Author: Various
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Essays; Year 11

Selected Essays

Table of Contents

IN DEFENSE OF THE ESSAY
Christopher Orlet

THE ARTISTIC ORDERING OF LIFE
Albert S. Cook

THE MORAL OBLIGATION TO BE INTELLIGENT
John Erskine

THE SUPERSTITION OF SCHOOL
G. K. Chesterton

MASTER OF MANY TRADES
Robert Twigger

THE SECOND TIME I LEARNED TO READ
Stephen L. Carter

ON THE READING OF OLD BOOKS
THE INNER RING
C. S. Lewis

A NICE CUP OF TEA
POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
George Orwell

HOW A GENERATION LOST ITS COMMON CULTURE
Patrick Deneen

LIVING LIKE WEASLES
Annie Dillard

HOME PLACES
Gene Logsdon

ABORTION AND THE CONSCIENCE OF THE NATION
Ronald Reagan

THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH
Morgan Meis

THE JOY OF LITERARY DESTRUCTION
Wendy Lesser

LA BELLA VITA
John Armstrong

YOU’RE REGRETTING WRONG
Judith Shulevitz

THE PROBLEM WITH TOO MUCH INFORMATION
Dougald Hine

IN DEFENSE OF THE ESSAY

Christopher Orlet

2003

It is an article of the most unshakable faith that the personal, familiar, Montaignian—call it what you will—essay is minor stuff, a second-rate employment undertaken by bankrupt novelists and other failures. In literary rankings its place lay well below the novella and scarcely above the book review. “Essays, reviews, imitations, caricatures are all minor stuff,” wrote the New York Times critic in a recent review of a Max Beerbohm biography. In this conviction he has more support than a sports bra. Indeed, the personal essay’s most esteemed and acclaimed practitioners have to a man voiced misgivings about their trade. E.B. White called the essay a second-rate form. Cynthia Ozick, certainly one of the best contemporary essayists, may not specifically refer to the essay as second rate, but she certainly prefers to write fiction. “I don’t think I ever undertake to write non-fiction without some external prodding,” she told the Atlantic. Joseph Epstein will allow only that an excellent essay counts for more than a less-than-excellent higher form of literature, thereby damning the essay with faint praise. In his collection Plausible Prejudices the former American Scholar editor writes that “because essays do not have the prestige of other genres, no one sets out to be an essayist.”

A less odious, but no less frequent adjective applied to the personal essay is the term “undervalued.” Robert Atwan, editor of the Best American Essay series, is no doubt correct when he says the essay is an undervalued genre that has resulted in a “sharply skewed canon, [and] the neglect of many important works.” In particular, master works such as T.S. Eliot’s Selected Essays, H.L. Mencken’s Prejudices, Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore, James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, Einstein’s Ideas and Opinions, and A.J. Liebling’s The Sweet Science come readily to mind. I suspect all but a handful of professors of literature dismiss these texts as lacking the creativity required of a first-rate genre.

In his introduction to the Norton Anthology of the Personal Essay, Mr. Epstein makes reference to the rise and fall of genres, which occur no less frequently than the rise and fall of empires. Time was when drama was tops, only to be outdone by the poem. Now the novel is king. Unless one counts film. Or, God help us, television. This much seems certain: if the essay has been exiled to the kitchen table of literature, this has not always been the case. No sensible person writes off the essays of Montaigne, Lamb, DeQuincey, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Samuel Johnson, Poe, Thoreau, Emerson, and William James as second-rate stuff. Dull, perhaps. Tiresome. But tiresome in the first-rate manner. “There are no second-rate genres,” said Joyce Carol Oates, “only second-rate practitioners.” If that is indeed the case, it is either today’s writers who are second-rate or something unfortunate has happened to the essay to precipitate its decline. Or both.

As late as mid-twentieth century one senses the essay donned respectable clothing, all done up in the fine silk prose of Orwell, Santayana, Russell, Chesterton, Belloc, Pound, Eliot, Yeats, William Carlos Williams, the latter few writing nearly as much in the essay form as in verse. Indeed their corpses had scarcely cooled when the professors began to bemoan the essay’s deterioration, as noted in David Daiches’ 1951 book A Century of the Essay, in which he blamed the decline on magazine specialization, noting that essays that appeal to intelligent persons of large general curiosity—notably the essays of Arnold and Thoreau—became increasingly rare as human knowledge was fragmented by “highly-focused serious prose discussions.” Similarly, Cynthia Ozick blamed the ubiquitous short article for displacing the personal essay. No doubt, the New Journalism, as popularized by Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer, played its part too. Arguably our best contemporary essayists—Ozick, William H. Gass, Susan Sontag, Christopher Hitchens, and, to a large extent, Joseph Epstein—have shunned the personal essay in favor of the essay of literary criticism.

The present lack of respect for the personal essay is not entirely undeserved; too many modern essays are thin, watery things written by self-absorbed sentimentalists, who inflict upon the reader a subgenre that Carl H. Klaus has termed “the malady essay.” Literary journals are infested with such rot, to the extent that they have replaced not only the Montaignian essay (a philosophical mediation upon a particular subject or theme), but the charming Beerbohmian or Orwellian essay in which the author begins with a small observation and ultimately reaches a larger understanding. Editors seem to favor essays that depict illness, sickness, disease, infection, and death over all other kinds. Not surprisingly the malady essay mirrors our whiny, I-feel-your-pain, tell-all, victimization culture. They may be therapeutic for the author-victim, but they are painful for the reader and certain death for the essay as a form. Editors who print malady essays assume we want to know the essayist in an intimate, overly personal way, genital warts and all, a role that has heretofore been assigned to the biography or confessional, not the personal essay. When Montaigne wrote “Of Drunkeness” he did not recount the many times he woke up in the Parisian gutter beside some fat whore. Au contraire. The Montaigne essay is an act of discovery, a meditation, containing not only what the essayist thinks, but what the greatest minds throughout history have thought on a particular subject.

Similarly, we pick up Mark Twain’s essays not because we hope to read about the many tragic deaths in his unfortunate family—since we can all relate to death. Rather we read Mark because he is an expert at exposing sham, pretension, and hypocrisy, and because he was the greatest American humorist of the 19th century. (The one exception, his essay “Death of Jean”—the doleful reminiscence and grieving of a mournful father—was meant as the last chapter of his autobiography, and not as a stand-alone essay. Such pieces as these are written more as a form of release for the author than as a pleasant diversion for the reader. Why editors print them, except out of sympathy, is a mystery on the order of the extinction of the dinosaurs.)

Unlike today’s malady essayists, the great personal essayist Max Beerbohm was an intensely private man working in a supposedly narcissistic trade, who knew how to write in the first-person without drawing constant attention to himself and his various difficulties, which may or may not have included two unconsummated marriages. According to his admirer Joseph Epstein: “His tact was consummate; and one has never grown less tired of a man who wrote so much in the first person, for he knew the difference, as he once told his wife, between ‘offering himself humbly for the inspection of others’ and pushing himself forward through egotism.” Advice too many malady essayists have failed to heed.

A few years ago in the online magazine Slate, the eminent literary critics A.O. Scott and Sarah Kerr undertook to diagnose the current health of the essay. Kerr found the personal essay “operating well beneath his full capacity. He’s not as robust or playful as he used to be…lately he’s been clinging to known routines…[but] nothing that some exercise and a change of scenery couldn’t cure.” Drs. Kerr and Scott accused essayists Epstein, Anne Fadiman and Wendy Lesser of an unhealthy fixation on the past, an “idolatrous valuation of the past,” and “a reluctance to break new ground.” Both Scott and Kerr seemed to be holding to the curious belief that—as with fiction—the personal essay must constantly reinvent itself through experimentation with form and punctuation. This hasn’t worked for fiction, and it doubtlessly won’t work with the essay. The essayist, in fact, profits immeasurably from looking over her shoulder at what the past masters have written and thought and applying it to today. That’s what Mr. Epstein does so successfully, and that is why he is often called the heir to Montaigne. Scott and Kerr seem to suggest this is a bad thing.

Elsewhere Mr. Scott admits that Epstein, Fadiman and Lesser’s essays “annoyed the hell out of [him].” Presumably then Montaigne, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Emerson would annoy the hell out of him too, were they writing today. That is, unless they changed their style, dropped all those references to dead white males and the occasional punctuation mark. The cause of Mr. Scott’s annoyance seems to stem from his belief that the essay should be “a democratic form, requiring no particular learning or credentials to practice.” In other words, a second-rate genre practiced by second-rate writers. Epstein, Fadiman and Lesser, he goes on to say, are “big snobs…They’re not like you and me at all—they’re better: better read, more sensitive, more discerning…Reading Fadiman and Lesser back to back was rather like watching a PBS fundraiser drive…all they can talk about is how much better their programming is than anything else, how threatened is our vulgar culture, how only viewers like you can keep it alive. And I find myself thanking God for the Fox network.”

So it is that literary critics—doubtless the snootiest pretenders inhabiting this crust—make themselves feel less snobbish when they accuse personal essayists of being the real snobs. I find this game of “Who’s the snob?” silly, to say the least.

For his final trick, Mr. Scott has at Epstein and Fadiman for assuming “the love of books, and of certain types of books, is a sign of cultural, and therefore moral, superiority.” I wonder which is the greater crime for Mr. Scott, being culturally superior or believing oneself culturally superior. For such critics the only acceptable essay seems to be the dreary death and dying essay. No chance of feeling superior there—at least until the essayist begins to claim that her hemorrhoids are larger and more painful than yours.

THE ARTISTIC ORDERING OF LIFE

Albert S. Cook, Ph.D., L.H.D.

An Address delivered before the Alumni of Rutgers College Tuesday, June 21, 1898

Art is as yet an exotic in America. The Puritan, keenly conscious of the delicate or urgent appeal to the senses which is inseparable from all art, and dreading the corruption of which, it was often the subtle and malign agent, resolutely frowned upon even the innocent pleasures with which it might have cheered and embellished life, and allowed no place to it in his system of the universe. Though he guided his conduct, and inspired his sentiments, by the Old Testament rather than the New, he disregarded the example of Bezaleel and Aholiab, of David and Solomon, and left his tabernacles bare, and his temples unadorned. Literature, music, painting, sculpture, all fell under the strokes of the iron flail with which he scourged the passions and follies of men. Our sturdy ancestor, who fought with the red Indian, felled the forest, and wrenched a scanty livelihood from the reluctant and meagre soil, was, indeed, like the chastiser of evil in Spenser’s poem, “immovable, resistlesse,” because, like him, “made of yron mould.” Nor, indeed, is this trait of the Puritan even in our own day without apology and eloquent vindication. Ruskin, who perhaps more than any other man in this generation has opened our unseeing eyes to the beauty of clouds, and skies, and mountains, and waters, and has disclosed to the prejudiced understandings of multitudes the wonder and joy in the paintings of the early religious masters, Ruskin himself, in the very heart of his Modern Painters, can calmly chronicle his doubt whether art, even religious art, has ever exerted any influence for good. I quote his eloquent words, though the passage be rather long, partly because of the authority with which they are uttered, and partly that the grounds of his belief, as well as the belief itself, may be the more clearly understood. I am sure that many who hear me will find it difficult to withhold some degree of assent from these views of the great critic and inspirer:—

“I do not think that any man who is thoroughly certain that Christ is in the room will care what sort of pictures of Christ he has on its walls; and, in the plurality of cases, the delight taken in art of this kind is, in reality, nothing more than a form of graceful indulgence of those sensibilities which the habits of a disciplined life restrain in other directions. Such art is, in a word, the opera and drama of the monk. Sometimes it is worse than this, and the love of it is the mask under which a general thirst for morbid excitement will pass itself for religion. The young lady who rises in the middle of the day, jaded by her last night’s ball, and utterly incapable of any simple or wholesome religious exercise, can still gaze into the dark eyes of the Madonna di San Sisto, or dream over the whiteness of an ivory crucifix, and returns to the course of her daily life in full persuasion that her morning’s feverishness has atoned for her evening’s folly. And, all the while, the art which possesses these very doubtful advantages is acting for undoubtful detriment, in the various ways above examined, on the inmost fastnesses of faith: it is throwing subtle endearments round foolish traditions, confusing sweet fancies with sound doctrines, obscuring real events with unlikely semblances, and enforcing false assertions with pleasant circumstantiality, until, to the usual and assuredly sufficient difficulties standing in the way of belief, its votaries have added a habit of changing what they know to be true, and of dearly loving what they confess to be false. Has there, then (the reader asks emphatically), been no true religious ideal? Has religious art never been of any service to mankind?”

Here, you will observe, is Ruskin’s significant, his momentous question. What will he, the hierophant of beauty, the devotee of religion, the servant of humanity, answer to this query? Briefly and unequivocally he replies: “I fear, on the whole, not.” And a little later he adds: “For the most part, it is assuredly much to be feared lest we mistake a surrender to the charms of art for one to the service of God; and, in the art which we permit, lest we substitute sentiment for sense, grace for utility.”

To this effect Ruskin, writing half a century ago; and it is but yesterday since the strokes of the hammer, wielded by a frail girl in a plain poke bonnet, echoed through the land, as she demolished the Cupids of the Exposition Building at Omaha. The English race is still, at bottom, deeply Puritan. We play with art as with a dangerous, but glittering, edge-tool; or we surrender ourselves to it as to the wiles of a siren, with whom we cannot choose but be transported, while yet we feel that her breath is a delicious airy venom, that the undulations of her form are serpentine in their allurements, and that the glances of her beautiful eyes are fraught with a deadly, though irresistible, fascination.

And yet, notwithstanding our instinctive thrill of dread, and the real danger which that dread apprehends, art, like the beauty which it strives to render, is well nigh irresistible. To many people, art is purely and solely the embodiment of the beautiful or the attractive, and such are ready to echo and acclaim the words of an eminent French painter and critic when he asserts: “At bottom, we naturally love only what is beautiful. Imagination turns thither; sensibility is excited by it; all hearts precipitate themselves toward it. If we seek carefully for what the mass of mankind loves most voluntarily, it may be seen that it is not what touches, nor what convinces, nor what edifies it; it is what charms it and excites its wonder.”

How, then, can we reconcile our dread with our longing? Are art and beauty actually infernal? Is righteousness intrinsically repulsive? We would fain believe not. We listen attentively to Emerson when he says: “The high and divine beauty which can be loved without effeminacy is found in combination with the human will.” We are ready to take him to our hearts when he adds: “Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.”

We listen to noble music—a simple, tender ballad, an uplifting hymn, a sonata rich with griefs, and struggles, and aspirations, and consolations, the hallelujahs of an oratorio, the multitudinous voices, the complex harmonies of a symphony, and for the time being live in that sphere of music to which we have been lifted as if on seraphic wings. We feel that it is good to be there, and would gladly make a tabernacle on the spot, in which our souls might abide continually. For a brief hour we have outsoared the things of time and sense, and are in the presence of the eternal concords and satisfactions. But how is it when we return to earth again? Are we more permanently tender for the tenderness of the ballad, joyful for the consolations of the sonata, adoring for the hallelujahs of the oratorio? Are we more perfectly adjusted to our fellow-beings, to life, and to the will of God concerning us, for the harmonic resolutions and concordant instrumentalities of the symphony?

Perhaps this illustration will suggest what I have in mind when I speak of the artistic ordering of life. Can a human being, constantly assailed by appetite and weariness, besieged at every moment by sordid cares, a prey to impulse, to lassitude, to disease—can such a one hope to become permanently musical, in the full Greek sense of that word, habitually to “practise music,” as Plato says? How beautiful is that conception of his, as expressed in these words: “He who would train the limbs of the body should impart to them the motions of the soul, and should practise music and all philosophy, if he would be called truly fair and truly good.” Practise medicine—we have heard of that; practise running, vaulting, swimming, even, practise scales; but practise music, in Plato’s sense of music, do we often hear people discuss so much as the possibility of that?

Two modern poets, one a man and the other a woman, have cast side-lights upon the idea which we are endeavoring to set forth. England’s recent Laureate, referring to his friend Arthur Hallam and his struggle to attain an artistic conception of the meaning and purpose of life, wrote:—

One indeed I knew

In many a subtle question versed,

Who touched a jarring lyre at first,

But ever strove to make it true.

Perplexed in faith, but pure in deeds,

At last he beat his music out.

The greatest of England’s poetesses, in a fine sonnet, just fails to express the thought at which I am aiming, though her failure is worth most triumphs:—

The woman singeth at her spinning-wheel

A pleasant chant,—ballad or barcarolle;

She thinketh of her song, upon the whole,

Far more than of the flax; and yet the reel

Is full, and artfully her fingers feel

With quick adjustment, provident control,

The lines, too subtly twisted to unroll,

Out to a perfect thread. I hence appeal

To the dear Christian church—that we may do

Our Father’s business in these temples mirk,

Thus swift and steadfast, thus intent and strong;

While thus, apart from toil, our souls pursue

Some high, calm, spheric tune, and prove our work

The better for the sweetness of our song.

No, despite my admiration for this lovely sonnet, I cannot admit that it is best our souls should pursue some high, calm, spheric tune apart from toil. What I am advocating is that the toil should be not merely accompanied by music, but set to music, or that, to recur to Plato’s phrase, the toil should be the practice of music.

To some minds all this will sound vastly Utopian, I am aware; and one must admit that it presents a very blind side indeed to the shafts of hard-headed common sense. “What! I am a farmer,” says one; “how shall my pursuit be the practice of music?” “I am a shopkeeper,” says another; “how am I to reconcile the weighing of pounds of butter or the measuring of yards of cloth with your wild, high-flying, visionary talk? Music, and art in general, are all very well in their place, as a diversion, as a recreation, even as the occupation of people who can afford to be busily idle in an elegant and graceful manner, but what have they to do with me in the hours of business, in a world where taxes are to be paid and every door is watched by a famine-stricken wolf?”

To such an objector I would reply: “Do you not acknowledge the binding force of the injunction, ‘Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God’? Because, if you do admit the obligation of this principle, you have conceded the possibility of your leading the artistic life, in the somewhat unusual sense in which we have employed the term.” This may seem like a rather inconclusive rejoinder. In order to discover whether it is really so or not, we must first inquire what art is, an inquiry by no means superfluous, since one person habitually limits it to painting, another regularly qualifies the word by an adjective, speaking of “decorative art,” “literary art,” etc., while there are comparatively few who employ it in its most comprehensive and universal signification.

The word art, short as it is, has not escaped analysis; and the root, found in a considerable number of words in Greek and Latin, is the biliteral one ar, meaning “to join or fit together.” Two Latin words, from the same root, chance to have assumed an identical form in English: one stands for a product of God’s art, and one of man’s. I refer to the word arm. As a member of the human body, it signifies that which is joined or fitted, at the shoulder, to the shoulder-blade; this, then, is a product of God’s art. As a warlike implement, it is a product of man’s skill in joining or fitting together; no one who considers the derivative term, armor, needs to be told how, in the Middle Ages, scale was lapped over scale, or link welded within link.

