Revisiting Dr. Johnson

exlibrismagnis was going along pretty well this year . . . until late September. And then life got turned on end. There was illness, and there were legal shenanigans by someone who has tried several times to steal from us, and there was a man shooting at my daughter’s fence. So it’s actually November as I write this post. We’ve just enjoyed a St. Martin’s summer – ending on St. Martin’s Day! (See my notes on March 10, 2021 about using that term for warm days in November) – and now the crisp is back in the air and the leaves are on the ground and on the driveway. Rather than going out with the leafblower, though, I’m going to start catching up on the blog with some brief comments about some reading from October.

I just can’t pass up writing about this year’s passage from Boswell’s Life of Dr. Johnson. It was the passage that, exactly ten years ago, inspired my favorite post on this blog. I can’t find now where or when I posted the note about temporarily losing this piece about dining with Samuel Johnson and his friends in Wendy’s. But I did. That fateful October day of 2011, after my mind churned with the idea during the lunch break and all the rest of the afternoon during work, I sat down and composed the post on the blogspot editor, almost without stopping or going back to correct anything. I know I didn’t edit much at all because the piece was completely finished when I committed the dreadful error of trying to undo one mistake using control-Z . . . and found out that the online editor considered that key combination to be a command to obliterate the post and all memory of it. (Did I click “Save” at all during this time? No, I did not.) I thought about just starting over, but my head, having emptied itself in emitting the full-grown production once, found itself unable to recreate Athena. Still, I knew that that string of characters had to be in my computer’s RAM somewhere, and I searched online until I found an explanation and an app that brought my precious lamb back home to me. Of course I love it more than the ninety-nine that never went astray! And since I have now apparently lost the post in which I thanked the people who showed me how to recover a lost post, let me take the opportunity.ten years too late, to thank the Villeneuve family once again for their invaluable help.

So now I’ve written about shooters and St. Martin and old posts, but I haven’t yet said anything about my reading from October, even though my express purpose today is to begin catching up on blogging, which is done best without extraneous comments. I haven’t yet written anything about the passage in which Dr. Johnson says that a majority of any professional's time is not spent on the proper focus of his work: the author, for instance, spends most of his time reading, not writing. (Maybe I should take that comment as exoneration since, in today’s post about Boswell and Dr. Johnson, I’ve spent most of my effort not writing about Boswell and Dr. Johnson?) I haven’t given any space to Dr. Johnson’s observation that knowledge must come through reading, not conversation, because conversation is not systematic. I haven’t mentioned Johnson’s practice, when entering a man's home for the first time, of rushing to his bookshelves and perusing the "backs" (covers?) of the books. It’s a pity; I could say a lot about it since I have the same habit. And I haven’t even said anything about Boswell’s account of the time in France when Dr. Johnson, much less fluent in French than in Latin, nevertheless spoke in broken French to a Frenchman who spoke back in broken English. If I had, I could have said that I found myself several times having that same surprising kind of conversation in Italy. Well, you know, except using Italian.

I’ll have to leave it all unwritten, though: I have to start thinking now about writing on some November reading.

Heroes

Harry Clavering loves Julia Brabazon and she seems to love him back. But then she marries Lord Ongar, who mistreats her miserably for a year before changing his ways by dying. In the meantime, Harry has moved on and has become engaged to Florence Burton. Then Julia comes back to England. All of this happens in just a couple of chapters in Anthony Trollope’s The Claverings. The rest of the book is taken up with (1) Harry’s vacillation between Julia and Florence and (2) other men vying for Julia’s rich hand.

Trollope’s original readers (and I join them in this) wanted Harry to marry Florence because she is the better person. But they also wanted a hero, and this Trollope does not want to give them. He explains it all right in the narration (as is his delightful wont): it is a weighty and painful burden the public places on an author when they expect of him the presentation of heroes, because then the author cannot write realistically. Trollope intends to give the public a real man in Harry Clavering, not a hero. And, after all, once stories began in the latter part of that century to emphasize and base plots upon antagonism within one character rather than antagonism between characters, heroes can no longer be the protagonists of novels. If Harry just says, “Oh, you’re back, Julia? Sorry. You had your chance. But I’ve met a nice girl now, so go have fun with your money,” there is no novel, no story to tell.

