Suspended Animation

Patrick O’Brian’s sea adventures wouldn’t have worked without some action. Lucky Jack Aubrey has to slip his one ship by five French ships and a land fortress to cut out a valuable prize in harbor, or he has to take his sloop with fourteen guns against a Spanish frigate with thirty-two. (Of course he succeeds in these feats, or he wouldn’t be called Lucky Jack Aubrey.)

But the best parts of the books for me are the long descriptions of daily sea life, when action and danger lie far beyond the horizon. I just reread The Letter of Marque and The Thirteen-Gun Salute – the twelfth and thirteenth installments in the tales of Captain Aubrey and his friend, surgeon, fellow musician, and government agent, Stephen Maturin – and the books are full of a state of nautical suspended animation. HMS Surprise hits the doldrums or simply has days on end of tacking across the Atlantic. In these times, the sailors scrub the decks with their holystones. They play chess. They trade stories. They turn the hour glass and strike the bells. They reef the t’gallant sails. They sing (well, as long as Surprise is a privateer – once reinstated to the Royal Navy, Capt. Aubrey doesn’t go for such frivolity). At one point in one of these books, some character even mentions “suspended animation.”

The frequent tastes of suspended animation in the books don’t all have to do with a sailor’s life, per se. Here and there time stands still as some grand object, literally suspended, brings perspective to time, space, and life. At the end of The Letter of Marque, Stephen dreams of a ride in a hot-air balloon, feeling his cares rolling off his shoulders as he watches clouds go by underneath him. In the middle of The Thirteen-Gun Salute, the best image in the whole series occurs as Stephen sees above him, in a towering wave hovering higher than the ship at the apex of its gigantic undulation, a whale, suspended in the clear, sunlit ocean water.

The best parts of retired life are the boring weeks with no appointments, nothing to do but what Jack’s crew does: read a story or play a song or get all the clocks in the house set to the same time or clean something that hasn’t been ship-shape in a year. (I don’t have any equivalent to reefing t’gallant sails.) Or I might just listen to the murmuring of a million leaves rustling in the gentle summer breeze or drive down the road to the Greenbrier entrance of Great Smoky Mountains National Park and watch the waters of the Little Pigeon River incessantly cascade down the rocks on their way to the ocean Jack Aubrey sailed. But with one thing and another (I don’t need to go into any details), I hadn’t had any boring weeks since the beginning of last July. Maybe I decided to take this angle on O’Brian this year because his images of suspended animation came through my schedule just as all the crises came to resolutions and the blessed boring weeks began again.

My Refreshing Experience with Chesterton This Year

What can I say about G. K. Chesterton after I’ve written so many posts about him? I’m not going to give you a list of nifty quotations; you can buy whole books of his pithy, twisty aphorisms. I also won’t rehash the story of my discovery last year that I had been on a forty-year quest to rediscover some favorite essays I read in the ’80s only to find I’d been looking for them in the wrong books. (OK, I guess I just rehashed it.) Much more important and pertinent is my need to report my experience with Chesterton this year, without necessarily focusing on the author himself.

I began by dreading my yearly encounter. Between court dates and an earache, I wasn’t sure I had the emotional wherewithal to wade through the topical pieces I had no chance of understanding just to get to the few good offerings. But after getting through January, 1926, and making it to his column for February 13, I found new strength in the peculiar comfort and joy that somehow only GKC can impart. In fact, I remembered that twenty years ago I often read through some Chesterton during stressful times precisely because he made them less stressful.

What is it about Chesterton that serves so well as a specific for my disquietude? It’s not particularly the “paradoxical” turns of phrase that everyone else seems so enamored of. (They’re not paradoxes, for one thing.) It’s the clear logic, the refreshing skewer popping the thin bubbles of modernist thinking. As I think about it, far from being his own so-called paradoxes, it’s Chesterton’s expert ability to show and demolish the actual paradoxes in modernist thinking that calms my nerves.

When a modern person tells you, he says in that February number, that faith kept the Dark Ages dark, that person speaks from ignorance; faith is the only thing that brought light to the early Middle Ages. But wait; there’s more! The person who says that, clearly not getting it from his own digestion of historical fact, has received it from an authority – a teacher or a modern book – and takes it at face value without examining it by the light of evidence. He is, then, exhibiting the very practice he reviles in what he imagines to be the Middle Ages.

A little later in 1926, Chesterton tells me that modern people can’t make customs, only fashions, and he has given me exactly the words and the formula I needed in order to express what I had been thinking lately about the postmodern penchant for tattoos and ear spacers and buzz cuts on one side of the head. He challenges me (successfully, I think) when he points out on November 13 that democracy was originally made for small societies and still works best only when everyone personally knows the leaders they have elected. His even more pointed conclusion: what we have is not a democracy but a plutocracy. (Can anyone deny that Congress is elected less on the principle of “one person, one vote” than on the principle of “one dollar, one vote”?)

At last – I mean literally on the last essay of the year – Chesterton reminded me that things sometimes explode in goodness just when you think they can’t get any better. (They have a way of punching you in the gut just when you think they can’t get any worse, too, but I didn’t suffer that experience this week.) In what will be one of my favorites of the thousands of Chesterton columns I’ve read in my life, he explains to me the poetic devices of old Christmas Carols that make them so good in “appalling” contrast to poetically flaccid hymns like (his example) “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood.” I won’t say more now, though. I want to save it for December when I write about “The Holly and the Ivy.”