We can now the better understand what Sir Thomas Browne meant when he said, “Nature is the art of God”; and indeed he himself illustrates his own statement by another to the like effect:

“Now, this course of Nature God seldom alters or perverts, but, like an excellent Artist, hath so contrived his work that, with the selfsame instrument, without a new creation, he may effect his obscurest designs.” We see, too, at a glance, Pope’s meaning in the lines:—

All nature is but art, unknown to thee;

All chance, direction which thou canst not see;

All discord, harmony not understood.

We even apprehend what Dante has in mind in his somewhat oracular saying: “Your art [i.e., man’s art] is, as it were, the granddaughter of God.” His conception is, of course, that man’s art is suggested by Nature, as Nature herself is a manifestation of God.

Nature, therefore, in the sense of the universe of created things, is a manifestation of God’s skill in the mutual adaptation of parts, and their adjustment to the scheme of the whole. It was according to the same conception that the Greeks spoke of the universe as cosmos, from a verb signifying to order or arrange. Art is man’s endeavor at the same thing, an attempt on his part to exemplify one or more principles of the cosmical beauty. If he does this in marble or bronze, we call it sculpture or statuary; if with pigments, painting; if with notes of the scale, music; if with words rhythmically arranged, poetry. If, perchance, he should do this with the successive days of his life, knitting them together in orderly sequences, and shaping them to a predetermined end—but we are anticipating.

Let us now see whether we have been adopting a singular, out-of-the-way, and therefore indefensible definition of our term. Since the foundations of much of our systematic knowledge were laid by Aristotle, it may be well to inquire what he thought on this point. His view is: “Since there is no art which is not a habit of methodical production, nor any habit of methodical production which is not an art, it follows that the definition of art is: ‘A habit of production in conscious accordance with a correct method.’” No definition of art is older than Aristotle’s, so far as I am aware, and none is more recent than this, which I extract from the latest authoritative English dictionary: “The skilful and systematic arrangement or adaptation of means for the attainment of some desired end.” There is no essential difference, it will be seen, between these two definitions, and both are in accord with the notion which I have been seeking to develop.

We have now arrived at a conclusion which will enable us, I think, to include among the fine arts the fine art of living. Surely life may be considered with reference to the attainment of a desired end, and surely there can be no rational objection to the skilful and systematic arrangement or adaptation of means for the attainment of this desired end. That the ancients, or at least the Romans, recognized the propriety of applying the term “art” to various species of moral excellence which had been produced or acquired by the soul “in conscious accordance with a correct method,” is beyond question. Thus Horace, in his famous Third Ode of the Third Book, after seven or eight lines descriptive of the virtues of the upright man, resumes them all in the word art. He begins (I employ the translation of Addison):—

The man resolved and steady to his trust,

Inflexible to ill, and obstinately just,

May the rude rabble’s insolence despise,

Their senseless clamors and tumultuous cries.

*      *      *

Should the whole frame of Nature round him break,

In ruin and confusion hurled,

He, unconcerned, would hear the mighty crack,

And stand secure amidst a falling world.

And then he adds:—

Such were the godlike arts that led

Bright Pollux to the blest abodes.

Cicero, too, calls various virtues by the name of arts. For example, in one of his moral treatises he says: “Let us pass in review not those greater arts”—meaning such as modesty, justice, contempt of pain and death—“which whoso lacked was called by our ancestors soulless.” In the Oration on Pompey he asserts that the great commander must not only be brave and a good fighter, “but,” he adds, “there are many arts of a high order which are auxiliary to and attendant upon his courage: what uprightness must such a chief possess, what temperance in all things, what sense of obligation!” and so the orator goes on, enumerating what we should call virtues, but what he is including under the designation of arts.

Enough has been said, I trust, to show that art is a term large enough to include not merely the pursuits of the sculptor, the musician, the painter, the architect, and the poet, but also the scope of many lives which would ordinarily be called workaday and prosaic. The essence of the artistic life is the production of effects permanently delightful and profitable to other people. The right sort of effect will not be delightful alone, but profitable as well; and this combination being presupposed, the rank of the artistic product will be determined by the permanency of the delight and the profit. Whoever, therefore, influences other lives for good in this twofold meaning of the term, and in such a way as to make an impression either lasting or recurrent, is, according to this definition, leading the artistic life. The landscape gardener would evidently be an artist in his laying out of noble parks, rich in masses of shadow and glades of light, set here and there with stately oaks and graceful elms, diversified with sweep of acclivity and prospect of gleaming water; but so also is the farmer who bends his best energies to the production of harvests that gladden the eye before they fill the granary, of orchards that realize the fable of the Hesperides before they swell the credit account of the ledger, and who sees to it that his own toil and that of all his family and associates is cheered by the contemplation of these achievements, and ennobled by a hearty and generous co-operation in the process. The preacher is an artist when he is made all things to all men, that he may by all means save some, for surely nothing can be more delightful and profitable, whether in its whole progress or in occasional retrospect, than the spiritual regeneration that he induces in the soul that is the object of his ministry. Can any contemplation of a landscape by Ruysdael or Corot, of an interior by Metsu or Gerard Dou, of a battle-piece by De Neuville or a reproduction of ancient life by Alma Tadema, afford such satisfaction as the view of one’s own life undergoing, through whatever struggle and strain, a continual transformation into the image of the heavenly, and, by its often unconscious influence, effecting a similar change in the lives of others? In so far as the preacher fulfils his mission, he paints many such masterpieces, or rather he sketches them so that the intent is visible, and leaves to the individual subject the task of filling in the outline thus delineated.

In like manner, there is many a home in which the mother is an accomplished artist, laying, with delicate precision and loving touch, here a line and there a line, and not seldom reinforcing the first dim contour by adding line upon line, until there flashes out upon the beholder a portrait true in its lineaments to the inherited racial and family character, but with a certain ideality in the features, a certain generosity, or courage, or scorn of meanness, for which nature is not wholly responsible, but which emanated from the brooding thought of the artificer.

Examples will occur to you in all the walks of life, and in circumstances the most humble. George Herbert’s lines are classic:—

Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws

Makes that and the action fine.

And in truth the artistic spirit may be well shown in little things, in those which the dull person passes over, or slights in the performance, as insignificant. Indeed, in what province of human effort is it possible to rise above mediocrity without possessing something of the largeness of view and fineness of sensation, without having experienced, in some measure, that high and harmonious training of all the powers, which is indispensable to the artist?

In no vocation, however, is the artistic temper, the artistic ideal, more indispensable than in that of the teacher. To take character when it is most plastic, and knead it as the modeler kneads clay; to give it such consistency that it can best abide the fiery trial of the world’s seven-times-heated furnace; to take account of the changes which will inevitably be wrought in the form by the fierce glow to which the fabric must needs be subjected—this is the task of the teacher, a task so momentous in its consequences, and so subtle in its execution, as to tax the highest powers, to demand at once wisdom, alertness, adaptability, unwearied effort, and an utter consecration to the endeavor. It is among the keenest of pleasures, on returning after long absence to the scene of one’s own earlier education, to recall those who there labored in this spirit, and to realize, however one may have failed to approach the standard which they set, that they were workmen that needed not to be ashamed. And keener still, if possible, is the pleasure to find so many of them still occupying their chairs of instruction, and accomplishing, with added sureness of judgment and firmness of touch, the same artistic transformation of another generation. Not all of these were men of eloquence; several of them were silent rather than loquacious, men of thought rather than of speech, of deed first, and of word only so far as word was necessary to give proper visibility to the deed; yet somehow they inculcated high endeavor, steady industry, love of Nature, reverence for things worthy, contempt of things base, the service of man, the worship of God. It is not for nothing that small colleges exist. So long as small colleges can shelter the activity of large men—men large-hearted and large-minded—there will, there must be a place for them in our American scheme of education.

If you have shared my thought thus far, we shall have seen, I think, that the acceptance of the view which I have proposed—a view which I have taken some pains to show is grounded in both philosophy and history—will tend to efface the current distinction between the fine and the useful arts. For some purposes, it is desirable that this distinction be retained; but it is perhaps even more important that it be abolished, or at least in some degree waived. It is important for two reasons—first, that the fine arts shall not be set apart, in a daintiness hedged about on all sides from contact with life in its ruder and more elemental forms; and secondly, that the useful arts shall be useful not merely in the gratification of the grosser and more material needs, but shall serve for the twofold embellishment, or rather ennoblement, of life, the life of him by whom, and the life of him for whom, the art is practised. For example, the making of pottery is a useful art, but it may also be brought under the dominion of beauty. In these last years the pottery of New Jersey has been serving more and more to exemplify this principle. And when we consider who it was that, doing his allotted work in this place, strove within his own peculiar sphere to render this outcome possible, shall we deny to him the essential artistic impulse, though his concern seemed to be primarily with the study of rocks and ores, and the diffusion of better ideas concerning agriculture? The truth is, we ought to cherish broader conceptions of the province common to the man of affairs and the devotee of art. In the palmy days of the Renaissance men were not so one-sided as they have become in the epoch which has since intervened. Michael Angelo had already executed his David, his Moses, and the Prophets and Sibyls of the Sistine Chapel, when in 1529 he was called upon to fortify the city of Florence, in anticipation of an attack by the Medici. He at once devoted himself to this undertaking—one not strictly, it will be observed, within the province of fine art—and, according to his biographer, “the work was carried on by him with such zeal that his brick bastions rose from the ground with wonderful rapidity.” He was then fifty-four years of age; and it was after this that he wrote his sonnets, chiseled the statues in the Medicean Chapel, painted the Last Judgment, and achieved one of the greatest triumphs of architecture in the dome of St. Peter’s. Take another illustration, somewhat earlier in time. Leonardo da Vinci said of himself, not untruly: “I can execute sculpture, whether in marble, bronze, or terra-cotta; also in painting I can do as much as any other, be he who he may.” Subsequently to this utterance, he painted the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, made a large number of exquisite drawings, and wrote a celebrated treatise on painting; but he also, we are told, devised a system of hydraulic irrigation of the plains of Lombardy, and was entrusted with the most ample authority as architect and engineer in the service of Caesar Borgia. These men, and such as these, did not conceive of their art as a thing cloistered and aloof, as remote from civic life and daily needs. They did not devote themselves exclusively to one of the arts, isolating it in their thought from all the others. No, above the technical skill displayed in each several province of the whole domain was throned the comprehensive, the august conception of Art, the efflux, it is true, of rich and mighty life, but dominating the life from which it sprang, as purpose sways the purposeless, as form tyrannizes over matter. Were Art, the prolific mother of vital works, thus regnant in our lives, though only in that humbler degree commensurate with our own inferiority to these giants of an elder time, might it not make some difference in both the quantity and the quality of our production?

That we may more perfectly apprehend the qualities which of right pertain to art, let us consult Winckelmann, the historian and most eminent critic of ancient sculpture. I quote a few of his sentences: “The highest beauty is in God; and our idea of human beauty advances towards perfection in proportion as it can be imagined in conformity and harmony with that highest Existence, which, in our conception of unity and indivisibility, we distinguish from matter. This idea of beauty … seeks to beget unto itself a creature formed after the likeness of the first rational being designed in the mind of the Divinity.… All beauty is heightened by unity and simplicity, as is everything we do and say; for whatever is great in itself is elevated when executed and uttered with simplicity.” From this canon of unity and simplicity, enounced by Winckelmann, it is evident that all great art is founded upon a philosophy. The artist must have a definite purpose in each production, aim at a specific effect, and focus all the means employed upon this end. This necessarily implies that he has well considered his purpose, has come to consider it most worthy of his effort, and has carefully distinguished it from all other purposes which might be confounded with it. Such unity and simplicity of aim, with corresponding unity and simplicity in the result, is possible only to those of reflective habit. Accordingly, we find Sir Joshua Reynolds, that most charming of portrait-painters, addressing the Royal Academy in these terms: “Though there neither are, nor can be, any precise, invariable rules for the exercise or the acquisition of these great qualities, yet we may truly say that they operate in proportion to our attention in observing the works of Nature, to our skill in selecting, and to our care in digesting, methodizing, and comparing our observations. There are many beauties in our art that seem, at first, to lie without reach of precept, and yet may easily be reduced to practical principles.… This long, laborious comparison should be the first study of the painter who aims at the great style. By this means he acquires a just idea of beautiful forms. His eye being enabled to distinguish the accidental deficiencies, excrescences, and deformities of things from their general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original.… This idea of the perfect state of Nature, which the artist calls the ideal beauty, is the great leading principle by which works of genius are conducted. By this Phidias acquired his fame. He wrought upon a sober principle what has so much excited the enthusiasm of the world; and by this method you who have courage to tread the same path may acquire equal reputation.”

It is this last truth which is so distasteful to many who are ambitious to move, to charm, to benefit their fellows. They are apt to suppose that an excited state of feeling is all that is necessary to arouse the enthusiasm of others. With what a chill falls upon the spirit of such a one the remark, the well-considered remark, of the man who enraptured his contemporaries, and has continued to command admiration ever since: “He wrought upon a sober principle what has so much excited the enthusiasm of the world”! or that other: “This long, laborious comparison should be the first study”! Nevertheless, these remarks are just. Science and philosophy must lay the foundations of art, and are its indispensable concomitants, if anything of permanent interest and value is to be achieved. And what is true of the arts usually denominated fine is quite as true of all those which, to recur to our definition, are “the skilful and systematic arrangement or adaptation of means for the attainment of a desired end.” This fact, however, so far from being repellent, ought rather to be an incentive. He who already has some tincture of science and philosophy may well rejoice that, by means of certain acquisitions in art, he can more perfectly profit and more fully delight; and he who is actuated by the artistic spirit may reflect what a great advantage and stimulus he possesses over his fellows in the study of that science and philosophy which to them are ultimate, but to him are merely ancillary.

As a modern example of art founded upon well-considered principles, and everywhere imbued with science and philosophy, take that of Tennyson, and observe how unerringly he oftentimes succeeds in what he attempts. Compare the feelings evoked in the reader by The Lotos-Eaters, Ulysses, and St. Agnes’ Eve respectively, and see how all sounds, and forms, and hues, from the isles of tropic seas or the white desolations of the frozen North, are but pigments on the palette of a cunning craftsman, from which he selects those, and those only, that will unite and harmonize in verse which is picture and picture which is music. What is true of the poet is true in his kind and degree of the orator. The orator, as being often a leader in practical affairs, is likely to be skilled in the art of government, that larger art in which oratory is only one element, though by no means the least. And what an array of such uncrowned kings, artists every one, the world has seen, from Demosthenes through Cicero and Chatham and Burke down to the old man eloquent whose mortal remains England has just laid to rest in Westminster Abbey!

The mention of governmental leaders suggests that what is true of the individual is not without application to the nation. For the nation, too, like the individual, has, or should have, an aim which it seeks to compass, and which can be realized, if it is realized at all, only through prevision, sobriety, the employment of all contributory agencies, the neglect of no essential factors. The State should not drift, from year to year, and from presidential campaign to campaign, like a vessel without a helm. There ought to be no place in this country, now or ever, for political opportunism in high places, for the trimming of sails to the ephemeral zephyr or the treacherous gust. Shall we have war or peace? This is a matter which properly should be decided, and not merely acquiesced in. Shall we enter upon a career of foreign colonization and conquest, or civilize our immense African colony at home, educate the poor white, put a stop to lynching, break the power of the saloon, and set intelligence and conscience to governing our cities? The decisions of the sculptor and the architect are the sheerest child’s play as compared with the issue between colonial empire, a standing army, and international entanglements on the one hand, and obedience to the monitions of Washington’s Farewell Address on the other. It may be said that the Master Artist of the universe is wiser than we, and that we are the clay, He the potter. This also is true, and we shall do well to beware lest haply we be found even to fight against God. Yet none the less it behooves us to advance upon our national path with calmness and deliberation, to use all the wisdom with which He has endowed us, and to work out upon sober principles what may afterwards excite the enthusiasm of the world.

But to return to the individual. It has seemed to me that college halls, and an anniversary occasion like the present, were fitting place and time for the consideration of this topic of art, since it is concerned with individual achievement, with the deepest personal satisfaction, with the highest exercise of our faculties, and with the fulfilment of the divine plan in us, through us, and respecting us. Moreover, it is in college halls that the artistic impulse should be fostered and educated. Here, perhaps, and in such places as this, something more might be done to enable young men to find their peculiar vocation, through addresses and familiar talks by eminent representatives of the several arts and artistic occupations, pointing out how the ideal and the practical are or may be combined in each, and thus assisting every student to bring into play his own peculiar abilities, at the same time that he satisfied his deeper spiritual needs. Thus we should be helping to bring nearer the day when, within the commonwealth, all ordered toil shall be co-operant to an end, and when the principle of variety in unity, e pluribus unum, shall find its most perfect exemplification in the Nation’s life.

I know what may be said by and for those who enter this race as an unequal struggle. There are those whom poverty threatens to debar from entering it at all. There are those who have been straitened, physically and intellectually, in earliest life. There are those whom, midway in their career, sickness lays low, or sudden reverse of fortune overtakes. There are those whom death will cut off untimely.

For all who seem to be the victims of circumstance there are words of cheer. To those who are hindered in beginning I would say, The Supreme Artist sympathizes with the cry of your soul to work out a fair and noble life, full of achievement perfect within its limits. He also was born into His world poor, humble, in the family of an unconsidered mechanic. He also was cut off untimely, in the flower of His age, yet not without being able to say, with a fulness of meaning which the words can never bear on any other tongue, “It is finished.” Not only does He sympathize, but, through His sway in the hearts of men, He raises up friends and helpers for those who, being wrought in a peculiar sense in the divine image, have something of the poetic, the shaping, the organizing, the creative impulse within their souls. The message to such is, Heaven helps them that help themselves.

To the others who, attempting, are prevented by adverse circumstance from bringing anything notable to pass in accordance with their strenuous endeavor, whom duty directs into other channels from those they would have chosen, who are thwarted by disease or overthrown by sudden disaster, the word of our time has come by the mouth of Robert Browning, in such poems as Rabbi Ben Ezra:—

But all, the world’s coarse thumb

And finger failed to plumb,

So passed in making up the main account;

All instincts immature,

All purposes unsure,

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man’s amount;

Thoughts hardly to be packed

Into a narrow act,

Fancies that broke through language and escaped;

All I could never be,

All men ignored in me,

This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.

And so there is cheer and consolation for all artists, actual, prospective, or only potential. If actual, then are they laborers together with God, bringing order, and beauty, and delight into His world. If prospective, they are called with a high calling to an employment divine in its satisfactions. If potential, with a potentiality destined to fail of any marked realization in this our mortal sphere, yet God will reckon even this to them for righteousness, since out of the heart are the issues of life.

Brethren of the Alumni, we are not unconcerned in this matter. Our times need artists—artists of the beautiful, artists of the practical, artists of righteousness. Are we doing everything in our power to discover them, to evolve them, to train them? Shall we not see to it that Rutgers, which strikes its roots so deep into the Nation’s past, shall become, to an ever increasing extent, the nursery of those spirits which shall shape the future, invest life with a purer radiance and joy, and conspire, with all those who love our land, to fashion here a fairer type of humanity than the world has yet known?