But Anthony Trollope doesn’t deny the existence of heroes altogether. He isn’t a cynic. He believes, for instance, that romantic love is a good, real thing, not just a plot point that sells stories to middle-class housewives. I know this because, again, he just comes out and says it in the narration. OK, it’s conceivable that the personal confessions by the narrator are deliberate canards to sell more books and magazines. But, having read a lot of his novels and his autobiography, I don’t think so. He truly believes in love, and he believes in heroes, as well. But if his male protagonist, the character who is going to get one girl or another at the end, can’t be heroic, and if his female protagonist doesn’t want to be a “hero” and win the man, how does Trollope display heroism in his tale?

Enter the Burtons of Onslow Crescent. Harry dislikes Theodore Burton, Florence’s brother, the minute he sees Theodore in the office (the Burton business is very much a family affair) dusting his boots with his pocket handkerchief. But, of course, Theodore invites Harry for a family dinner after work one day, so Harry must make the effort to be amiable, discovering in the process that he actually admires the domestic life of Theodore, his wife Cecilia, and several honest, devoted, humble, obedient, and cute Burton tykes. The fine line Theodore and Cecelia walk that both protects Florence and steers Harry toward honor is nothing short of heroic. Their display of heroism involves no blood, no banners or fanfares, but it requires intelligence, fortitude, a restraint of judgment, and emotional self-control.

I would happily read an entire book about the Burtons of Onslow Crescent. No wicked villains would appear; the conflicts would arise from an urgent bill for which cash is not readily available, a childhood illness, a neighbor spreading rumors, a black sheep of the Burton family (if such a thing can exist) asking for shelter, a nest of mice in the attic, a messenger at the business that routinely misremembers addresses, and a warped window frame that lets in a cold breeze. But the Burtons of Onslow Crescent would face all with the proper mixture of healthy emotional reaction and virtuous Christian composure, and I would love and learn from every page.

Speaking of Wanting Rebel Fighters to Be Perfect . . .

Just a few days ago, I wrote about Churchill’s complaints that earlier historians had tried to paint Oliver Cromwell as a paragon, and I said that I at least sympathized with those who want the people who fight for their cause to be perfect, even though we should all know that they can’t be. But, wow! Then I got to the crucial parts of a Robert E. Lee biography. I had no idea how far this desire for holiness could go.

I started the year with the plan to read Douglas Freeman’s biography of the Confederate general, based on the fact that it won a Pulitzer Prize and was published (I thought) in 2008. As I started reading the forward by James McPherson, though, I discovered that what came out in 2008 was a new abridgment, that the book had originally been published in 1935, and that it was the work that established the mythical sainthood of the rebel for twentieth-century readers. I quickly shifted to a more recent treatment, one by Elizabeth Pryor, after reading recommendations that she gives the man a well-documented and fair examination.

And I have to say that Pryor tries her very best at various times through the book and especially at the end to make the reader admire what was admirable in the oathbreaker. But do I really have to admire the virtues he had? Al Capone reportedly loved his wife and mother with utmost devotion. Am I really under an obligation to look to Al Capone as a model of family love? The problem is that, as Pryor worked to be fair in reporting the good in Robert E. Lee, she labored just as hard to expose the bad. Here’s a quick list of some highlights:

• He broke the oath he took in 1829 to “bear true allegiance to the United States of America” and to serve “against all their enemies.”
• He broke his word given in 1861 that he would fight only to defend Virginia and would “never bear arms against the United States.” (The promise was contradictory in the context of the time since he would be bearing arms against the United States Army in “defending” Virginia. But the promise, made to many, would fall apart entirely when he invaded Maryland.)
• He put out bounties on runaway slaves and punished them by contracting them out to harsh masters.
• He kept a whipping post at Arlington and ordered that it be used.
• He broke families apart by trading and selling slaves,
• He condoned the capturing and enslaving of free blacks by “virtually every unit” of his army when he invaded Pennsylvania.
• He gave only slight punishments to students at Washington College, where he was president after the Civil War, when they terrorized local black citizens. (He was more harsh to students who didn’t continue studying over Christmas break.)

