of an eye. In one example, he cites a study showing that students viewing fifteen seconds of video of each of several professors rate them essentially the same as do other students after taking entire courses with the same professors. I thought about times I made decisions to hire people as soon they walked in the door; I no longer feel privately ashamed to have done so. (Not one that I chose in this way gave me any cause for regret.)

• Isaac Asimov, A-story-that-has-a-title-which-I-have-forgotten. In the future, everyone uses calculators. One day one person shows his ability to add up a couple of multi-digit numbers, and everyone else is amazed. Thus does new technology diminish traditional skills. Have we already reached this future?

• Michael Ward, Planet Narnia. Michael Ward, admitting that he sounds like a conspiracy theorist, says that he has discovered the secret organizing plan to Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, a plan so secret that no one – not one friend of Lewis, not one professor, not one faithful reader, not Warnie, not Joy, not Douglas – no one suspected it. And yet his evidence is totally convincing not just to me but to apparently all C. S. Lewis experts. Each of the volumes in the series corresponds to the Renaissance image of one of the seven planets. (OK, more exactly, each corresponds to Lewis’s image of the Renaissance image of one of the planets.) And each is ultimately about Christ, displaying Him not only in the person of Aslan but in the pervading atmosphere of each book, the very medium through which each plot swims. Christ is Jupiter, the jolly King with a red spot on his wounded side (LW&W). He is Mars, Forger of iron, Master of courage, Lord of Hosts (PC). He is the Sun of Righteousness, our Light, more precious than gold (VotDT). He is the Moon, Reflector of God’s glory, Mediator between Earth and Heaven, Great Physician of health and sanity (SC). He is Mercury, the Word, He who sunders and unites (HaHB). He is Venus, God of Love, Creator (MN). And He is Saturn, End of Desire, Keeper of the keys of Hell and of Death (LB). Is this a favorite book? I don’t know. It is a book about other books. All of its virtue cultivates love but directs all that love away from itself. And yet it has changed my thinking more than any other book I’ve read in the last twenty years or more.

There you have it. Seven more bits from my reading that I think about often. If I make it to post 800, I’ll have seven more. I hope you stick with me until then.

The Meaning Is in the Singing

Many years ago, as I was researching ideas of meaning in music, I came across an idea that has greatly affected my thinking ever since. Because I am who I am, I don’t remember the book or the author or even the century the author lived in. All in all, I’d rather be the kind of reader who forgets the source but is changed by the idea than the kind who remembers all the bibliographic details but isn’t moved by what he reads at all.

The idea was this: meaning in music is like meaning in baby talk. Yes, toddlers eventually assign words to objects and activities, sometimes totally fabricated words. (Our first called a tree a “doot.”) But the cooing of the infant can’t be translated, is not a thought expressed in words with codified meanings. And yet the baby’s cooing isn’t meaningless. The meaning of a baby’s talking is in the talking. His talking means that he is expressive. It means he wants to make an aural mark on his world. It means he wants to be like all the strange big animals he sees who make sounds with their mouths constantly. It’s not that “bak-gak” means a bottle and “bbbthhhhh” means a toy. It’s that they both mean, “Talking is fun!” Similarly, except in cases of quotation or obvious iconic reference, harmonic progression and melodic shape don’t and can’t ever say anything as specific as, say, “I want an orange because my mother liked apples.” And, contrary to the claim of another author, whose name I have deliberately and justly forgotten, as reported in a professional music journal that should have known better, there is no “gay” chord in Schubert. No, the meaning of the melody is in the singing itself. (I’m reminded here of Annie Dillard talking about the beauty of birdsong. Thanks, Annie Dillard!)

This year, many years after my introduction to him in a poetry class in college, I decided to revisit and deepen my acquaintance with T. S. Eliot. I remember the professor of that class saying of The Waste Land, “Even experts have trouble understanding it all.” In my ignorant, cocky, youthful confidence, I told myself that I would work it out. After all, I had recently learned to understand Shakespeare, and I had grown up with the idea that he, too, was impenetrable. Alas, I got lost on the first page, somewhere around Eliot’s announcement that he goes south for the winter. But I wanted to understand The Waste Land. I wanted to work it all out. Anybody who can come up with such great phrases as “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” and “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper” deserves to be understood. (Yes, I know that last one is from Hollow Men, but it’s still a really great phrase.)

Well, this time around, I was surprised to find that the foreign-language bits were much shorter and fewer than I remembered and that most of the English bits made much more sense without any extra work. It helped to be 62 and to know more literature and more history than I did at 19. It helped (a little) to know that the title referred to the waste land in the Arthurian legends. But still there were all those elusive allusions. Maybe, I thought, I should buy a book that will tell me what it all means, a guide that will help me work it all out.

Then it occurred to me that my problem was in thinking that a poem was something to be worked out. I understood the point Eliot was making in presenting vapid conversation even if I didn’t always know who was talking or exactly what they were talking about. Why should I learn what they were talking about anyway if the point is that the conversation is vapid? The thought sprang up: The meaning of the music is in the singing. And I thought of Eliot like a bird sitting in the waste land of inter-war European society wanting to sing beautiful melody and finding the reverberations of his song made tinny and hollow by the corruption of the landscape around him. I understood The Waste Land so much more when I quit trying to understand it.

Already very happy with my plan to reap great swaths of Eliot this summer after reading all the early poems, I next came upon the choruses from The Rock. Not only did I have one of the best reading days of the year. I also found that much of what I had quit trying to understand in the earlier work suddenly became very clear. Like Wallace Stevens’s jar in Tennessee (look it up if you don’t know this one!), the first chorus made all the rest of the Eliot wilderness (including the Eliot Waste Land) an organized realm rising up to its thoughts. In fact, the chorus presents a similar image when it speaks of the Incarnation as a point in history that contains all history and makes all history an organized story surrounding and flowing both toward and from it. Suddenly all the seeming contradictions in all of Eliot’s poetry made sense as echoes of this one thought. I thought of the circles in the Divine Comedy that turn inside out when Dante reaches the Empyrean Heaven, the Divine Point in the center becoming the all-encompassing circumference. (Eliot may have been thinking of that image, too, if only because no Christian poet can long have Dante out of his mind: at some point in the choruses, Eliot quotes Dante in invoking Mary as figlia del tuo figlio, an expression of mystery that, in context, also gave me images of points that contain the circles that surround them.) I also thought of Henry Vaughan and “I saw Eternity the other night,” another poem of divine circles. (Look this one up, too, if you don’t know it!)

This morning, I read Thomas’s Christmas sermon in Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. We celebrate, the soon-to-be-martyred saint tells us, both the birth and death of Christ in a mass on that most blessed day. How can we celebrate both at the same time? How can we be both joyful and sorrowful at the same time, joyful in our sorrow and sorrowful in our joy? The world doesn’t understand the peace that Jesus gives, he reminds us (“Not as the world gives, give I unto you”), and it doesn’t understand the joy that is compatible with sorrow. If the image of the point that contains the whole line of history summarizes what I felt reading Eliot, this theological statement on joy-and-sorrow summarizes what I took to be the meaning of his singing. I’ve had to learn the hard way in my life that all those Christians who have told me I didn’t have the joy of the Lord must not truly understand the divine joy in godly sorrow. (Or let us charitably say that they momentarily forgot that they understood it.) In the last post, I said I hoped for an antidote to my disappointment in William Morris, as Bryant had been after Browning. I didn’t know the elixir would be right around the corner.