THE MORAL OBLIGATION TO BE INTELLIGENT

John Erskine

1915

I

If a wise man should ask, What are the modern virtues? and should answer his own question by a summary of the things we admire; if he should discard as irrelevant the ideals which by tradition we profess, but which are not found outside of the tradition or the profession—ideals like meekness, humility, the renunciation of this world; if he should include only those excellences to which our hearts are daily given, and by which our conduct is motived,—in such an inventory what virtues would he name?

This question is neither original nor very new. Our times await the reckoning up of our spiritual goods which is here suggested. We have at least this wisdom, that many of us are curious to know just what our virtues are. I wish I could offer myself as the wise man who brings the answer. But I raise this question merely to ask another—When the wise man brings his list of our genuine admirations, will intelligence be one of them? We might seem to be well within the old ideal of modesty if we claimed the virtue of intelligence. But before we claim the virtue, are we convinced that it is a virtue, not a peril?

II

The disposition to consider intelligence a peril is an old Anglo-Saxon inheritance. Our ancestors have celebrated this disposition in verse and prose. Splendid as our literature is, it has not voiced all the aspirations of humanity, nor could it be expected to voice an aspiration that has not characteristically belonged to the English race; the praise of intelligence is not one of its characteristic glories.

“Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever.”

Here is the startling alternative which to the English, alone among great nations, has been not startling but a matter of course. Here is the casual assumption that a choice must be made between goodness and intelligence; that stupidity is first cousin to moral conduct, and cleverness the first step into mischief; that reason and God are not on good terms with each other; that the mind and the heart are rival buckets in the well of truth, inexorably balanced—full mind, starved heart—stout heart, weak head.

Kingsley’s line is a convenient text, but to establish the point that English literature voices a traditional distrust of the mind we must go to the masters. In Shakspere’s plays there are some highly intelligent men, but they are either villains or tragic victims. To be as intelligent as Richard or Iago or Edmund seems to involve some break with goodness; to be as wise as Prospero seems to imply some Faust-like traffic with the forbidden world; to be as thoughtful as Hamlet seems to be too thoughtful to live. In Shakspere the prizes of life go to such men as Bassanio, or Duke Orsino, or Florizel—men of good conduct and sound character, but of no particular intelligence. There might, indeed, appear to be one general exception to this sweeping statement: Shakspere does concede intelligence as a fortunate possession to some of his heroines. But upon even a slight examination those ladies, like Portia, turn out to have been among Shakspere’s Italian importations—their wit was part and parcel of the story he borrowed; or, like Viola, they are English types of humility, patience, and loyalty, such as we find in the old ballads, with a bit of Euphuism added, a foreign cleverness of speech. After all, these are only a few of Shakspere’s heroines; over against them are Ophelia, Juliet, Desdemona, Hero, Cordelia, Miranda, Perdita—lovable for other qualities than intellect,—and in a sinister group, Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, Goneril, intelligent and wicked.

In Paradise Lost Milton attributes intelligence of the highest order to the devil. That this is an Anglo-Saxon reading of the infernal character may be shown by a reference to the book of Job, where Satan is simply a troublesome body, and the great wisdom of the story is from the voice of God in the whirlwind. But Milton makes his Satan so thoughtful, so persistent and liberty-loving, so magnanimous, and God so illogical, so heartless and repressive, that many perfectly moral readers fear lest Milton, like the modern novelists, may have known good and evil, but could not tell them apart. It is disconcerting to intelligence that it should be God’s angel who cautions Adam not to wander in the earth, nor inquire concerning heaven’s causes and ends, and that it should be Satan meanwhile who questions and explores. By Milton’s reckoning of intelligence the theologian and the scientist to-day alike take after Satan.

If there were time, we might trace this valuation of intelligence through the English novel. We should see how often the writers have distinguished between intelligence and goodness, and have enlisted our affections for a kind of inexpert virtue. In Fielding or Scott, Thackeray or Dickens, the hero of the English novel is a well-meaning blunderer who in the last chapter is temporarily rescued by the grace of God from the mess he has made of his life. Unless he also dies in the last chapter, he will probably need rescue again. The dear woman whom the hero marries is, with a few notable exceptions, rather less intelligent than himself. When David Copperfield marries Agnes, his prospects of happiness, to the eyes of intelligence, look not very exhilarating. Agnes has more sense than Dora, but it is not even for that slight distinction that we must admire her; her great qualities are of the heart—patience, humility, faithfulness. These are the qualities also of Thackeray’s good heroines, like Laura or Lady Castlewood. Beatrice Esmond and Becky Sharp, both highly intelligent, are of course a bad lot.

No less significant is the kind of emotion the English novelist invites towards his secondary or lower-class heroes—toward Mr. Boffin in Our Mutual Friend, for example, or Harry Foker in Pendennis. These characters amuse us, and we feel pleasantly superior to them, but we agree with the novelist that they are wholly admirable in their station. Yet if a Frenchman—let us say Balzac—were presenting such types, he would make us feel, as in Pere Goriot or Eugenie Grandet, not only admiration for the stable, loyal nature, but also deep pity that such goodness should be so tragically bound in unintelligence or vulgarity. This comparison of racial temperaments helps us to understand ourselves. We may continue the method at our leisure. What would Socrates have thought of Mr. Pickwick, or the Vicar of Wakefield, or David Copperfield, or Arthur Pendennis? For that matter, would he have felt admiration or pity for Colonel Newcome?

III

I hardly need confess that this is not an adequate account of English literature. Let me hasten to say that I know the reader is resenting this somewhat cavalier handling of the noble writers he loves. He probably is wondering how I can expect to increase his love of literature by such unsympathetic remarks. But just now I am not concerned about our love of literature; I take it for granted, and use it as an instrument to prod us with. If we love Shakspere and Milton and Scott and Dickens and Thackeray, and yet do not know what qualities their books hold out for our admiration, then—let me say it as delicately as possible—our admiration is not discriminating; and if we neither have discrimination nor are disturbed by our lack of it, then perhaps that wise man could not list intelligence among our virtues. Certainly it would be but a silly account of English literature to say only that it set little store by the things of the mind. I am aware that for the sake of my argument I have exaggerated, by insisting upon only one aspect of English literature. But our history betrays a peculiar warfare between character and intellect, such as to the Greek, for example, would have been incomprehensible. The great Englishman, like the most famous Greeks, had intelligence as well as character, and was at ease with them both. But whereas the notable Greek seems typical of his race, the notable Englishman usually seems an exception to his own people, and is often best appreciated in other lands. What is more singular—in spite of the happy combination in himself of character and intelligence, he often fails to recognize the value of that combination in his neighbors. When Shakspere portrayed such amateurish statesmen as the Duke in Measure for Measure, Burleigh was guiding Elizabeth’s empire, and Francis Bacon was soon to be King James’s counsellor. It was the young Milton who pictured the life of reason in L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, the most spiritual fruit of philosophy in Comus; and when he wrote his epic he was probably England’s most notable example of that intellectual inquiry and independence which in his great poem he discouraged. There remain several well-known figures in our literary history who have both possessed and believed in intelligence—Byron and Shelley in what seems our own day, Edmund Spenser before Shakspere’s time. England has more or less neglected all three, but they must in fairness be counted to her credit. Some excuse might be offered for the neglect of Byron and Shelley by a nation that likes the proprieties; but the gentle Spenser, the noblest philosopher and most chivalrous gentleman in our literature, seems to be unread only because he demands a mind as well as a heart used to high things.

This will be sufficient qualification of any disparagement of English literature; no people and no literature can be great that are not intelligent, and England has produced not only statesmen and scientists of the first order, but also poets in whom the soul was fitly mated with a lofty intellect. But I am asking you to reconsider your reading in history and fiction, to reflect whether our race has usually thought highly of the intelligence by which it has been great; I suggest these non-intellectual aspects of our literature as commentary upon my question—and all this with the hope of pressing upon you the question as to what you think of intelligence.

Those of us who frankly prefer character to intelligence are therefore not without precedent. If we look beneath the history of the English people, beneath the ideas expressed in our literature, we find in the temper of our remotest ancestors a certain bias which still prescribes our ethics and still prejudices us against the mind. The beginnings of our conscience can be geographically located. It began in the German forests, and it gave its allegiance not to the intellect but to the will. Whether or not the severity of life in a hard climate raised the value of that persistence by which alone life could be preserved, the Germans as Tacitus knew them, and the Saxons as they landed in England, held as their chief virtue that will-power which makes character. For craft or strategy they had no use; they were already a bulldog race; they liked fighting, and they liked best to settle the matter hand to hand. The admiration for brute force which naturally accompanied this ideal of self-reliance, drew with it as naturally a certain moral sanction. A man was as good as his word, and he was ready to back up his word with a blow. No German, Tacitus says, would enter into a treaty of public or private business without his sword in his hand. When this emphasis upon the will became a social emphasis, it gave the direction to ethical feeling. Honor lay in a man’s integrity, in his willingness and ability to keep his word; therefore the man became more important than his word or deed. Words and deeds were then easily interpreted, not in terms of absolute good and evil, but in terms of the man behind them. The deeds of a bad man were bad; the deeds of a good man were good. Fielding wrote Tom Jones to show that a good man sometimes does a bad action, consciously or unconsciously, and a bad man sometimes does good, intentionally or unintentionally. From the fact that Tom Jones is still popularly supposed to be as wicked as it is coarse, we may judge that Fielding did not convert all his readers. Some progress certainly has been made; we do not insist that the more saintly of two surgeons shall operate on us for appendicitis. But as a race we seem as far as possible from realising that an action can intelligently be called good only if it contributes to a good end; that it is the moral obligation of an intelligent creature to find out as far as possible whether a given action leads to a good or a bad end; and that any system of ethics that excuses him from that obligation is vicious. If I give you poison, meaning to give you wholesome food, I have—to say the least—not done a good act; and unless I intend to throw overboard all pretence to intelligence, I must feel some responsibility for that trifling neglect to find out whether what I gave you was food or poison.

Obvious as the matter is in this academic illustration, it ought to have been still more obvious in Matthew Arnold’s famous plea for culture. The purpose of culture, he said, is “to make reason and the will of God prevail.” This formula he quoted from an Englishman. Differently stated, the purpose of culture, he said, is “to make an intelligent being yet more intelligent.” This formula he borrowed from a Frenchman. The basis culture must have in character, the English resolution to make reason and the will of God prevail, Arnold took for granted; no man ever set a higher price on character—so far as character by itself will go. But he spent his life trying to sow a little suspicion that before we can make the will of God prevail we must find out what is the will of God.

I doubt if Arnold taught us much. He merely embarrassed us temporarily. Our race has often been so embarrassed when it has turned a sudden corner and come upon intelligence. Charles Kingsley himself, who would rather be good than clever,—and had his wish,—was temporarily embarrassed when in the consciousness of his own upright character he publicly called Newman a liar. Newman happened to be intelligent as well as good, and Kingsley’s discomfiture is well known. But we discovered long ago how to evade the sudden embarrassments of intelligence. “Toll for the brave,” sings the poet for those who went down in the Royal George. They were brave. But he might have sung, “Toll for the stupid.” In order to clean the hull, brave Kempenfelt and his eight hundred heroes took the serious risk of laying the vessel well over on its side, while most of the crew were below. Having made the error, they all died bravely; and our memory passes easily over the lack of a virtue we never did think much of, and dwells on the English virtues of courage and discipline. So we forget the shocking blunder of the charge of the Light Brigade, and proudly sing the heroism of the victims. Lest we flatter ourselves that this trick of defence has departed with our fathers—this reading of stupidity in terms of the tragic courage that endures its results—let us reflect that recently, after full warning, we drove a ship at top speed through a field of icebergs. When we were thrilled to read how superbly those hundreds died, in the great English way, a man pointed out that they did indeed die in the English way, and that our pride was therefore ill-timed; that all that bravery was wasted; that the tragedy was in the shipwreck of intelligence. That discouraging person was an Irishman.

IV

I have spoken of our social inheritance as though it were entirely English. Once more let me qualify my terms. Even those ancestors of ours who never left Great Britain were heirs of many civilizations—Roman, French, Italian, Greek. With each world-tide some love of pure intelligence was washed up on English shores, and enriched the soil, and here and there the old stock marvelled at its own progeny. But to America, much as we may sentimentally deplore it, England seems destined to be less and less the source of culture, of religion and learning. Our land assimilates all races; with every ship in the harbor our old English ways of thought must crowd a little closer to make room for a new tradition. If some of us do not greatly err, these newcomers are chiefly driving to the wall our inherited criticism of the intellect. As surely as the severe northern climate taught our forefathers the value of the will, the social conditions from which these new citizens have escaped have taught them the power of the mind. They differ from each other, but against the Anglo-Saxon they are confederated in a Greek love of knowledge, in a Greek assurance that sin and misery are the fruit of ignorance, and that to know is to achieve virtue. They join forces at once with that earlier arrival from Greece, the scientific spirit, which like all the immigrants has done our hard work and put up with our contempt. Between this rising host that follow intelligence, and the old camp that put their trust in a stout heart, a firm will, and a strong hand, the fight is on. Our college men will be in the thick of it. If they do not take sides, they will at least be battered in the scuffle. At this moment they are readily divided into those who wish to be men—whatever that means—and those who wish to be intelligent men, and those who, unconscious of blasphemy or humor, prefer not to be intelligent, but to do the will of God.

When we consider the nature of the problems to be solved in our day, it seems—to many of us, at least—that these un-English arrivals are correct, that intelligence is the virtue we particularly need. Courage and steadfastness we cannot do without, so long as two men dwell on the earth; but it is time to discriminate in our praise of these virtues. If you want to get out of prison, what you need is the key to the lock. If you cannot get that, have courage and steadfastness. Perhaps the modern world has got into a kind of prison, and what is needed is the key to the lock. If none of the old virtues exactly fits, why should it seem ignoble to admit it? England for centuries has got on better by sheer character than some other nations by sheer intelligence, but there is after all a relation between the kind of problem and the means we should select to solve it. Not all problems are solved by willpower. When England overthrew Bonaparte, it was not his intelligence she overthrew; the contest involved other things besides intelligence, and she wore him out in the matter of physical endurance. The enemy that comes to her as a visible host or armada she can still close with and throttle; but when the foe arrives as an arrow that flieth by night, what avail the old sinews, the old stoutness of heart! We Americans face the same problems, and are too much inclined to oppose to them similar obsolete armor. We make a moral issue of an economic or social question, because it seems ignoble to admit it is simply a question for intelligence. Like the medicine-man, we use oratory and invoke our hereditary divinities, when the patient needs only a little quiet, or permission to get out of bed. We applaud those leaders who warm to their work—who, when they cannot open a door, threaten to kick it in. In the philosopher’s words, we curse the obstacles of life as though they were devils. But they are not devils. They are obstacles.

V

Perhaps my question as to what you think of intelligence has been pushed far enough. But I cannot leave the subject without a confession of faith.

None of the reasons here suggested will quite explain the true worship of intelligence, whether we worship it as the scientific spirit, or as scholarship, or as any other reliance upon the mind. We really seek intelligence not for the answers it may suggest to the problems of life, but because we believe it is life,—not for aid in making the will of God prevail, but because we believe it is the will of God. We love it, as we love virtue, for its own sake, and we believe it is only virtue’s other and more precise name. We believe that the virtues wait upon intelligence—literally wait, in the history of the race. Whatever is elemental in man—love, hunger, fear—has obeyed from the beginning the discipline of intelligence. We are told that to kill one’s aging parents was once a demonstration of solicitude; about the same time, men hungered for raw meat and feared the sun’s eclipse. Filial love, hunger, and fear are still motives to conduct, but intelligence has directed them to other ends. If we no longer hang the thief or flog the school-boy, it is not that we think less harshly of theft or laziness, but that intelligence has found a better persuasion to honesty and enterprise.

We believe that even in religion, in the most intimate room of the spirit, intelligence long ago proved itself the master-virtue. Its inward office from the beginning was to decrease fear and increase opportunity; its outward effect was to rob the altar of its sacrifice and the priest of his mysteries. Little wonder that from the beginning the disinterestedness of the accredited custodians of all temples has been tested by the kind of welcome they gave to intelligence. How many hecatombs were offered on more shores than that of Aulis, by seamen waiting for a favorable wind, before intelligence found out a boat that could tack! The altar was deserted, the religion revised—fear of the uncontrollable changing into delight in the knowledge that is power. We contemplate with satisfaction the law by which in our long history one religion has driven out another, as one hypothesis supplants another in astronomy or mathematics. The faith that needs the fewest altars, the hypothesis that leaves least unexplained, survives; and the intelligence that changes most fears into opportunity is most divine.

We believe this beneficent operation of intelligence was swerving not one degree from its ancient course when under the name of the scientific spirit it once more laid its influence upon religion. If the shock here seemed too violent, if the purpose of intelligence here seemed to be not revision but contradiction, it was only because religion was invited to digest an unusually large amount of intelligence all at once. Moreover, it is not certain that devout people were more shocked by Darwinism than the pious mariners were by the first boat that could tack. Perhaps the sacrifices were not abandoned all at once.

But the lover of intelligence must be patient with those who cannot readily share his passion. Some pangs the mind will inflict upon the heart. It is a mistake to think that men are united by elemental affections. Our affections divide us. We strike roots in immediate time and space, and fall in love with our locality, the customs and the language in which we were brought up. Intelligence unites us with mankind, by leading us in sympathy to other times, other places, other customs; but first the prejudiced roots of affection must be pulled up. These are the old pangs of intelligence, which still comes to set a man at variance against his father, saying, “He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me.”

Yet, if intelligence begins in a pang, it proceeds to a vision. Through measureless time its office has been to make of life an opportunity, to make goodness articulate, to make virtue a fact. In history at least, if not yet in the individual, Plato’s faith has come true, that sin is but ignorance, and knowledge and virtue are one. But all that intelligence has accomplished dwindles in comparison with the vision it suggests and warrants. Beholding this long liberation of the human spirit, we foresee, in every new light of the mind, one unifying mind, wherein the human race shall know its destiny and proceed to it with satisfaction, as an idea moves to its proper conclusion; we conceive of intelligence at last as the infinite order, wherein man, when he enters it, shall find himself.

Meanwhile he continues to find his virtues by successive insights into his needs. Let us cultivate insight.

THE SUPERSTITION OF SCHOOL

G. K. Chesterton

1923

It is an error to suppose that advancing years bring retrogressing opinions. In other words, it is not true that men growing old must be growing reactionary. Some of the difficulties of recent times have been due to the obstinate optimism of the old revolutionary. Magnificent old men like [Russian revolutionary Peter] Kropotkin and [poet Walt] Whitman and [English artist and writer] William Morris went to their graves expecting Utopia if they did not expect Heaven. But the falsehood, like so many falsehoods, is a false version of a half-truth. The truth, or half-truth, is not that men must learn by experience to be reactionaries; but that they must learn by experience to expect reactions. And when I say reactions I mean reactions; I must apologize, in the world of current culture, for using the word in its correct sense.