As Pryor says, the only reason we are interested in him is that he is one of history’s greatest generals. So only in this regard can I begin to join anyone in looking to Lee as an example. And yet even here Pryor assesses both supporters and detractors. Did Lee, for instance, formulate the winning tactics at Chancellorsville, one of the most daring in all history, or was it Jackson? Should he be blamed for thinking that invading the northern states (twice!) would break the resolve of their citizens rather than understanding what should have been perfectly obvious given his recent experience – that people attacked in their homeland find even greater determination to fight? Was his plan at Gettysburg foolhardy as Longstreet said, or is the fault for his loss there to be laid on a hesitant Longstreet? Either way, I’m glad for America that Lee did lose at Gettysburg, so I have little desire to admire his tactical thinking even where I find it interesting.

Still, the myth exists and many Americans do look up to him. Even as I applaud the recent removal of monuments to the man who fought for the rights of white Virginians to own human beings (it risks erasing history only for those who don’t read!), I can understand that many admirers see Lee as a symbol of something other than racism, something other than a desire to return to a fairy-tale world in which all slaves were content and all owners kindhearted, gentle masters who only gave their servants good jobs, civilization, and Christianity. They may see in Lee the gallant champion against government overreach. They may see in him the defender of a relaxed, agrarian, southern way of life. And these positions I can begin to appreciate even if I can’t go shoulder to shoulder with those who hold them. But when “artists” from recent years paint halos around Lee and Elvis, standing as pillars of the saints on either side of a glorified Jesus Christ, I can only respond with a line from Dr. Johnson that I read just this morning: “There is no trusting to that crazy piety.”

The War on Christmas

You’d think that with all his Ciceronian rhetorical skill and all his Plutarchian knowledge of history, Winston Churchill would have written the definitive history of England. But his History of the English-Speaking Peoples (i.e. History of England with Notes on Places that Ended Up Speaking Its Language) has some problems. Churchill assumes much of his reader; it’s his right since his original readers had all been educated in English public schools in the early twentieth century. But for me, the book has gaps, abridgements, unexplained terms. Even though the work is four volumes long, it still reads at times like summary notes for people who already know the story. When James I dies, for instance, he says, “The first king of Great Britain was dead.” That reference to “Great Britain” jarred me when I read it several days ago because it reminded me of the significance of the united crown, which he had not explained (or even mentioned in the chapter). Yes, he said that James was King of Scotland and that he inherited the English crown. But he didn’t stop to highlight it: “Now for the first time one person reigned as monarch of both Scotland and England.” In a history for the uninitiated, the author would at the very least have introduced the term “Great Britain” at the beginning of James’s reign. OK, so maybe “Great Britain” isn’t all that hard to understand. But several other terms, even more cryptic to the American, appear without explanation: “Black Rod” (a person?), “the Chapel” (which he opposes to the Church), and “the Ironsides” (apparently a nickname for both Cromwell and, in some instances, for his cavalry).

Now I learned all about these problems thirty years ago when I first read the HESP. But I still wanted to read it again. Maybe I know enough now that reminders are all I need. Or maybe I just wanted to enjoy the stodgy eloquence again. In any case, this year, I reread The New World, volume 2 of the HESP, and thoroughly enjoyed it. The stories were good, and the missing bits didn’t bother me so much this time around since I wasn’t reading to learn this history for the first time.