If a boy fires off a gun, whether at a fox, a landlord or a reigning sovereign, he will be rebuked according to the relative value of these objects. But if he fires off a gun for the first time it is very likely that he will not expect the recoil, or know what a heavy knock it can give him. He may go blazing away through life at these and similar objects in the landscape; but he will be less and less surprised by the recoil; that is, by the reaction. He may even dissuade his little sister of six from firing off one of the heavy rifles designed for the destruction of elephants; and will thus have the appearance of being himself a reactionary. Very much the same principle applies to firing off the big guns of revolution. It is not a man’s ideals that change; it is not his Utopia that is altered; the cynic who says, “You will forget all that moonshine of idealism when you are older,” says the exact opposite of the truth. The doubts that come with age are not about the ideal, but about the real. And one of the things that are undoubtedly real is reaction: that is, the practical probability of some reversal of direction, and of our partially succeeding in doing the opposite of what we mean to do. What experience does teach us is this: that there is something in the make-up and mechanism of mankind, whereby the result of action upon it is often unexpected, and almost always more complicated than we expect.

These are the snags of sociology; and one of them is concerned with Education. If you ask me whether I think the populace, especially the poor, should be recognized as citizens who can rule the state, I answer in a voice of thunder, “Yes.” If you ask me whether I think they ought to have education, in the sense of a wide culture and familiarity with the classics of history, I again answer, “Yes.” But there is, in the achievement of this purpose, a sort of snag or recoil that can only be discovered by experience and does not appear in print at all. It is not allowed for on paper, even so much as is the recoil of a gun. Yet it is at this moment an exceedingly practical part of practical politics; and, while it has been a political problem for a very long time past, it is a little more marked (if I may stain these serene and impartial pages with so political a suggestion) under recent conditions that have brought so many highly respectable Socialists and widely respected Trade Union officials to the front.

The snag in it is this: that the self-educated think far too much of education. I might add that the half-educated always think everything of education. That is not a fact that appears on the surface of the social plan or ideal; it is the sort of thing that can only be discovered by experience. When I said that I wanted the popular feeling to find political expression, I meant the actual and autochthonous popular feeling as it can be found in third-class carriages and bean-feasts and bank-holiday crowds; and especially, of course (for the earnest social seeker after truth), in public-houses. I thought, and I still think, that these people are right on a vast number of things on which the fashionable leaders are wrong. The snag is that when one of these people begins to “improve himself” it is exactly at that moment that I begin to doubt whether it is an improvement. He seems to me to collect with remarkable rapidity a number of superstitions, of which the most blind and benighted is what may be called the Superstition of School. He regards School, not as a normal social institution to be fitted in to other social institutions, like Home and Church and State; but as some sort of entirely supernormal and miraculous moral factory, in which perfect men and women are made by magic. To this idolatry of School he is ready to sacrifice Home and History and Humanity, with all its instincts and possibilities, at a moment’s notice. To this idol he will make any sacrifice, especially human sacrifice. And at the back of the mind, especially of the best men of this sort, there is almost always one of two variants of the same concentrated conception: either “If I had not been to School I should not be the great man I am now,” or else “If I had been to school I should be even greater than I am.” Let none say that I am scoffing at uneducated people; it is not their uneducation but their education that I scoff at. Let none mistake this for a sneer at the half-educated; what I dislike is the educated half. But I dislike it, not because I dislike education, but because, given the modern philosophy or absence of philosophy, education is turned against itself, destroying that very sense of variety and proportion which it is the object of education to give.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education; no man who sacrifices everything to education is even educated. I need not mention here the many recent examples of this monomania, rapidly turning into mad persecution, such as the ludicrous persecution of the families who live on barges. What is wrong is a neglect of principle; and the principle is that without a gentle contempt for education, no gentleman’s education is complete.

I use the casual phrase casually; for I do not concern myself with the gentleman but with the citizen. Nevertheless, there is this historic half-truth in the case for aristocracy; that it is sometimes a little easier for the aristocrat, at his best, to have this last touch of culture which is a superiority to culture. Nevertheless, the truth of which I speak has nothing to do with any special culture of any special class. It has belonged to any number of peasants, especially when they were poets; it is this which gives a sort of natural distinction to Robert Burns and the peasant poets of Scotland. The power which produces it more effectively than any blood or breed is religion; for religion may be defined as that which puts the first things first. Robert Burns was justifiably impatient with the religion he inherited from Scottish Calvinism; but he owed something to his inheritance. His instinctive consideration of men as men came from an ancestry which still cared more for religion than education. The moment men begin to care more for education than for religion they begin to care more for ambition than for education. It is no longer a world in which the souls of all are equal before heaven, but a world in which the mind of each is bent on achieving unequal advantage over the other. There begins to be a mere vanity in being educated whether it be self-educated or merely state-educated. Education ought to be a searchlight given to a man to explore everything, but very specially the things most distant from himself. Education tends to be a spotlight; which is centered entirely on himself. Some improvement may be made by turning equally vivid and perhaps vulgar spotlights upon a large number of other people as well. But the only final cure is to turn off the limelight and let him realize the stars.

MASTER OF MANY TRADES

Robert Twigger

2013

I travelled with Bedouin in the Western Desert of Egypt. When we got a puncture, they used tape and an old inner tube to suck air from three tyres to inflate a fourth. It was the cook who suggested the idea; maybe he was used to making food designed for a few go further. Far from expressing shame at having no pump, they told me that carrying too many tools is the sign of a weak man; it makes him lazy. The real master has no tools at all, only a limitless capacity to improvise with what is to hand. The more fields of knowledge you cover, the greater your resources for improvisation.

We hear the descriptive words psychopath and sociopath all the time, but here’s a new one: monopath. It means a person with a narrow mind, a one-track brain, a bore, a super-specialist, an expert with no other interests—in other words, the role-model of choice in the Western world. You think I jest? In June, I was invited on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 to say a few words on the river Nile, because I had a new book about it. The producer called me ‘Dr Twigger’ several times. I was flattered, but I also felt a sense of panic. I have never sought or held a PhD. After the third ‘Dr’, I gently put the producer right. And of course, it was fine—he didn’t especially want me to be a doctor. The culture did. My Nile book was necessarily the work of a generalist. But the radio needs credible guests. It needs an expert—otherwise why would anyone listen?

The monopathic model derives some of its credibility from its success in business. In the late 18th century, Adam Smith (himself an early polymath who wrote not only on economics but also philosophy, astronomy, literature and law) noted that the division of labour was the engine of capitalism. His famous example was the way in which pin-making could be broken down into its component parts, greatly increasing the overall efficiency of the production process. But Smith also observed that ‘mental mutilation’ followed the too-strict division of labour. Or as Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: ‘Nothing tends to materialise man, and to deprive his work of the faintest trace of mind, more than extreme division of labour.’

Ever since the beginning of the industrial era, we have known both the benefits and the drawbacks of dividing jobs into ever smaller and more tedious ones. Riches must be balanced against boredom and misery. But as long as a boring job retains an element of physicality, one can find a rhythm, entering a ‘flow’ state wherein time passes easily and the hard labour is followed by a sense of accomplishment. In Jack Kerouac’s novel Big Sur (1962) there is a marvellous description of Neal Cassady working like a demon, changing tyres in a tyre shop and finding himself uplifted rather than diminished by the work. Industrialism tends toward monopathy because of the growth of divided labour, but it is only when the physical element is removed that the real problems begin. When the body remains still and the mind is forced to do something repetitive, the human inside us rebels.

The average job now is done by someone who is stationary in front of some kind of screen. Someone who has just one overriding interest is tunnel-visioned, a bore, but also a specialist, an expert. Welcome to the monopathic world, a place where only the single-minded can thrive. Of course, the rest of us are very adept at pretending to be specialists. We doctor our CVs to make it look as if all we ever wanted to do was sell mobile homes or Nespresso machines. It’s common sense, isn’t it, to try to create the impression that we are entirely focused on the job we want? And wasn’t it ever thus?

In fact, it wasn’t. Classically, a polymath was someone who ‘had learnt much’, conquering many different subject areas. As the 15th-century polymath Leon Battista Alberti—an architect, painter, horseman, archer and inventor—wrote: ‘a man can do all things if he will’. During the Renaissance, polymathy became part of the idea of the ‘perfected man’, the manifold master of intellectual, artistic and physical pursuits. Leonardo da Vinci was said to be as proud of his ability to bend iron bars with his hands as he was of the Mona Lisa.

Polymaths such as Da Vinci, Goethe and Benjamin Franklin were such high achievers that we might feel a bit reluctant to use the word ‘polymath’ to describe our own humble attempts to become multi-talented. We can’t all be geniuses. But we do all still indulge in polymathic activity; it’s part of what makes us human.

So, say that we all have at least the potential to become polymaths. Once we have a word, we can see the world more clearly. And that’s when we notice a huge cognitive dissonance at the centre of Western culture: a huge confusion about how new ideas, new discoveries, and new art actually come about.

Science, for example, likes to project itself as clean, logical, rational and unemotional. In fact, it’s pretty haphazard, driven by funding and ego, reliant on inspired intuition by its top-flight practitioners. Above all it is polymathic. New ideas frequently come from the cross-fertilisation of two separate fields. Francis Crick, who intuited the structure of DNA, was originally a physicist; he claimed this background gave him the confidence to solve problems that biologists thought were insoluble. Richard Feynman came up with his Nobel Prize-winning ideas about quantum electrodynamics by reflecting on a peculiar hobby of his—spinning a plate on his finger (he also played the bongos and was an expert safe-cracker). Percy Spencer, a radar expert, noticed that the radiation produced by microwaves melted a chocolate bar in his pocket and developed microwave ovens. And Hiram Maxim, the inventor of the modern machine gun, was inspired by a self-cocking mousetrap he had made in his teens.

Despite all this, there remains the melancholy joke about the scientist who outlines a whole new area of study only to dismiss it out of hand because it trespasses across too many field boundaries and would never get funding. Somehow, this is just as believable as any number of amazing breakthroughs inspired by the cross-fertilisation of disciplines.

One could tell similar stories about breakthroughs in art—cubism crossed the simplicity of African carving with a growing non-representational trend in European painting. Jean-Michel Basquiat and Banksy took street graffiti and made it acceptable to galleries. In business, cross-fertilisation is the source of all kinds of innovations: fibres inspired by spider webs have become a source of bulletproof fabric; practically every mobile phone also seems to be a computer, a camera and a GPS tracker. To come up with such ideas, you need to know things outside your field. What’s more, the further afield your knowledge extends, the greater potential you have for innovation.

Invention fights specialisation at every turn. Human nature and human progress are polymathic at root. And life itself is various—you need many skills to be able to live it. In traditional cultures, everyone can do a little of everything. Though one man might be the best hunter or archer or trapper, he doesn’t do only that.

The benefits of polymathic endeavour in innovation are not so hard to see. What is less obvious is how we ever allowed ourselves to lose sight of them. The problem, I believe, is some mistaken assumptions about learning. We come to believe that we can only learn when we are young, and that only ‘naturals’ can acquire certain skills. We imagine that we have a limited budget for learning, and that different skills absorb all the effort we plough into them, without giving us anything to spend on other pursuits.

Our hunch that it’s easier to learn when you’re young isn’t completely wrong, or at least it has a real basis in neurology. However, the pessimistic assumption that learning somehow ‘stops’ when you leave school or university or hit thirty is at odds with the evidence. It appears that a great deal depends on the nucleus basalis, located in the basal forebrain. Among other things, this bit of the brain produces significant amounts of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that regulates the rate at which new connections are made between brain cells. This in turn dictates how readily we form memories of various kinds, and how strongly we retain them. When the nucleus basalisis ‘switched on’, acetylcholine flows and new connections occur. When it is switched off, we make far fewer new connections.

Between birth and the age of ten or eleven, the nucleus basalisis is permanently ‘switched on’. It contains an abundance of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, and this means new connections are being made all the time. Typically this means that a child will be learning almost all the time—if they see or hear something once they remember it. But as we progress towards the later teenage years the brain becomes more selective. From research into the way stroke victims recover lost skills it has been observed that the nucleus basalis only switches on when one of three conditions occur: a novel situation, a shock, or intense focus, maintained through repetition or continuous application.

I know from my own experience of studying martial arts in Japan that intense study brings rewards that are impossible to achieve by casual application. For a year I studied an hour a day three days a week and made minimal progress. For a further year I switched to an intensive course of five hours a day five days a week. The gains were dramatic and permanent, resulting in a black belt and an instructor certificate. Deep down I was pessimistic that I could actually learn a martial art. I thought you were either a ‘natural’ or nothing. Then I saw natural athletes fall behind when they didn’t practice enough. This, shamefully, was a great morale booster.

The fact that I succeeded where others were failing also gave me an important key to the secret of learning. There was nothing special about me, but I worked at it and I got it. One reason many people shy away from polymathic activity is that they think they can’t learn new skills. I believe we all can—and at any age too—but only if we keep learning. ‘Use it or lose it’ is the watchword of brain plasticity.

People as old as 90 who actively acquire new interests that involve learning retain their ability to learn. But if we stop taxing the nucleus basalis, it begins to dry up. In some older people it has been shown to contain no acetylcholine—they have been ‘switched off’ for so long the organ no longer functions. In extreme cases this is considered to be one factor in Alzheimers and other forms of dementia—treated, effectively at first, by artificially raising acetylcholine levels. But simply attempting new things seems to offer health benefits to people who aren’t suffering from Alzheimers. After only short periods of trying, the ability to make new connections develops. And it isn’t just about doing puzzles and crosswords; you really have to try and learn something new.

Monopathy, or over-specialisation, eventually retreats into defending what one has learnt rather than making new connections. The initial spurt of learning gives out, and the expert is left, like an animal, merely defending his territory. One sees this in the academic arena, where ancient professors vie with each other to expel intruders from their hard-won patches. Just look at the bitter arguments over how far the sciences should be allowed to encroach on the humanities. But the polymath, whatever his or her ‘level’ or societal status, is not constrained to defend their own turf. The polymath’s identity and value comes from multiple mastery.

Besides, it may be that the humanities have less to worry about than it seems. An intriguing study funded by the Dana foundation and summarised by Dr Michael Gazzaniga of the University of California, Santa Barbara, suggests that studying the performing arts—dance, music and acting—actually improves one’s ability to learn anything else. Collating several studies, the researchers found that performing arts generated much higher levels of motivation than other subjects. These enhanced levels of motivation made students aware of their own ability to focus and concentrate on improvement. Later, even if they gave up the arts, they could apply their new-found talent for concentration to learning anything new.

I find this very suggestive. The old Renaissance idea of mastering physical as well as intellectual skills appears to have real grounding in improving our general ability to learn new things. It is having the confidence that one can learn something new that opens the gates to polymathic activity.

There is, I think, a case to be made for a new area of study to counter the monopathic drift of the modern world. Call it polymathics. Any such field would have to include physical, artistic and scientific elements to be truly rounded. It isn’t just that mastering physical skills aids general learning. The fact is, if we exclude the physicality of existence and reduce everything worth knowing down to book-learning, we miss out on a huge chunk of what makes us human. Remember, Feynman had to be physically competent enough to spin a plate to get his new idea.

Polymathics might focus on rapid methods of learning that allow you to master multiple fields. It might also work to develop transferable learning methods. A large part of it would naturally be concerned with creativity—crossing unrelated things to invent something new. But polymathics would not just be another name for innovation. It would, I believe, help build better judgment in all areas. There is often something rather obvious about people with narrow interests—they are bores, and bores always lack a sense of humour. They just don’t see that it’s absurd to devote your life to a tiny area of study and have no other outside interests. I suspect that the converse is true: by being more polymathic, you develop a better sense of proportion and balance—which gives you a better sense of humour. And that can’t be a bad thing.

THE SECOND TIME I LEARNED TO READ

Stephen L. Carter

2017

I forgot again.

Every year I promise myself that when National Teacher Appreciation Week rolls around in May, I will write about the teacher who had the greatest influence on my life. And every year I look up and it’s June, and the opportunity once more slipped by me.

Not this year. This year, even if my theme is turned in late, I am going to tell you about Mrs. Judith Dickey, who taught 10th grade English at Ithaca High School back in the days when I was, as they say, still wet behind the ears. But for Mrs. Dickey, I might never have become a serious reader; meaning, I would never have become a serious writer.

You have to take a few seconds to see me as I was in high school: smart but as we would now say geeky, a compulsive joiner if not entirely likable, more fascinated by numbers than by people, with my head deep in books about science—and science fiction. I was many things, a few of them perhaps useful, but I was not a reader. Not really.

Mrs. Dickey taught me to read. Not to read. To read.

I arrived in Ithaca reasonably well educated in every field but literature. Oh, I had read a bit of Shakespeare and Dickens, but only because my 8th and 9th grade English courses required it. Over the years I had gorged myself on comic books (my maternal grandparents owned a candy store and saved copies of our favorites for our summer visits) and science fiction (Bradbury and Asimov and Heinlein, yes, but also a lot of schlock—I am embarrassed to admit that in those days I could quote Tom Swift by the yard). I read voraciously, but my choices were filling my head with junk. My mind was agile but not disciplined; quick but not reflective; I was much better at snappy answers than thoughtful ones.

Mrs. Dickey changed all that. She took me aside one day after class and asked me why I read such junk. (She used the very word.) I replied, a bit stupidly, that I liked what I read and I read what I liked (or something equally unclever.) I grew defensive. I refused to concede that there was anything wrong with my tastes. I was, in short, a fool.

And so she offered me a deal. She would read any three books I gave her if I would read any three books she gave me. Then we would get together after school to talk. I agreed.

Best deal I ever made.

I do not remember what books she gave me, except that they were thick hardcovers. I believe one might have been a Thomas Hardy. It makes no difference. My English teacher was right, and I was wrong. Some books are better than others. And as a teen I had no way of judging for myself.

Without that bet, I would still have read serious literature when I had to, but I’m not sure how much I would have read because I chose to. Mrs. Dickey had taught me that there are things one ought to read. I put away the books of sports records and pulpy sci-fi. By the time I finished high school, I had read all of Shakespeare, the sonnets included.

When I started college, although I began as a physics major, with lots of work in math and computer science—you can’t entirely ungeek the geek—I was drawn increasingly to literature. In those days you could still find a jampacked course on Western Civilization and read the great books. (Dante haunts me still.) I devoured Greek drama, medieval philosophy, Russian absurdist stories, and the novels of Updike and Baldwin. In my spare time I prowled the stacks of the campus library, in search of authors of whom I had never heard. I was an addict whose craving could never be satisfied. I was finally in the oasis after a lifetime in the desert.

And it matters.

Reading serious literature, as I have argued in this space before, promotes deep and reflective thought. Studies tell us that those who read seriously are more empathetic—in particular, that they are more welcoming of opposing views. This makes sense. Serious literature teaches us the complexity of our fellow human beings. And a taste for complexity is exactly what we need, especially in these strained times.