But I actually started learning things (or relearning, I guess) in chapters 19 and 20, covering the English Civil War. “Here,” Sir Winston says in almost the last good thing he has to offer about Oliver Cromwell, “is the salient fact which distinguishes the English Revolution from all others: that those who wielded irresistible physical force were throughout convinced that it would give them no security. Nothing is more characteristic of the English people than their instinctive reverence even in rebellion for law and tradition.” The rebel forces may at first have tried to find legal precedent for their treason and may have sought a new stability that fit into their interpretation of existing law. But it goes downhill from there. After the King’s forces have been totally defeated, the Roundhead (i.e. rebel) army won’t disband because they have not been paid. Now begins what Churchill calls the Second Civil War. (So much for “irresistible physical force” respecting “law and tradition.”) Once Cromwell and his army takes over, he says, “We must not be led by Victorian writers into regarding this triumph of the Ironsides and of Cromwell as a kind of victory for democracy and the Parliamentary system over Divine Right and Old World dreams. It was the victory of some twenty thousand resolute, ruthless, disciplined, military fanatics over all that England ever willed or ever wished. . . . Thus the struggle, in which we have in these days so much sympathy and part, begun to bring about a constitutional and limited monarchy, had led only to the autocracy of the sword.”

Again, Churchill assumes things. I don’t know who those Victorian writers were. I didn’t grow up thinking of Cromwell as a lightbearer for democracy and parliamentarism. But I get the idea. I live in a free democracy, as well, and I want those who established my freedom to have had no flaws and to have labored and bled solely for the abstract cause of freedom for future generations. So I can see why historians of a previous age would want to make heroes out of very flawed humans who fought for their own purposes and yet, even on a route as indirect as that leading from Oliver Cromwell, paved the way for the progress of greater freedom from tyranny. But when Cromwell and his brand of Puritanism won the rule of a Brave New England, he wanted no such thing as personal liberty for all. Among all the tyrannical policies enacted by this regicide and traitor, none seems more telling to me than his war on Christmas. A literal war. On Christmas. His understanding of Christianity dictated that this holiday smacked of Catholicism and should not be celebrated by him or by anyone he had power over. So the armed forces of the English government entered English homes on December 25 without a warrant and examined dinners. If a goose was involved, they confiscated the goose and sometimes took into custody the perpetrators of the lewd crime of being merry about the birth of Christ.

As I think about it, I want Churchill to be perfect, too. I actually believe I owe my freedom partly to him and his stalwart stand against Hitler, lonely but unwavering until the rest of the English-Speaking Peoples (i.e. us) went shoulder-to-shoulder with him. So I want him to be a paragon, even though I know that in reality he was human, as broken and self-centered as the rest of us. And yet I must admire the good and the noble in the man, and high among those admirable qualities is his understanding that shutting down Christmas with guns is an atrocity.

Modern Morality

In the early days of this blog, I would have made at least three posts out of three books. These days, I’m inclined to make just one post out of Hardy, Galsworthy, and Joyce.

Hardy

Let’s begin with Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I don’t know exactly what I expected from a book that I had heard characterized as “shocking”; maybe I thought it would be graphic in its depiction of sex or violence. It was not graphic, and, not being a Victorian, I didn’t find it shocking, either. Tragic and heartbreaking, yes. Surprising or offensive (are these the two main definitions of “shocking”?), no. Tess is seduced by a man who uses a very dirty trick, and then she despises him and tries to start a new life in a place where people don’t know she’s not a virgin. Is this shocking? The book itself describes the situation as one that “happens to girls.” Surely every proper Victorian had – I don't know – cousins who went astray. Then Tess suffers the hypocritical judgment of a man who otherwise seems like a very decent fellow; I imagine most women have found themselves victim to the male's double standard. So, again, it just looks like honest storytelling to me. I sympathized with and admired Tess until the end (I won’t give it away), and I’m really not sure why even Victorian ladies had such trouble with it.