I’m hardly alone. Most of us can remember a favorite teacher. But what makes a good teacher good? We know that quality is influenced far more by years on the job than by the teacher’s undergraduate training, test scores or professional development. In other words, most of the inputs we can measure have little effect on output. But to me the most interesting recent work is the 2012 study by C. Kirabo Jackson of Northwestern University, whose research on noncognitive skills indicates that having a good English teacher is particularly important. Jackson’s model allows us to identify good teachers not simply by studying test scores but also by studying other aspects of the students’ subsequent lives. In particular, he found that having the right 9th-grade algebra or English teacher influences the likelihood of finishing high school and of taking the SAT (in turn a predictor of college attendance), and also may be related to earning higher wages and avoiding arrest.

Now, Mrs. Dickey was my English teacher in 10th grade, not 9th, and my algebra teacher (in 8th grade) no doubt affected me too; moreover, I doubt that I was in any case headed for prison or underemployment. I don’t suppose we yet have the tools to measure how thoughtful and patient and reflective a student is later in life. I do know that without that bet with Mrs. Dickey, I would not have become either the reader or writer that I am. The habit of mind I am describing is no easy thing to measure, but my life is better for having it.

So even though I once more missed National Teacher Appreciation Week, and am therefore tardy in handing in my essay, I want to thank Judith Dickey publicly for the great gift she gave me. Since you made it to the end of this column, chances are you have a teacher to thank too.

ON THE READING OF OLD BOOKS

C. S. Lewis

1944

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about “isms” and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.

This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. Wherever you find a little study circle of Christian laity you can be almost certain that they are studying not St. Luke or St. Paul or St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Hooker or Butler, but M. Berdyaev or M. Maritain or M. Niebuhr or Miss Sayers or even myself.

Now this seems to me topsy-turvy. Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light. Often it cannot be fully understood without the knowledge of a good many other modern books. If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said. Remarks which seem to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you will not see why—the reason, of course, being that the earlier stages of the conversation have given them a special point. In the same way sentences in a modern book which look quite ordinary may be directed at some other book; in this way you may be led to accept what you would have indignantly rejected if you knew its real significance. The only safety is to have a standard of plain, central Christianity (“mere Christianity” as Baxter called it) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective. Such a standard can be acquired only from the old books. It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

I myself was first led into reading the Christian classics, almost accidentally, as a result of my English studies. Some, such as Hooker, Herbert, Traherne, Taylor and Bunyan, I read because they are themselves great English writers; others, such as Boethius, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Dante, because they were “influences.” George Macdonald I had found for myself at the age of sixteen and never wavered in my allegiance, though I tried for a long time to ignore his Christianity. They are, you will note, a mixed bag, representative of many Churches, climates and ages. And that brings me to yet another reason for reading them. The divisions of Christendom are undeniable and are by some of these writers most fiercely expressed. But if any man is tempted to think—as one might be tempted who read only contemporaries—that “Christianity” is a word of so many meanings that it means nothing at all, he can learn beyond all doubt, by stepping out of his own century, that this is not so. Measured against the ages “mere Christianity” turns out to be no insipid interdenominational transparency, but something positive, self-consistent, and inexhaustible. I know it, indeed, to my cost. In the days when I still hated Christianity, I learned to recognise, like some all too familiar smell, that almost unvarying something which met me, now in Puritan Bunyan, now in Anglican Hooker, now in Thomist Dante. It was there (honeyed and floral) in Francois de Sales; it was there (grave and homely) in Spenser and Walton; it was there (grim but manful) in Pascal and Johnson; there again, with a mild, frightening, Paradisial flavour, in Vaughan and Boehme and Traherne. In the urban sobriety of the eighteenth century one was not safe—Law and Butler were two lions in the path. The supposed “Paganism” of the Elizabethans could not keep it out; it lay in wait where a man might have supposed himself safest, in the very centre of The Faerie Queene and the Arcadia. It was, of course, varied; and yet—after all—so unmistakably the same; recognisable, not to be evaded, the odour which is death to us until we allow it to become life:

“An air that kills

From yon far country blows.”

We are all rightly distressed, and ashamed also, at the divisions of Christendom. But those who have always lived within the Christian fold may be too easily dispirited by them. They are bad, but such people do not know what it looks like from without. Seen from there, what is left intact despite all the divisions, still appears (as it truly is) an immensely formidable unity. I know, for I saw it; and well our enemies know it. That unity any of us can find by going out of his own age. It is not enough, but it is more than you had thought till then. Once you are well soaked in it, if you then venture to speak, you will have an amusing experience. You will be thought a Papist when you are actually reproducing Bunyan, a Pantheist when you are quoting Aquinas, and so forth. For you have now got on to the great level viaduct which crosses the ages and which looks so high from the valleys, so low from the mountains, so narrow compared with the swamps, and so broad compared with the sheep-tracks.

The present book is something of an experiment. The translation is intended for the world at large, not only for theological students. If it succeeds, other translations of other great Christian books will presumably follow. In one sense, of course, it is not the first in the field. Translations of the Theologia Germanica, the Imitation, the Scale of Perfection, and the Revelations of Lady Julian of Norwich, are already on the market, and are very valuable, though some of them are not very scholarly. But it will be noticed that these are all books of devotion rather than of doctrine. Now the layman or amateur needs to be instructed as well as to be exhorted. In this age his need for knowledge is particularly pressing. Nor would I admit any sharp division between the two kinds of book. For my own part I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others. I believe that many who find that “nothing happens” when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.

This is a good translation of a very great book. St. Athanasius has suffered in popular estimation from a certain sentence in the “Athanasian Creed.” I will not labour the point that that work is not exactly a creed and was not by St. Athanasius, for I think it is a very fine piece of writing. The words “Which Faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly” are the offence. They are commonly misunderstood. The operative word is keep; not acquire, or even believe, but keep. The author, in fact, is not talking about unbelievers, but about deserters, not about those who have never heard of Christ, nor even those who have misunderstood and refused to accept Him, but of those who having really understood and really believed, then allow themselves, under the sway of sloth or of fashion or any other invited confusion to be drawn away into sub-Christian modes of thought. They are a warning against the curious modern assumption that all changes of belief, however brought about, are necessarily exempt from blame. But this is not my immediate concern. I mention “the creed (commonly called) of St. Athanasius” only to get out of the reader’s way what may have been a bogey and to put the true Athanasius in its place. His epitaph is Athanasius contra mundum, “Athanasius against the world.” We are proud that our own country has more than once stood against the world. Athanasius did the same. He stood for the Trinitarian doctrine, “whole and undefiled,” when it looked as if all the civilised world was slipping back from Christianity into the religion of Arius—into one of those “sensible” synthetic religions which are so strongly recommended today and which, then as now, included among their devotees many highly cultivated clergymen. It is his glory that he did not move with the times; it is his reward that he now remains when those times, as all times do, have moved away.

When I first opened his De Incarnatione I soon discovered by a very simple test that I was reading a masterpiece. I knew very little Christian Greek except that of the New Testament and I had expected difficulties. To my astonishment I found it almost as easy as Xenophon; and only a master mind could, in the fourth century, have written so deeply on such a subject with such classical simplicity. Every page I read confirmed this impression. His approach to the Miracles is badly needed today, for it is the final answer to those who object to them as “arbitrary and meaningless violations of the laws of Nature.” They are here shown to be rather the re-telling in capital letters of the same message which Nature writes in her crabbed cursive hand; the very operations one would expect of Him who was so full of life that when He wished to die He had to “borrow death from others.” The whole book, indeed, is a picture of the Tree of Life—a sappy and golden book, full of buoyancy and confidence. We cannot, I admit, appropriate all its confidence today. We cannot point to the high virtue of Christian living and the gay, almost mocking courage of Christian martyrdom, as a proof of our doctrines with quite that assurance which Athanasius takes as a matter of course. But whoever may be to blame for that it is not Athanasius.

The translator knows so much more Christian Greek than I that it would be out of place for me to praise her version. But it seems to me to be in the right tradition of English translation. I do not think the reader will find here any of that sawdusty quality which is so common in modern renderings from the ancient languages. That is as much as the English reader will notice; those who compare the version with the original will be able to estimate how much wit and talent is presupposed in such a choice, for example, as “these wiseacres” on the very first page.

THE INNER RING

C. S. LEWIS

1944

May I read you a few lines from Tolstoy’s War and Peace?

When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening to an old general, wearing his decorations, who was reporting something to Prince Andrey, with an expression of soldierly servility on his purple face. “Alright. Please wait!” he said to the general, speaking in Russian with the French accent which he used when he spoke with contempt. The moment he noticed Boris he stopped listening to the general who trotted imploringly after him and begged to be heard, while Prince Andrey turned to Boris with a cheerful smile and a nod of the head. Boris now clearly understood—what he had already guessed—that side by side with the system of discipline and subordination which were laid down in the Army Regulations, there existed a different and more real system—the system which compelled a tightly laced general with a purple face to wait respectfully for his turn while a mere captain like Prince Andrey chatted with a mere second lieutenant like Boris. Boris decided at once that he would be guided not by the official system but by this other unwritten system.

When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I must conclude, however unlikely the conclusion seems, that you have a taste for middle-aged moralising. I shall do my best to gratify it. I shall in fact, give you advice about the world in which you are going to live. I do not mean by this that I am going to talk on what are called current affairs. You probably know quite as much about them as I do. I am not going to tell you—except in a form so general that you will hardly recognise it—what part you ought to play in post-war reconstruction.

It is not, in fact, very likely that any of you will be able, in the next ten years, to make any direct contribution to the peace or prosperity of Europe. You will be busy finding jobs, getting married, acquiring facts. I am going to do something more old-fashioned than you perhaps expected. I am going to give advice. I am going to issue warnings. Advice and warnings about things which are so perennial that no one calls them “current affairs.”

And of course everyone knows what a middle-aged moralist of my type warns his juniors against. He warns them against the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. But one of this trio will be enough to deal with today. The Devil, I shall leave strictly alone. The association between him and me in the public mind has already gone quite as deep as I wish: in some quarters it has already reached the level of confusion, if not of identification. I begin to realise the truth of the old proverb that he who sups with that formidable host needs a long spoon. As for the Flesh, you must be very abnormal young people if you do not know quite as much about it as I do. But on the World I think I have something to say.

In the passage I have just read from Tolstoy, the young second lieutenant Boris Dubretskoi discovers that there exist in the army two different systems or hierarchies. The one is printed in some little red book and anyone can easily read it up. It also remains constant. A general is always superior to a colonel, and a colonel to a captain. The other is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it.

There are what correspond to passwords, but they are too spontaneous and informal. A particular slang, the use of particular nicknames, an allusive manner of conversation, are the marks. But it is not so constant. It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the borderline. And if you come back to the same Divisional Headquarters, or Brigade Headquarters, or the same regiment or even the same company, after six weeks’ absence, you may find this secondary hierarchy quite altered.

There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside. It has no fixed name. The only certain rule is that the insiders and outsiders call it by different names. From inside it may be designated, in simple cases, by mere enumeration: it may be called “You and Tony and me.” When it is very secure and comparatively stable in membership it calls itself “we.” When it has to be expanded to meet a particular emergency it calls itself “all the sensible people at this place.” From outside, if you have dispaired of getting into it, you call it “That gang” or “they” or “So-and-so and his set” or “The Caucus” or “The Inner Ring.” If you are a candidate for admission you probably don’t call it anything. To discuss it with the other outsiders would make you feel outside yourself. And to mention talking to the man who is inside, and who may help you if this present conversation goes well, would be madness.

Badly as I may have described it, I hope you will all have recognised the thing I am describing. Not, of course, that you have been in the Russian Army, or perhaps in any army. But you have met the phenomenon of an Inner Ring. You discovered one in your house at school before the end of the first term. And when you had climbed up to somewhere near it by the end of your second year, perhaps you discovered that within the ring there was a Ring yet more inner, which in its turn was the fringe of the great school Ring to which the house Rings were only satellites. It is even possible that the school ring was almost in touch with a Masters’ Ring. You were beginning, in fact, to pierce through the skins of an onion. And here, too, at your University—shall I be wrong in assuming that at this very moment, invisible to me, there are several rings—independent systems or concentric rings—present in this room? And I can assure you that in whatever hospital, inn of court, diocese, school, business, or college you arrive after going down, you will find the Rings—what Tolstoy calls the second or unwritten systems.

All this is rather obvious. I wonder whether you will say the same of my next step, which is this. I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside. This desire, in one of its forms, has indeed had ample justice done to it in literature. I mean, in the form of snobbery. Victorian fiction is full of characters who are hag-ridden by the desire to get inside that particular Ring which is, or was, called Society. But it must be clearly understood that “Society,” in that sense of the word, is merely one of a hundred Rings, and snobbery therefore only one form of the longing to be inside.

People who believe themselves to be free, and indeed are free, from snobbery, and who read satires on snobbery with tranquil superiority, may be devoured by the desire in another form. It may be the very intensity of their desire to enter some quite different Ring which renders them immune from all the allurements of high life. An invitation from a duchess would be very cold comfort to a man smarting under the sense of exclusion from some artistic or communistic côterie. Poor man—it is not large, lighted rooms, or champagne, or even scandals about peers and Cabinet Ministers that he wants: it is the sacred little attic or studio, the heads bent together, the fog of tobacco smoke, and the delicious knowledge that we—we four or five all huddled beside this stove—are the people who know.

Often the desire conceals itself so well that we hardly recognize the pleasures of fruition. Men tell not only their wives but themselves that it is a hardship to stay late at the office or the school on some bit of important extra work which they have been let in for because they and So-and-so and the two others are the only people left in the place who really know how things are run. But it is not quite true. It is a terrible bore, of course, when old Fatty Smithson draws you aside and whispers, “Look here, we’ve got to get you in on this examination somehow” or “Charles and I saw at once that you’ve got to be on this committee.” A terrible bore… ah, but how much more terrible if you were left out! It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons: but to have them free because you don’t matter, that is much worse.

Freud would say, no doubt, that the whole thing is a subterfuge of the sexual impulse. I wonder whether the shoe is not sometimes on the other foot. I wonder whether, in ages of promiscuity, many a virginity has not been lost less in obedience to Venus than in obedience to the lure of the caucus. For of course, when promiscuity is the fashion, the chaste are outsiders. They are ignorant of something that other people know. They are uninitiated. And as for lighter matters, the number of people who first smoked or first got drunk for a similar reason is probably very large.

I must now make a distinction. I am not going to say that the existence of Inner Rings is an Evil. It is certainly unavoidable. There must be confidential discussions: and it is not only a bad thing, it is (in itself) a good thing, that personal friendship should grow up between those who work together. And it is perhaps impossible that the official hierarchy of any organisation should coincide with its actual workings. If the wisest and most energetic people held the highest spots, it might coincide; since they often do not, there must be people in high positions who are really deadweights and people in lower positions who are more important than their rank and seniority would lead you to suppose. It is necessary: and perhaps it is not a necessary evil. But the desire which draws us into Inner Rings is another matter. A thing may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be dangerous. As Byron has said:

Sweet is a legacy, and passing sweet

The unexpected death of some old lady

The painless death of a pious relative at an advanced age is not an evil. But an earnest desire for her death on the part of her heirs is not reckoned a proper feeling, and the law frowns on even the gentlest attempts to expedite her departure. Let Inner Rings be unavoidable and even an innocent feature of life, though certainly not a beautiful one: but what of our longing to enter them, our anguish when we are excluded, and the kind of pleasure we feel when we get in?

I have no right to make assumptions about the degree to which any of you may already be compromised. I must not assume that you have ever first neglected, and finally shaken off, friends whom you really loved and who might have lasted you a lifetime, in order to court the friendship of those who appeared to you more important, more esoteric. I must not ask whether you have derived actual pleasure from the loneliness and humiliation of the outsiders after you, yourself were in: whether you have talked to fellow members of the Ring in the presence of outsiders simply in order that the outsiders might envy; whether the means whereby, in your days of probation, you propitiated the Inner Ring, were always wholly admirable. I will ask only one question—and it is, of course, a rhetorical question which expects no answer. In the whole of your life as you now remember it, has the desire to be on the right side of that invisible line ever prompted you to any act or word on which, in the cold small hours of a wakeful night, you can look back with satisfaction? If so, your case is more fortunate than most.

My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you that this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it—this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment and advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent mainsprings then you may be quite sure of this. Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. That will be the natural thing—the life that will come to you of its own accord. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort. If you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream, you will in fact be an “inner ringer.” I don’t say you’ll be a successful one; that’s as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in—one way or the other you will be that kind of man.

I have already made it fairly clear that I think it better for you not to be that kind of man. But you may have an open mind on the question. I will therefore suggest two reasons for thinking as I do. It would be polite and charitable, and in view of your age reasonable too, to suppose that none of you is yet a scoundrel. On the other hand, by the mere law of averages (I am saying nothing against free will) it is almost certain that at least two or three of you before you die will have become something very like scoundrels. There must be in this room the makings of at least that number of unscrupulous, treacherous, ruthless egotists. The choice is still before you: and I hope you will not take my hard words about your possible future characters as a token of disrespect to your present characters.

And the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”

And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.

That is my first reason. Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things. My second reason is this. The torture allotted to the Danaids in the classical underworld, that of attempting to fill sieves with water, is the symbol not of one vice, but of all vices. It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had. The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this rule. As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.

This is surely very clear when you come to think of it. If you want to be made free of a certain circle for some wholesome reason—if, say, you want to join a musical society because you really like music—then there is a possibility of satisfaction. You may find yourself playing in a quartet and you may enjoy it. But if all you want is to be in the know, your pleasure will be short lived. The circle cannot have from within the charm it had from outside. By the very act of admitting you it has lost its magic.

Once the first novelty is worn off, the members of this circle will be no more interesting than your old friends. Why should they be? You were not looking for virtue or kindness or loyalty or humour or learning or wit or any of the things that can really be enjoyed. You merely wanted to be “in.” And that is a pleasure that cannot last. As soon as your new associates have been staled to you by custom, you will be looking for another Ring. The rainbow’s end will still be ahead of you. The old ring will now be only the drab background for your endeavor to enter the new one.

And you will always find them hard to enter, for a reason you very well know. You yourself, once you are in, want to make it hard for the next entrant, just as those who are already in made it hard for you. Naturally. In any wholesome group of people which holds together for a good purpose, the exclusions are in a sense accidental. Three or four people who are together for the sake of some piece of work exclude others because there is work only for so many or because the others can’t in fact do it. Your little musical group limits its numbers because the rooms they meet in are only so big. But your genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There’d be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident; it is the essence.

The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain.

And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.

We are told in Scripture that those who ask get. That is true, in senses I can’t now explore. But in another sense there is much truth in the schoolboy’s principle “them as asks shan’t have.” To a young person, just entering on adult life, the world seems full of “insides,” full of delightful intimacies and confidentialities, and he desires to enter them. But if he follows that desire he will reach no “inside” that is worth reaching. The true road lies in quite another direction. It is like the house in Alice Through the Looking Glass.

A NICE CUP OF TEA

George Orwell

1946

If you look up ‘tea’ in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points.

This is curious, not only because tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country, as well as in Eire, Australia and New Zealand, but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.

When I look through my own recipe for the perfect cup of tea, I find no fewer than eleven outstanding points. On perhaps two of them there would be pretty general agreement, but at least four others are acutely controversial. Here are my own eleven rules, every one of which I regard as golden:

First of all, one should use Indian or Ceylonese tea. China tea has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays—it is economical, and one can drink it without milk—but there is not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more optimistic after drinking it. Anyone who has used that comforting phrase ‘a nice cup of tea’ invariably means Indian tea.

Secondly, tea should be made in small quantities—that is, in a teapot. Tea out of an urn is always tasteless, while army tea, made in a cauldron, tastes of grease and whitewash. The teapot should be made of china or earthenware. Silver or Britanniaware teapots produce inferior tea and enamel pots are worse; though curiously enough a pewter teapot (a rarity nowadays) is not so bad.

Thirdly, the pot should be warmed beforehand. This is better done by placing it on the hob than by the usual method of swilling it out with hot water.

Fourthly, the tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right. In a time of rationing, this is not an idea that can be realized on every day of the week, but I maintain that one strong cup of tea is better than twenty weak ones. All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes—a fact which is recognized in the extra ration issued to old-age pensioners.

Fifthly, the tea should be put straight into the pot. No strainers, muslin bags or other devices to imprison the tea. In some countries teapots are fitted with little dangling baskets under the spout to catch the stray leaves, which are supposed to be harmful. Actually one can swallow tea-leaves in considerable quantities without ill effect, and if the tea is not loose in the pot it never infuses properly.

Sixthly, one should take the teapot to the kettle and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours. Some people add that one should only use water that has been freshly brought to the boil, but I have never noticed that it makes any difference.

Seventhly, after making the tea, one should stir it, or better, give the pot a good shake, afterwards allowing the leaves to settle.

Eighthly, one should drink out of a good breakfast cup—that is, the cylindrical type of cup, not the flat, shallow type. The breakfast cup holds more, and with the other kind one’s tea is always half cold before one has well started on it.

Ninthly, one should pour the cream off the milk before using it for tea. Milk that is too creamy always gives tea a sickly taste.

Tenthly, one should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject. The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round.

Lastly, tea—unless one is drinking it in the Russian style—should be drunk without sugar. I know very well that I am in a minority here. But still, how can you call yourself a true tea-lover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it? It would be equally reasonable to put in pepper or salt. Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter. If you sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar; you could make a very similar drink by dissolving sugar in plain hot water.

Some people would answer that they don’t like tea in itself, that they only drink it in order to be warmed and stimulated, and they need sugar to take the taste away. To those misguided people I would say: Try drinking tea without sugar for, say, a fortnight and it is very unlikely that you will ever want to ruin your tea by sweetening it again.

These are not the only controversial points to arise in connexion with tea drinking, but they are sufficient to show how subtilized the whole business has become. There is also the mysterious social etiquette surrounding the teapot (why is it considered vulgar to drink out of your saucer, for instance?) and much might be written about the subsidiary uses of tealeaves, such as telling fortunes, predicting the arrival of visitors, feeding rabbits, healing burns and sweeping the carpet. It is worth paying attention to such details as warming the pot and using water that is really boiling, so as to make quite sure of wringing out of one’s ration the twenty good, strong cups of tea that two ounces, properly handled, ought to represent.

POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

George Orwell

1946

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language—so the argument runs—must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad—I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen—but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:

1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.

Professor Harold Laski

(Essay in Freedom of Expression)

2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder.

Professor Lancelot Hogben

(Interglossia)

3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?

Essay on psychology in Politics

(New York)

4. All the ‘best people’ from the gentlemen’s clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.

Communist pamphlet

5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion’s roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream—as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as ‘standard English’. When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o’clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma’amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!

Letter in Tribune

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged.

DYING METAPHORS. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e. g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a ‘rift’, for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.

OPERATORS OR VERBAL FALSE LIMBS. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.

PRETENTIOUS DICTION. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid process of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic colour, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i. e., e. g. and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers.1 The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

MEANINGLESS WORDS. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.2 Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, ‘The outstanding feature of Mr. X’s work is its living quality’, while another writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr. X’s work is its peculiar deadness’, the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations—race, battle, bread—dissolve into the vague phrases ‘success or failure in competitive activities’. This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing—no one capable of using phrases like ‘objective considerations of contemporary phenomena’—would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase (‘time and chance’) that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier—even quicker, once you have the habit—to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for the words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry—when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech—it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash—as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot—it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty three words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip—alien for akin—making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means; (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning—they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another—but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases—bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder—one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find—this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify—that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one’s elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning’s post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he ‘felt impelled’ to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: ‘[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany’s social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.’ You see, he ‘feels impelled’ to write—feels, presumably, that he has something new to say—and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence,3 to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defence of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.

To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a ‘good prose style’. On the other hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one’s meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose—not simply accept—the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one’s words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don’t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase—some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse—into the dustbin where it belongs.

↑1 An interesting illustration of this is the way in which the English flower names which were in use till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones, snapdragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me-not becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning-away from the more homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific.

↑2 Example: ‘Comfort’s catholicity of perception and image, strangely Whitmanesque in range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion, continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative hinting at a cruel, an inexorably serene timelessness… Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming at simple bull’s-eyes with precision. Only they are not so simple, and through this contented sadness runs more than the surface bitter-sweet of resignation’. (Poetry Quarterly.)

↑3 One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.

HOW A GENERATION LOST ITS COMMON CULTURE

Patrick Deneen

2016

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.

It’s difficult to gain admissions to the schools where I’ve taught—Princeton, Georgetown, and now Notre Dame. Students at these institutions have done what has been demanded of them: they are superb test-takers, they know exactly what is needed to get an A in every class (meaning that they rarely allow themselves to become passionate and invested in any one subject); they build superb resumes. They are respectful and cordial to their elders, though easy-going if crude with their peers. They respect diversity (without having the slightest clue what diversity is) and they are experts in the arts of non-judgmentalism (at least publically). They are the cream of their generation, the masters of the universe, a generation-in-waiting to run America and the world.

But ask them some basic questions about the civilization they will be inheriting, and be prepared for averted eyes and somewhat panicked looks. Who fought in the Peloponnesian War? Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach? How did Socrates die? Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Canterbury Tales? Paradise Lost? The Inferno?

Who was Saul of Tarsus? What were the 95 theses, who wrote them, and what was their effect? Why does the Magna Carta matter? How and where did Thomas Becket die? Who was Guy Fawkes, and why is there a day named after him? What did Lincoln say in his Second Inaugural? His first Inaugural? How about his third Inaugural? What are the Federalist Papers?

Some students, due most often to serendipitous class choices or a quirky old-fashioned teacher, might know a few of these answers. But most students have not been educated to know them. At best, they possess accidental knowledge, but otherwise are masters of systematic ignorance. It is not their “fault” for pervasive ignorance of western and American history, civilization, politics, art and literature. They have learned exactly what we have asked of them—to be like mayflies, alive by happenstance in a fleeting present.

Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system—it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts—whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about—have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.

During my lifetime, lamentation over student ignorance has been sounded by the likes of E.D. Hirsch, Allan Bloom, Mark Bauerlein and Jay Leno, among many others. But these lamentations have been leavened with the hope that appeal to our and their better angels might reverse the trend (that’s an allusion to Lincoln’s first inaugural address, by the way). E.D. Hirsch even worked up a self-help curriculum, a do-it yourself guide on how to become culturally literate, imbued with the can-do American spirit that cultural defenestration could be reversed by a good reading list in the appendix. Broadly missing is sufficient appreciation that this ignorance is the intended consequence of our educational system, a sign of its robust health and success.

We have fallen into the bad and unquestioned habit of thinking that our educational system is broken, but it is working on all cylinders. What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, history-less free agents, and educational goals composed of content-free processes and unexamined buzz-words like “critical thinking,” “diversity,” “ways of knowing,” “social justice,” and “cultural competence.”

Our students are the achievement of a systemic commitment to producing individuals without a past for whom the future is a foreign country, cultureless ciphers who can live anywhere and perform any kind of work without inquiring about its purposes or ends, perfected tools for an economic system that prizes “flexibility” (geographic, interpersonal, ethical).

In such a world, possessing a culture, a history, an inheritance, a commitment to a place and particular people, specific forms of gratitude and indebtedness (rather than a generalized and deracinated commitment to “social justice”), a strong set of ethical and moral norms that assert definite limits to what one ought and ought not to do (aside from being “judgmental”) are hindrances and handicaps.

Regardless of major or course of study, the main object of modern education is to sand off remnants of any cultural or historical specificity and identity that might still stick to our students, to make them perfect company men and women for a modern polity and economy that penalizes deep commitments. Efforts first to foster appreciation for “multi-culturalism” signaled a dedication to eviscerate any particular cultural inheritance, while the current fad of “diversity” signals thoroughgoing commitment to de-cultured and relentless homogenization.

We Must Know…What?

Above all, the one overarching lesson that students receive is the true end of education: the only essential knowledge is that we know ourselves to be radically autonomous selves within a comprehensive global system with a common commitment to mutual indifference. Our commitment to mutual indifference is what binds us together as a global people. Any remnant of a common culture would interfere with this prime directive: a common culture would imply that we share something thicker, an inheritance that we did not create, and a set of commitments that imply limits and particular devotions.

Ancient philosophy and practice praised as an excellent form of government a res publica—a devotion to public things, things we share together. We have instead created the world’s first Res Idiotica—from the Greek word idiotes, meaning “private individual.” Our education system produces solipsistic, self-contained selves whose only public commitment is an absence of commitment to a public, a common culture, a shared history. They are perfectly hollowed vessels, receptive and obedient, without any real obligations or devotions.

They won’t fight against anyone, because that’s not seemly, but they won’t fight for anyone or anything either. They are living in a perpetual Truman Show, a world constructed yesterday that is nothing more than a set for their solipsism, without any history or trajectory.

I love my students—like any human being, each has enormous potential and great gifts to bestow upon the world. But I weep for them, for what is rightfully theirs but hasn’t been given. On our best days, I discern their longing and anguish and I know that their innate human desire to know who they are, where they have come from, where they ought to go, and how they ought to live will always reassert itself. But even on those better days, I can’t help but hold the hopeful thought that the world they have inherited—a world without inheritance, without past, future, or deepest cares—is about to come tumbling down, and that this collapse would be the true beginning of a real education.

LIVING LIKE WEASLES

Annie Dillard

1974

A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home. Obedient to instinct, he bites his prey at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go. One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off, and he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label.

And once, says Ernest Thompson Seton—once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones?

I have been reading about weasels because I saw one last week. I startled a weasel who startled me, and we exchanged a long glance.

Twenty minutes from my house, through the woods by the quarry and across the highway, is Hollins Pond, a remarkable piece of shallowness, where I like to go at sunset and sit on a tree trunk. Hollins Pond is also called Murray’s Pond; it covers two acres of bottomland near Tinker Creek with six inches of water and six thousand lily pads. In winter, brown-and-white steers stand in the middle of it, merely dampening their hooves; from the distant shore they look like miracle itself, complete with miracle’s nonchalance. Now, in summer, the steers are gone. The water lilies have blossomed and spread to a green horizontal plane that is terra firma to plodding blackbirds, and tremulous ceiling to black leeches, crayfish, and carp.

This is, mind you, suburbia. It is a five-minute walk in three directions to rows of houses, though none is visible here. There’s a 55-mph highway at one end of the pond, and a nesting pair of wood ducks at the other. Under every bush is a muskrat hole or a beer can. The far end is an alternating series of fields and woods, fields and woods, threaded everywhere with motorcycle tracks—in whose bare clay wild turtles lay eggs.

So, I had crossed the highway, stepped over two low barbed-wire fences, and traced the motorcycle path in all gratitude through the wild rose and poison ivy of the pond’s shoreline up into high grassy fields. Then I cut down through the woods to the mossy fallen tree where I sit. This tree is excellent. It makes a dry, upholstered bench at the upper, marshy end of the pond, a plush jetty raised from the thorny shore between a shallow blue body of water and a deep blue body of sky.

The sun had just set. I was relaxed on the tree trunk, ensconced in the lap of lichen, watching the lily pads at my feet tremble and part dreamily over the thrusting path of a carp. A yellow bird appeared to my right and flew behind me. It caught my eye; I swiveled around—and the next instant, inexplicably, I was looking down at a weasel, who was looking up at me.

Weasel! I’d never seen one wild before. He was ten inches long, thin as a curve, a muscled ribbon, brown as fruitwood, soft-furred, alert. His face was fierce, small and pointed as a lizard’s; he would have made a good arrowhead. There was just a dot of chin, maybe two brown hairs’ worth, and then the pure white fur began that spread down his underside. He had two black eyes I didn’t see, any more than you see a window.

The weasel was stunned into stillness as he was emerging from beneath an enormous shaggy wild rose bush four feet away. I was stunned into stillness twisted backward on the tree trunk. Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key.

Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut. It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes. If you and I looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don’t. We keep our skulls. So.

He disappeared. This was only last week, and already I don’t remember what shattered the enchantment. I think I blinked, I think I retrieved my brain from the weasel’s brain, and tried to memorize what I was seeing, and the weasel felt the yank of separation, the careening splash-down into real life and the urgent current of instinct. He vanished under the wild rose. I waited motionless, my mind suddenly full of data and my spirit with pleadings, but he didn’t return.

Please do not tell me about “approach-avoidance conflicts.” I tell you I’ve been in that weasel’s brain for sixty seconds, and he was in mine. Brains are private places, muttering through unique and secret tapes—but the weasel and I both plugged into another tape simultaneously, for a sweet and shocking time. Can I help it if it was a blank?

What goes on in his brain the rest of the time? What does a weasel think about? He won’t say. His journal is tracks in clay, a spray of feathers, mouse blood and bone: uncollected, unconnected, loose leaf, and blown.

I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. I come to Hollins Pond not so much to learn how to live as, frankly, to forget about it. That is, I don’t think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular—shall I suck warm blood, hold my tail high, walk with my footprints precisely over the prints of my hands?—but I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical sense and the dignity of living without bias or motive. The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel’s: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.

I missed my chance. I should have gone for the throat. I should have lunged for that streak of white under the weasel’s chin and held on, held on through mud and into the wild rose, held on for a dearer life. We could live under the wild rose wild as weasels, mute and uncomprehending. I could very calmly go wild. I could live two days in the den, curled, leaning on mouse fur, sniffing bird bones, blinking, licking, breathing musk, my hair tangled in the roots of grasses. Down is a good place to go, where the mind is single. Down is out, out of your ever-loving mind and back to your careless senses. I remember muteness as a prolonged and giddy fast, where every moment is a feast of utterance received. Time and events are merely poured, unremarked, and ingested directly, like blood pulsed into my gut through a jugular vein. Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?

We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—even of silence—by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn’t “attack” anything; a weasel lives as he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.

HOME PLACES

Gene Logsdon

2014

The word, home, has the most comforting sound to it for me, probably because I am a confirmed homebody after living an earlier part of my life in seventeen different places in six different states. Even then, I tried to make a home out of every place I lived. As I like to tell, I surreptitiously planted onions and radishes in the landscaping around my college dorm. But as soon as I could manage it, I came back to the scenes of my childhood. That meant that my wife could not go back to her childhood home and I am forever grateful that she went along with my yearning.

Unlike Carol’s home farm which disappeared under a subdivison, mine remains miraculously somewhat the same as it was a hundred years ago. Carol and I returned to this home area forty years ago, and, except for the fences that had disappeared as small fields of yesterday were turned into the bigger fields of today, the lay of the land was about the same and still is. The fields are occupied and farmed by my siblings and we were able to go together and buy the woodlots and some fields around the farm. So I can go to the place east of the barn where I was disking ground at age 16 and see almost the same landscape of field, stream, pasture, and woodland that so pleasured me that long ago June day. I was singing “How Are Things In Glocca Morra” (still about my favorite song) and thought that I was the luckiest person in the world. I have theorized that maybe I was high on exhaust gases from the tractor muffler that stuck up in my face. But whatever, no view of ocean, mountain, plain or canyon in the whole United States has ever filled me with that much joy. Good old home.

I suppose it can be true of urban places too, but when home is a farm and you are there every day as a child, without the knowledge of any other place to distract you, it takes on a special preciousness that never goes away. That’s why so many of us eventually come home to put down roots. Even when writers and singers and painters go away from their childhood farm homes, they often write, sing and paint those places all the rest of their lives.

Not so long ago, lying in a hospital bed, I decided to recreate the old fence lines of the home farm in my head (I live two miles from it now), walking along each fence boundary in my imagination. I was surprised how well I knew them, how many acres were in each field, and how many details I could remember. Even more vivid were little adventures and happenings that occurred in various places in those fields that I had almost forgotten. I can take you to almost the exact spot where as a child I fell off the plow beam. My father had allowed me to ride there as he held fast to the plow handles while our horses, Bell, Flora and Daisy pulled the one-bottom plow. There was little danger involved but the fall scared me exceedingly which is probably why I remember it.

As I walked across the land mentally, I recalled little incidences of my life all over the place, like specific spots where I had found my best Indian artifacts. Where fields edged up to tree groves, I remembered where I had found morel mushrooms. And right about there in the pasture above the creek was where our dog, Brownie, tried to bury a rabbit that was not quite dead yet, much to my boyhood amazement. And over there in the creek, a raccoon almost drowned Brownie. And just upstream from there was the big elm where Dad hung a hay rope so we could swing across the creek. And there behind where my sister’s house stands now once stood a big strawstack that all the farmers roundabout helped build. I still can see my cousin, Adrian, on top of the stack, shaping it up, a red bandana over his nose to keep from breathing in too much chaff. I imagined him being a cowboy, maybe Tom Mix.

Home places. They turn the mind into the most wondrous scrapbook of historical pictures and stories that seldom get published.

ABORTION AND THE CONSCIENCE OF THE NATION

Ronald Reagan

1983

THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade is a good time for us to pause and reflect. Our nationwide policy of abortion-on-demand through all nine months of pregnancy was neither voted for by our people nor enacted by our legislators—not a single state had such unrestricted abortion before the Supreme Court decreed it to be national policy in 1973. But the consequences of this judicial decision are now obvious: since 1973, more than 15 million unborn children have had their lives snuffed out by legalized abortions. That is over ten times the number of Americans lost in all our nation’s wars.

Make no mistake, abortion-on-demand is not a right granted by the Constitution. No serious scholar, including one disposed to agree with the Court’s result, has argued that the framers of the Constitution intended to create such a right. Shortly after the Roe v. Wade decision, Professor John Hart Ely, now Dean of Stanford Law School, wrote that the opinion “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” Nowhere do the plain words of the Constitution even hint at a “right” so sweeping as to permit abortion up to the time the child is ready to be born. Yet that is what the Court ruled.

As an act of “raw judicial power” (to use Justice White’s biting phrase), the decision by the seven-man majority in Roe v. Wade has so far been made to stick. But the Court’s decision has by no means settled the debate. Instead, Roe v. Wade has become a continuing prod to the conscience of the nation.

Abortion concerns not just the unborn child, it concerns every one of us. The English poet, John Donne, wrote: “… any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life—the unborn—without diminishing the value of all human life. We saw tragic proof of this truism last year when the Indiana courts allowed the starvation death of “Baby Doe” in Bloomington because the child had Down’s Syndrome.