Perhaps more shocking than the question of sexual morals, though, was Hardy’s anti-Christian, anti-Theist stance. But how offensive could this really have been? Tess’s Christianity is ill informed and syncretistically infused with folk legends. Sure. Such things happen in rural areas. The clergymen in her area are mostly hypocrites and nonbelievers. I’ve known several of these myself, and surely the most sincere Victorian believers were familiar with such, as well. I don’t see how they could have taken that part of the atmosphere of the book as an attack on all Christianity. I’m sad for Hardy that he couldn’t believe. It seems to me that he wanted to and just couldn’t. His books, including this one, don’t come across to me as personal accusations of stupidity and hypocrisy on the part of all Christians but as the honest observations of a struggling man. His narration denies the existence of a God who makes sense of Tess’s life, a God who cares for her. But he doesn’t want to tear down the social fabric. He doesn’t ask for a change in the Constitution or the disestablishment of the Anglican Church. He shows no scorn for the believer. I’m sure it helps that I approach the book from a perspective different from that of Victorians: I live after the modern age and in a country with no established church. But, really, why were they shocked?

Before I move on with my thoughts on modern morality in my recent reading, I have to say that I don’t believe I’ve ever read more beautifully poetic descriptions of rural life than those Hardy provides in Tess. A sample:

Thus, during this October month of wonderful afternoons they roved along the meads by creeping paths which followed the brinks of trickling tributary brooks, hopping across by little wooden bridges to the other side, and back again. They were never out of the sound of some purling weir, whose buzz accompanied their own murmuring, while the beams of the sun, almost as horizontal as the mead itself, formed a pollen of radiance over the landscape.

Yes, it is very hard to believe sometimes that God cares for girls like Tess. But I hope that Hardy, in stolen moments, thought that perhaps a God could have made that pastoral landscape and empowered that beautiful language.

Galsworthy

Right after finishing Tess, I read Silver Spoon, the fifth entry in John Galsworthy’s nine-part Forsyte Saga. Partly because the story was so similar to Tess, which I had just found so moving, and partly because I had enjoyed book 4, The White Monkey, so much last year, this book was a bit disappointing. Again, the story revolves around a young woman, Marjorie Ferrar, who has had a premarital affair. But, unlike Tess, Marjorie has no shame about it, no regrets. Galsworthy, calling the situation “modern morality,” literally puts this new morality on trial. An acquaintance, Fleur Mont, writes to a friend that Marjorie “hasn’t a moral about her,” and Marjorie takes Fleur to court for libel, where Fleur’s only defense is to show that what she said is totally true. The jury finds in Fleur’s favor, but Fleur loses in the court of Society. Right or wrong, says Galsworthy, this is where we are: our culture is a spoiled baby, tossing food around with a silver spoon and delighting in the mess while our only consequence lies in being told by an indulgent nurse that we’re naughty. (Actually, why was I disappointed? That all sounds pretty interesting!)

Joyce

I’ve read that some people think James Joyce spoke “the last word” on human sexuality in Ulysses. All I can say is that those critics and readers must not know very many words about human sexuality; I think much more can be spoken. In any case, I expected more “modern morality” in Finnegans Wake, but I didn’t find it. In fact, I didn’t find much that I could understand at all. I knew that the book ended with the line “A way a lone a last a loved a long the,” a string of words that strikes me as both interestingly cryptic and extremely beautiful. So I knew that the adventure would be loopy, but I didn’t know it would be quite as crazy as it has turned out to be. I had immense trouble getting through just the first day’s portion. I told myself decades ago that one day I would read this “hardest of all books to read.” So I don’t want to give up.

But in reading more about the book, I found that most readers don’t just sit down and take it in in a few days. Most take years. So, new plan. I’m going to divide Finnegans Wake up over not only the remaining five years of my current ten-year reading plan but also the ten years of my next decade-long schedule (most of which is already set). I don’t know what I’ll get out of the experience, but, assuming I live that long, I will finish reading this book!

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.