Many of our fellow citizens grieve over the loss of life that has followed Roe v. Wade. Margaret Heckler, soon after being nominated to head the largest department of our government, Health and Human Services, told an audience that she believed abortion to be the greatest moral crisis facing our country today. And the revered Mother Teresa, who works in the streets of Calcutta ministering to dying people in her world-famous mission of mercy, has said that “the greatest misery of our time is the generalized abortion of children.”

Over the first two years of my Administration I have closely followed and assisted efforts in Congress to reverse the tide of abortion—efforts of Congressmen, Senators and citizens responding to an urgent moral crisis. Regrettably, I have also seen the massive efforts of those who, under the banner of “freedom of choice,” have so far blocked every effort to reverse nationwide abortion-on-demand.

Despite the formidable obstacles before us, we must not lose heart. This is not the first time our country has been divided by a Supreme Court decision that denied the value of certain human lives. The Dred Scott decision of 1857 was not overturned in a day, or a year, or even a decade. At first, only a minority of Americans recognized and deplored the moral crisis brought about by denying the full humanity of our black brothers and sisters; but that minority persisted in their vision and finally prevailed. They did it by appealing to the hearts and minds of their countrymen, to the truth of human dignity under God. From their example, we know that respect for the sacred value of human life is too deeply engrained in the hearts of our people to remain forever suppressed. But the great majority of the American people have not yet made their voices heard, and we cannot expect them to—any more than the public voice arose against slavery—until the issue is clearly framed and presented.

What, then, is the real issue? I have often said that when we talk about abortion, we are talking about two lives—the life of the mother and the life of the unborn child. Why else do we call a pregnant woman a mother? I have also said that anyone who doesn’t feel sure whether we are talking about a second human life should clearly give life the benefit of the doubt. If you don’t know whether a body is alive or dead, you would never bury it. I think this consideration itself should be enough for all of us to insist on protecting the unborn.

The case against abortion does not rest here, however, for medical practice confirms at every step the correctness of these moral sensibilities. Modern medicine treats the unborn child as a patient. Medical pioneers have made great breakthroughs in treating the unborn—for genetic problems, vitamin deficiencies, irregular heart rhythms, and other medical conditions. Who can forget George Will’s moving account of the little boy who underwent brain surgery six times during the nine weeks before he was born? Who is the patient if not that tiny unborn human being who can feel pain when he or she is approached by doctors who come to kill rather than to cure?

The real question today is not when human life begins, but, What is the value of human life? The abortionist who reassembles the arms and legs of a tiny baby to make sure all its parts have been torn from its mother’s body can hardly doubt whether it is a human being. The real question for him and for all of us is whether that tiny human life has a God-given right to be protected by the law—the same right we have.

What more dramatic confirmation could we have of the real issue than the Baby Doe case in Bloomington, Indiana? The death of that tiny infant tore at the hearts of all Americans because the child was undeniably a live human being—one lying helpless before the eyes of the doctors and the eyes of the nation. The real issue for the courts was not whether Baby Doe was a human being. The real issue was whether to protect the life of a human being who had Down’s Syndrome, who would probably be mentally handicapped, but who needed a routine surgical procedure to unblock his esophagus and allow him to eat. A doctor testified to the presiding judge that, even with his physical problem corrected, Baby Doe would have a “non-existent” possibility for “a minimally adequate quality of life”—in other words, that retardation was the equivalent of a crime deserving the death penalty. The judge let Baby Doe starve and die, and the Indiana Supreme Court sanctioned his decision.

Federal law does not allow federally-assisted hospitals to decide that Down’s Syndrome infants are not worth treating, much less to decide to starve them to death. Accordingly, I have directed the Departments of Justice and HHS to apply civil rights regulations to protect handicapped newborns. All hospitals receiving federal funds must post notices which will clearly state that failure to feed handicapped babies is prohibited by federal law. The basic issue is whether to value and protect the lives of the handicapped, whether to recognize the sanctity of human life. This is the same basic issue that underlies the question of abortion.

The 1981 Senate hearings on the beginning of human life brought out the basic issue more clearly than ever before. The many medical and scientific witnesses who testified disagreed on many things, but not on the scientific evidence that the unborn child is alive, is a distinct individual, or is a member of the human species. They did disagree over the value question, whether to give value to a human life at its early and most vulnerable stages of existence.

Regrettably, we live at a time when some persons do not value all human life. They want to pick and choose which individuals have value. Some have said that only those individuals with “consciousness of self” are human beings. One such writer has followed this deadly logic and concluded that “shocking as it may seem, a newly born infant is not a human being.”

A Nobel Prize winning scientist has suggested that if a handicapped child “were not declared fully human until three days after birth, then all parents could be allowed the choice.” In other words, “quality control” to see if newly born human beings are up to snuff.

Obviously, some influential people want to deny that every human life has intrinsic, sacred worth. They insist that a member of the human race must have certain qualities before they accord him or her status as a “human being.”

Events have borne out the editorial in a California medical journal which explained three years before Roe v. Wade that the social acceptance of abortion is a “defiance of the long-held Western ethic of intrinsic and equal value for every human life regardless of its stage, condition, or status.”

Every legislator, every doctor, and every citizen needs to recognize that the real issue is whether to affirm and protect the sanctity of all human life, or to embrace a social ethic where some human lives are valued and others are not. As a nation, we must choose between the sanctity of life ethic and the “quality of life” ethic.

I have no trouble identifying the answer our nation has always given to this basic question, and the answer that I hope and pray it will give in the future. America was founded by men and women who shared a vision of the value of each and every individual. They stated this vision clearly from the very start in the Declaration of Independence, using words that every schoolboy and schoolgirl can recite:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We fought a terrible war to guarantee that one category of mankind—black people in America—could not be denied the inalienable rights with which their Creator endowed them. The great champion of the sanctity of all human life in that day, Abraham Lincoln, gave us his assessment of the Declaration’s purpose. Speaking of the framers of that noble document, he said:

This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures. Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on … They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon to guide their children and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages.

He warned also of the danger we would face if we closed our eyes to the value of life in any category of human beings:

I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop. If one man says it does not mean a Negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man?

When Congressman John A. Bingham of Ohio drafted the Fourteenth Amendment to guarantee the rights of life, liberty, and property to all human beings, he explained that all are “entitled to the protection of American law, because its divine spirit of equality declares that all men are created equal.” He said the rights guaranteed by the amendment would therefore apply to “any human being.” Justice William Brennan, writing in another case decided only the year before Roe v. Wade, referred to our society as one that “strongly affirms the sanctity of life.”

Another William Brennan—not the Justice—has reminded us of the terrible consequences that can follow when a nation rejects the sanctity of life ethic:

The cultural environment for a human holocaust is present whenever any society can be misled into defining individuals as less than human and therefore devoid of value and respect.

As a nation today, we have not rejected the sanctity of human life. The American people have not had an opportunity to express their view on the sanctity of human life in the unborn. I am convinced that Americans do not want to play God with the value of human life. It is not for us to decide who is worthy to live and who is not. Even the Supreme Court’s opinion in Roe v. Wade did not explicitly reject the traditional American idea of intrinsic worth and value in all human life; it simply dodged this issue.

The Congress has before it several measures that would enable our people to reaffirm the sanctity of human life, even the smallest and the youngest and the most defenseless. The Human Life Bill expressly recognizes the unborn as human beings and accordingly protects them as persons under our Constitution. This bill, first introduced by Senator Jesse Helms, provided the vehicle for the Senate hearings in 1981 which contributed so much to our understanding of the real issue of abortion.

The Respect Human Life Act, just introduced in the 98th Congress, states in its first section that the policy of the United States is “to protect innocent life, both before and after birth.” This bill, sponsored by Congressman Henry Hyde and Senator Roger Jepsen, prohibits the federal government from performing abortions or assisting those who do so, except to save the life of the mother. It also addresses the pressing issue of infanticide which, as we have seen, flows inevitably from permissive abortion as another step in the denial of the inviolability of innocent human life.

I have endorsed each of these measures, as well as the more difficult route of constitutional amendment, and I will give these initiatives my full support. Each of them, in different ways, attempts to reverse the tragic policy of abortion-on-demand imposed by the Supreme Court ten years ago. Each of them is a decisive way to affirm the sanctity of human life.

We must all educate ourselves to the reality of the horrors taking place. Doctors today know that unborn children can feel a touch within the womb and that they respond to pain. But how many Americans are aware that abortion techniques are allowed today, in all 50 states, that burn the skin of a baby with a salt solution, in an agonizing death that can last for hours?

Another example: two years ago, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a Sunday special supplement on “The Dreaded Complication.” The “dreaded complication” referred to in the article—the complication feared by doctors who perform abortions—is the survival of the child despite all the painful attacks during the abortion procedure. Some unborn children do survive the late-term abortions the Supreme Court has made legal. Is there any question that these victims of abortion deserve our attention and protection? Is there any question that those who don’t survive were living human beings before they were killed?

Late-term abortions, especially when the baby survives, but is then killed by starvation, neglect, or suffocation, show once again the link between abortion and infanticide. The time to stop both is now. As my Administration acts to stop infanticide, we will be fully aware of the real issue that underlies the death of babies before and soon after birth.

Our society has, fortunately, become sensitive to the rights and special needs of the handicapped, but I am shocked that physical or mental handicaps of newborns are still used to justify their extinction. This Administration has a Surgeon General, Dr. C. Everett Koop, who has done perhaps more than any other American for handicapped children, by pioneering surgical techniques to help them, by speaking out on the value of their lives, and by working with them in the context of loving families. You will not find his former patients advocating the so-called “quality-of-life” ethic.

I know that when the true issue of infanticide is placed before the American people, with all the facts openly aired, we will have no trouble deciding that a mentally or physically handicapped baby has the same intrinsic worth and right to life as the rest of us. As the New Jersey Supreme Court said two decades ago, in a decision upholding the sanctity of human life, “a child need not be perfect to have a worthwhile life.”

Whether we are talking about pain suffered by unborn children, or about late-term abortions, or about infanticide, we inevitably focus on the humanity of the unborn child. Each of these issues is a potential rallying point for the sanctity of life ethic. Once we as a nation rally around anyone of these issues to affirm the sanctity of life, we will see the importance of affirming this principle across the board.

Malcolm Muggeridge, the English writer, goes right to the heart of the matter: “Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.” The sanctity of innocent human life is a principle that Congress should proclaim at every opportunity.

It is possible that the Supreme Court itself may overturn its abortion rulings. We need only recall that in Brown v. Board of Education the court reversed its own earlier “separate-but-equal” decision. I believe if the Supreme Court took another look at Roe v. Wade, and considered the real issue between the sanctity of life ethic and the quality of life ethic, it would change its mind once again.

As we continue to work to overturn Roe v. Wade, we must also continue to lay the groundwork for a society in which abortion is not the accepted answer to unwanted pregnancy. Pro-life people have already taken heroic steps, often at great personal sacrifice, to provide for unwed mothers. I recently spoke about a young pregnant woman named Victoria, who said, “In this society we save whales, we save timber wolves and bald eagles and Coke bottles. Yet, everyone wanted me to throw away my baby.” She has been helped by Sav-a-Life, a group in Dallas, which provides a way for unwed mothers to preserve the human life within them when they might otherwise be tempted to resort to abortion. I think also of House of His Creation in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, where a loving couple has taken in almost 200 young women in the past ten years. They have seen, as a fact of life, that the girls are not better off having abortions than saving their babies. I am also reminded of the remarkable Rossow family of Ellington, Connecticut, who have opened their hearts and their home to nine handicapped adopted and foster children.

The Adolescent Family Life Program, adopted by Congress at the request of Senator Jeremiah Denton, has opened new opportunities for unwed mothers to give their children life. We should not rest until our entire society echoes the tone of John Powell in the dedication of his book, Abortion: The Silent Holocaust, a dedication to every woman carrying an unwanted child: “Please believe that you are not alone. There are many of us that truly love you, who want to stand at your side, and help in any way we can.” And we can echo the always-practical woman of faith, Mother Teresa, when she says, “If you don’t want the little child, that unborn child, give him to me.” We have so many families in America seeking to adopt children that the slogan “every child a wanted child” is now the emptiest of all reasons to tolerate abortion.

I have often said we need to join in prayer to bring protection to the unborn. Prayer and action are needed to uphold the sanctity of human life. I believe it will not be possible to accomplish our work, the work of saving lives, “without being a soul of prayer.” The famous British Member of Parliament, William Wilberforce, prayed with his small group of influential friends, the “Clapham Sect,” for decades to see an end to slavery in the British empire. Wilberforce led that struggle in Parliament, unflaggingly, because he believed in the sanctity of human life. He saw the fulfillment of his impossible dream when Parliament oulawed slavery just before his death.

Let his faith and perseverance be our guide. We will never recognize the true value of our own lives until we affirm the value in the life of others, a value of which Malcolm Muggeridge says: “… however low it flickers or fiercely burns, it is still a Divine flame which no man dare presume to put out, be his motives ever so humane and enlightened.”

Abraham Lincoln recognized that we could not survive as a free land when some men could decide that others were not fit to be free and should therefore be slaves. Likewise, we cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide. My Administration is dedicated to the preservation of America as a free land, and there is no cause more important for preserving that freedom than affirming the transcendent right to life of all human beings, the right without which no other rights have any meaning.

THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH
What was so new about Futurism?

Morgan Meis

2014

My wife, the over-observant Shuffy, noticed a group of children playing with geometric shapes cut from pieces of black paper. The children were arranging these shapes on larger sheets of construction paper. The construction paper was lying on the floor of the Guggenheim Museum and the Guggenheim Museum was in the midst of its exhibit of Italian Futurism.

One wonders what Filippo Tommaso Marinetti would have thought about these children. Marinetti (1876-1944) was the founder of Futurism. In 1909, he wrote a document that has since become the most famous testament of Futurism. It is known as The Futurist Manifesto. The fourth “principle” of Futurism states, infamously: “We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath … a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”

Marinetti always thought the “new beauty” of Futurism was specially tied to the spirit of youth. The young desire to escape the tyranny of the old. The young have energy. The young have enthusiasm. The young have yet to be corrupted by old ideas, stale instincts, plodding conservatism. The last thing, therefore, that young people should be doing is exploring libraries and museums. Those are the places where old ideas, old forms of art, and ancient texts threaten to stifle all that is new. As Marinetti wrote:

In truth I tell you that daily visits to museums, libraries, and academies (cemeteries of empty exertion, Calvaries of crucified dreams, registries of aborted beginnings!) are, for artists, as damaging as the prolonged supervision by parents of certain young people drunk with their talent and their ambitious wills. When the future is barred to them, the admirable past may be a solace for the ills of the moribund, the sickly, the prisoner… But we want no part of it, the past, we the young and strong Futurists!

So, what about those young children, sitting on the floor of the Guggenheim Museum, learning about Futurism by moving black shapes around on construction paper? Aren’t these children doing exactly the opposite of what Marinetti envisioned for his glorious new civilization?

Let’s look at a typical painting from the first period of Futurism, Ivo Pannaggi’s “Speeding Train” from 1922. Here is what we expect from Futurism. The love of speed. The love of machines. The love of bold shapes and color. The painting is also an attempt to solve a not-insignificant problem. Images captured by means of applying paint to canvas are inherently static affairs. That is to say, it’s difficult to get motion into a painting. It is even more difficult to capture speed. Pannaggi solves the problem by breaking up the canvas into a number of intersecting planes that create lines or rays moving from the center of the painting out to the edges of the canvas. He uses intersecting circles and hemispheres to capture a sense of the rotating wheels and gears of the train. And he uses color boldly, with sharp contrasts set one against the other—a patch of red, for instance, right against a patch of blue. The net effect is, more or less, one of speed and motion.

“Speeding Train (Treno in corsa),” Ivo Pannaggi (1922), Fondazione Carima–Museo Palazzo Ricci, Macerata, Italy. Photo courtesy Fondazione Cassa di risparmio della Provincia di Macerata.

But the more you look at the painting, the more it looks familiar. If you didn’t know that “Speeding Train” was a work of Futurism, you might think that it was the painting of some hitherto-unknown Cubist. You might think, “This artist looked at some of the paintings of Braque and early Picasso and decided to apply Cubist principles to the specific problem of painting a moving train.” You might further notice that the intersecting planes and the geometric shapes to be found in “Speeding Train” are vaguely reminiscent of the still lifes and landscapes of Cézanne. It wouldn’t be crazy to think this, since there is a direct lineage from Cézanne to the analytical and geometric experiments of Cubism. It was Cézanne, after all, who decided that painting could be an act of analysis, that a painting could show us the deeper Platonic truths of shape and form that can be found lurking within our visual field. And that is what Pannaggi seemed to be doing, too. He broke the speeding train down into primal elements: square, plane, circle, red, line, blue, ray, cone, hemisphere. The children sitting on the floor of the Guggenheim, playing with the arrangement of basic shapes, were therefore doing a childish version of what Pannaggi did in his painting of a moving train.

Futurists like Pannaggi may have been trying to break civilization wide open. They may have declared a new age of speed and violence and radical newness. But as soon as they attempted to analyze that newness, as soon as they attempted to say something about their brave new world, they found themselves pulled back into history and tradition. Pannaggi wanted to show us that modern machines are unlike anything we’ve ever seen or experienced before. Then he created a painting that doesn’t look radically different from Cézanne’s paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, a mountain that has existed since before the dawn of the human species. Pannaggi wanted to paint the very essence of speed in the machine age. His painting, with its basic geometrical shapes, looks like a study in Platonic solids that could have come from the early Renaissance; something, maybe, by Paolo Uccello.

This inability truly to break out of the old ways must have been frustrating for the Futurists.

Newness, it turns out, is a trap. That is one of the essential discoveries of Futurism. Futurism was not the first movement to discover this trap. But the trap of newness is no less important for being discovered and rediscovered over the ages. That is part of the trap, after all. You rediscover something that has already been multiply rediscovered. What seemed brand-new at first, turns out, on further reflection, to be ancient.

Amusingly, perhaps maddeningly, you can scratch the surface of any work of Futurism and the past comes rushing back in. Take Umberto Boccioni’s Futurist sculpture, “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space.” Boccioni’s work is to sculpture what Pannaggi’s “Speeding Train” is to painting. It is the attempt to make a solid, motionless piece of cast bronze into something that is fluid in space and time. Boccioni achieves this by breaking up the surfaces of a human figure. That’s to say, he sculpts a person in several moments of motion all at once. Look, especially, at the legs of the figure. The legs are thick because Boccioni is showing us multiple positions of a moving leg. It is as if Boccioni took a series of photographs of a person striding forward, spliced those photographs together, and then made a sculpture of the result. The sculpture does not freeze a moment into sculptural eternity, as a more traditional sculpture might do. Instead, it shows us that form is never frozen, but always in transition from one state to another. That’s an essentially Futurist thought—all the emphasis is on dynamism, with little regard for the fixed state.

“Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio),” Umberto Boccioni, 1913 (cast 1949). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Lydia Winston Malbin, 1989. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo courtesy Art Resource, New York.

But the problem with Boccioni’s sculpture is that, though it may suggest movement, as a sculpture, it is still in a fixed state. It may express dynamism, but it does so in static—one almost wants to say classical—form. Indeed, as has been noticed before, “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” resembles the classical sculpture, “Winged Victory of Samothrace.” You’ll recall that “Winged Victory of Samothrace” was the very sculpture that Marinetti referred to in his Manifesto. Marinetti claimed that the roaring motorcar was more beautiful than the “Winged Victory of Samothrace.” This was his way of rejecting past notions of beauty in the name of the resolutely modern. But Boccioni’s sculpture is beautiful partly because of what it shares, formally and historically, with the “Winged Victory of Samothrace.” Boccioni’s sculpture does not resemble an automobile; it resembles a stone statue from ancient times. Boccioni and the sculptor of “Winged Victory” share the assumption that there is something essentially compelling about the movement of human bodies. When a human being strides forward, the rest of us pause to take a look. The lyrical quality in “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” would have been beautiful to a citizen of 2nd century Hellenistic society, just as it is to someone wandering through the Guggenheim in the early 21st century.

Indeed, the more one looks at Futurist art, the more one suspects sleight of hand. Maybe the claim to radical newness was not so much a trap as a conscious or semi-conscious ploy. In this, Futurism was a fascist movement all the way to its core. That’s to say, Futurism and fascism were both about restoring order in a disordered world. The Guggenheim exhibit, by the way, is perfectly open about the fascism of Italian Futurism. There is no point in denying it. Most of the Italian Futurists, Marinetti most of all, were enthusiastic fascists. You can seek to explain this away, as has often been done in the past, or make the claim that Futurism was aesthetically important despite its political allegiance to fascism. The problem with the latter claim is that Futurism is aesthetically interesting insofar as, aesthetically, it refuses to accept boundaries between art and politics, or between art and life, or art and anything else. So, to claim that Futurism is aesthetically interesting although politically repellent is to misunderstand and ignore the very point and purpose of Futurist aesthetics. The Futurists wanted their art to impact life and they wanted that impact to be fascist in nature.

What is most interesting about Futurism is not, then, the element of Futurism that can be preserved from Fascism, but what Futurism reveals and expresses about the soul of Fascism. The Futurist response to WWI is instructive in this regard. Sensible persons confronted by the calamity and destruction of WWI felt chastened and depressed in the aftermath of the war. There were civilization-wide feelings of shame and regret. “Let us never,” it was said by most, “do that again. Let the Great War be the war that ends all wars.” The Futurists did not accept this line of thinking. They were among an odd and select group that said, “Let us have more of this. Let us have bigger and more spectacular wars.” The question of whether the Futurists really meant what they said, or had really experienced or understood the trauma of WWI, misses the point. The Futurists weren’t putting forward practical proposals; they were experimenting with an idea. “How does it make us feel,” they wondered, “to say yes to the bombs and the machines and the explosions?”

In saying “yes,” in asking for more, they discovered a secret source of power. It was a way forward. By choosing to embrace the most terrible aspects of the war and the industrial civilization that had made it possible, the Futurists gave themselves a kind of immunity from the paralysis that European civilization experienced after the war. This was a significant discovery. The next thing the Futurists discovered was that once you’ve expressed enthusiasm in response to war and the machine age, you can go about repairing your civilization’s ties to the past under the protection of that enthusiasm.

This is roughly the same attitude expressed by Mussolini and by the movement of Italian Fascism. Mussolini, too, proclaimed “The New Man,” and then set about producing a form of political and aesthetic neo-classicism. Roman, Renaissance, Etruscan, and Baroque (just to pick a few) ideas and forms percolated through Mussolini’s and Marinetti’s Italy. The odd insanity of Italian Futurism/Fascism was produced by the seeming irreconcilability between absolute newness and absolute dependence on traditional ideas and classical references. Maybe these two tendencies don’t seem quite so irreconcilable when the claims to newness are seen as a clearing of the way, a bold face put on by the classicist when he is feeling threatened. Just think of the bold face, the extreme jaw-jutting that Mussolini enacted during his public speeches. He was acting a part, playing the role of the extremely confident politician under whose wing the nation could be safe again. It was only by proclaiming a wild enthusiasm for the motorcar that men like Mussolini and Marinetti could get back to the work of being good ol’ Italians—that is to say, obsessed with the history that from Cato to Dante to Leonardo to Leopardi weds every Italian to the past like an insect in a spider’s web. The children on the floor of the Guggenheim, therefore, had it right. To understand Italian Futurism, to feel the passions that made it go, you have to return to the very beginning. The Italian Futurists yelled and screamed about the radically new, but in many ways they simply wanted to go back home.

THE JOY OF LITERARY DESTRUCTION:
WRITERS WHO BROKE ALL THE RULES

Wendy Lesser

2014

There is a certain kind of writer who seems to feel that unless he is breaking apart everything that came before him, composing something that in his own view is astonishingly new, he is not writing great literature. Though he is sincere in his wish to be a great writer (and in that sense might seem almost naive), his preferred mode of public address is sarcasm or heavy irony, both of which are meant to suggest his sophistication, his superiority to banal questions about reality, authenticity, and truth. He has no interest in accurately representing human behavior, partly because he has no interest in accuracy and partly because he has very little interest in other people; what concerns him most is the working of his own mind. He hates with a passion the realist novelists and formalist poets who came just before him, and he is convinced that only he, among all the writers who ever lived, is producing work that will matter to the future. In this respect, he evidently imagines a future filled with people who are nothing like him—people who will be content to rest with the innovations he has produced and will not feel obliged to stomp on their forebears.

Writers like this have given novelty a bad name. They have led those who are wedded to old-fashioned notions of plot and character to conclude that innovations in style or structure are antagonistic to these older values, as if we could only have one of the two aspects—let us call them startling originality and enduring sympathetic gratification—so we have to choose between them. This obsessive clinging to the cherished ways of the past is almost as bad as its opposite. It is equally humorless, equally self-enclosed, and equally unlikely to lead to the production and enjoyment of great literature. I have no prescriptions for producing great works, but I have enjoyed a vast number of them, and from this outsider’s perspective I can pretty confidently say that what is entailed has an element of openness to it. Rigid rules of any kind will be of no use here. Nor will the overweening desire to achieve newness, on the one hand, or protect tradition, on the other, because both of those positions imply a goal that is separate from, and often detrimental to, the more intrinsic purpose of simply telling the truth as one sees it. I say “simply,” but it is not at all a simple matter. Literature that tells lies is not worth the paper it is written on, but a lie is not the same as a fantasy, an invention, an allegory, a myth, a dream. Fiction, drama, poetry, and even essays can be made up and also truthful.

Usefully for my purposes, one of the works of literature which most strongly expresses this complicated view is also one of the most innovative in form. I am referring to Miguel de Cervantes’s “Don Quixote”—perhaps the most stylistically ambitious novel ever undertaken, in no small part because it was one of the first. What does it mean for an author to get inside his characters’ minds and relay their thoughts, rather than simply displaying their actions on a theatrical stage? What is a “narrator,” and how does he connect with the author of a work? How do the realities of fictional characters’ lives compare to the realities of readers’ lives, and where, if anywhere, do the two planes intersect? Does the book exist in its own time or in the time when you are reading it, and does that mean it exists in a different way for each new reader? Can the reader himself inhabit more than one era, time-traveling through books? Can the past, in this sense, be made to live again, and if so, can the nonexistent, purely fictional past also be brought to life? Are dead authors different from living ones, from a reader’s point of view? How do poetry, drama, history, and fiction overlap? What is novel about the novel?

Cervantes was possibly the first person to ask most of these questions, and probably the first person to answer them—not flatly or pedantically, but with hints, suggestions, jokes, and intimations, through novelistic strategies that honored plot and character even as they worried about the existence of such things. There is no ancestor-stomping in “Don Quixote,” in part because the book had no immediate ancestors: it was sui generis, emerging from Cervantes’s brow like Athena from Zeus’s, whole and perfect.

The tone is sardonic but also genial, at once sharp, critical, empathetic, and companionable. The hero—a devoted reader, just like us—is the most lovable madman imaginable. (Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin perhaps runs a close second, as he was intended to do, for Dostoyevsky, despite the astonishing innovations he brought to the novel, was no enemy of the past: he deeply admired “Don Quixote,” and consciously borrowed from it for “The Idiot.”) The plot is a higgledy-piggledy series of adventures, to which we might be tempted to apply the word “plotless” if the whole book didn’t so clearly and movingly lead up to its ending. That feeling which I mentioned in relation to “Wolf Hall,” of being summarily ejected from an enticing and richly detailed world, is Don Quixote’s feeling when he recovers his sanity at the end of the novel. It is also our feeling when we are finally forced to take leave of him.

One of the many things Cervantes discovered was that he could repeatedly remind his readers that they were reading a book—could, in that sense, blatantly announce the fictionality of his fictional characters—and still get us to invest emotionally in these people and their story. There are apparently at least two sides to our minds in such cases: one which goes logically about its business, registering Sancho Panza’s jokes about typographical errors in previously published volumes of the knight’s adventures as patent admissions of the story’s fabrication; and another which takes Sancho, his master, and all the other characters at face value, allowing us to treat them as fellow humans, to laugh approvingly at Sancho’s earthy wisdom, to weep wholeheartedly at the Don’s death. We know the difference between reality and fiction (we are not, in that respect, as mad as Don Quixote), but that does not prevent us from feeling real emotions for these fictional characters. If anything, the fact that they sometimes comment on their own unreality makes them seem more real, as if they were capable of viewing their circumstances from the same perspective we do.

Cervantes was not the first writer to discover this for himself. There are numerous examples of it in his near contemporary Shakespeare. And if we go even further back, to the Middle English works of Geoffrey Chaucer, we can find an especially pure version of it—an easygoing, entirely comfortable readiness to acknowledge the related but different planes on which authors and characters dwell. To give but one example: Chaucer ends his extremely moving account of Troilus and Criseyde’s doomed love affair (a more sympathetic account, I would argue, than even Shakespeare’s version in “Troilus and Cressida”) with the words

Go, litel bok, go litel myn tragedye …

… And kis the steppes, where as thow seest pace

Virgil, Ovid, Omer, Lucan, and Stace

as if sending his poem out into the world in this literary ancestor-acknowledging manner won’t endanger or contradict the felt reality of his tale. As indeed it does not. What you might think of as the Wizard of Oz syndrome, that moment when the great and powerful Oz reveals himself as the little man working the effects from behind the curtain, can apparently coexist quite nicely with our continuing belief in the magic that little man produces.

Shakespeare is even braver than Chaucer in invoking this paradox, for he sometimes has his characters themselves deliver the envoi. At the end of “The Tempest,” when Prospero is renouncing the sorcery that has enabled him to rule his island throughout the play—the magical powers that have in essence brought the play into being—he comes forward in his final speech and asks us for our applause without in any way breaking character. Even more riskily, in “Antony and Cleopatra,” the doomed, captured Cleopatra, formerly the rebellious queen of Egypt and the proud mistress of Antony’s heart, deplores what she can already foresee as the result of her captivity: a future in which

… quick comedians

Extemporally will stage us, and present

Our Alexandrian revels: Antony

Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see

Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness

I’ th’ posture of a whore.

In Shakespeare’s own time, these lines would have been delivered by the boy actor playing the female part. In other words, this actor had to criticize his own squeaking delivery at the same time as he convinced the audience of the character’s palpable existence. And the character, through her lines, had to persuade us that this existence would in some ghostly form extend forever—allowing her as well as us to “see” this performance—even as its mortal version ended tragically, and at her own hands, less than two pages later in the script.

Theater, the art form which gave us the very notion of “suspension of disbelief,” specializes in such moments of contradiction. Real humans, just like us, are standing bodily before us onstage, representing actions and emotions that cry out for our sympathy, our hatred, our anxiety, our laughter, our distress. We do not really forget that they are actors, just as we don’t forget that the sets they occupy bear little or no relationship to reality, or that the lines they speak have been written for them by someone else. All these factors, far from being detrimental by-products, are built into the effectiveness of the theatrical form. As audience members, we are indeed in a suspended state, where real emotions about non-real events can course through us. But what is being suspended is not, precisely, disbelief. Logic, evidence, empirical truth: these elements that make up scientific belief, or even juridical disbelief, do not enter into it. We are not, as audience members, being asked to weigh in on the innocence or guilt, truthfulness or falsity, worthiness or unworthiness of the people we see before us onstage—not, at any rate, in the same way we would have to make such judgments in a courtroom. Our relationship to stage actors and the characters they represent is both more remote and less antagonistic than that. Precisely because we are not a jury of their peers, we can do things for them, and they for us, that would not be possible in our normal reality. For the two or three-hour duration of their performance, we give them life; and they, in turn, allow us to become pure vessels of feeling, afloat in a world that for the moment seems as real to us as one of our own dreams.

The theatrical work, in this sense, reinvents itself each time it is performed. However old the script may be, it impresses us with its newness, its aliveness to our own present circumstances, even as it confesses its embeddedness in the predetermined past. This is true, at any rate, of good theater. It all hinges on quality. And the same is true, though in a different way, if the literary work is a poem or a novel. What Chaucer succeeds in doing in “Troilus and Criseyde”—reminding us of the existence of his poetic ancestors and at the same time leaving us enthralled by the freshness of his verse tale—cannot be done by just anyone. Cervantes is not the only novelist who can call our attention to the book in our hands and still make it live for us, but he is the best of them. The level at which the trick is performed matters deeply. If it is good enough, it ceases to be deception. Formal ingenuity, practiced at this level, becomes almost transparent. Far from being an intrusion from the outside, the author’s intervention in his tale comes to seem an essential part of that tale.

One of the ways twentieth-century authors developed to remind us of their existence was the use of the footnote. What began as a sort of pseudo-scholarly addendum in T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” had become, by the time of Nabokov’s “Pale Fire,” a whole story in itself—an epic meant to rival and even eclipse the fragile literary work to which it was attached. After that came the essays and novels of David Foster Wallace, Nicholson Baker, Jonathan Lethem, and their many imitators, in which the footnote represented both a mimicry of academic style and a method of ironic self-commentary, so that to have second thoughts (and perhaps even third and fourth thoughts, each appropriately numbered on the page) was a way of signaling that some kind of thought was at any rate taking place. The typography of the footnote—the fact that it came in a different size from the regular type, often accompanied by a number, and always with a placeholder embedded in and noticeably interrupting the writing itself—appealed to these novelty-seeking litterateurs, as did its placement on the bottom of each page, usually with a thin half-line fencing it off from the text above. By reminding readers of the actual print technology through which the writer was communicating with them, these typographical oddities reinforced the sense that some kind of veil was being pierced; at the same time, the footnote offered opportunities for new veils, new masks and disguises, new ways in which the author could seem to argue with or undermine himself.

Yet this twentieth-century invention was not really new at all. One has only to look back to Jonathan Swift’s “A Tale of a Tub,” composed in the late seventeenth century and first published at the beginning of the eighteenth, to find a similar game being played with footnotes. I do not recommend reading the whole of “A Tale of a Tub”: like many of its twentieth-century descendants, it is so taken with the cleverness of its form that it disregards the problem of readable content. But the footnotes themselves can be a delight, as when Swift has his anonymous editor comment on the anonymous text, “I cannot guess the Author’s meaning here, which I would be very glad to know, because it seems to be of Importance.” Some of the notes are even embedded in little blank rectangles in the text itself, a format which the twentieth-century authors would surely have borrowed if they could, since it interrupts the tale even more pointedly than the normal kind of footnote.

You needn’t read far into “A Tale of a Tub” to get the point. In fact, the pinnacle of its self-undermining humor occurs a mere three or four pages into the text, where we are confronted with all the typographical elements battling together at once. A footnoting dagger-sign in the text is followed by four and a half lines of asterisks, amid which the words “Hiatus in MS.” are inscribed in smaller italic type. The text then resumes as before; but if we follow the dagger to its twin below, we get the Editor’s footnote:

Here is pretended a Defect in the Manuscript, and this is very frequent with our Author, either when he thinks he cannot say any thing worth Reading, or when he has no mind to enter on the Subject, or when it is a Matter of little Moment, or perhaps to amuse his Reader (whereof he is frequently very fond) or lastly, with some Satyrical Intention.

This single footnote is, to my mind, the best thing about “A Tale of a Tub,” just as the best part of Swift’s equally clever (and equally impenetrable) “Battle of the Books” lies in the first sentence of its preface, where the again anonymous author proposes to define satire for us. “Satyr,” he says, “is a sort of Glass, wherein Beholders do generally discover every body’s Face but their Own; which is the chief Reason for that kind Reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.” I think this comment goes a long way toward explaining why satiric authors like Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon were so loved by their late-twentieth-century audiences. It is not difficult to charm one’s readers when one seems, by giving them the wink, to include them in the inner circle of those who know better. Great satire, to last, needs to be offensive even to those who agree with it.

“A Modest Proposal” is Swift’s breathtaking achievement in this genre. Even now, nearly four hundred years after its first appearance, to read it is to be taken aback. It starts calmly enough, with potentially disturbing ideas masked in scrupulously inoffensive prose:

It is a melancholly Object to those, who walk through this great Town, or travel in the Country; when they see the Streets, the Roads, and Cabbin-doors crowded with Beggars of the Female Sex, followed by three, four, or six Children, all in Rags … I think it is agreed by all Parties, that this prodigious Number of Children in the Arms, or on the Backs, or at the Heels of their Mothers, and frequently of their Fathers, is in the present deplorable State of the Kingdom, a very great additional Grievance …

I think it is agreed: in that phrase lies the special brilliance of the voice that Swift has invented to put forth his little idea. A half-century before Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” and a century before Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian doctrine, he has come up with the simple expedient of maximizing public good by eliminating any sentimental concern for the individual. It is all a matter of pounds, shillings, and pence: those who have money will buy the new product from those who do not, and everybody will measurably benefit all round. For “no Gentleman would repine to give Ten Shillings for the Carcase of a good fat Child; which, as I have said, will make four dishes of excellent nutritive Meat, when he hath only some particular Friend, or his own Family, to dine with him.” Swift goes on to suggest that, when the market fully emerges, butchers will proliferate to handle these mothers’-milk-fed year-old offspring of the poor—“although I rather recommend buying the Children live, and dressing them hot from the Knife, as we do roasting Pigs.”

You do not need to know anything about famine conditions in eighteenth-century Ireland or the political relations between the Irish and the English to find this little essay chilling (though that knowledge will certainly enrich your reading of certain lines). The voice speaks to us now, about our poverty, our wealth, our political championing of the national good, and our penchant to make welfare decisions in light of budgetary considerations. We are eating those babies still. And Swift is onto us: this is the writer-reader pact turned on its head, with all that cozy winking and mutual self-congratulation turned into something horrifying. What he invented, in “A Modest Proposal,” was not just that fatuously self-satisfied narrative voice, but the whole idea of a counterfactual work of nonfiction. This is what I meant when I said earlier that even an essay could be made up and also truthful. Swift’s essay is both, and we can still hear its gruesome honesty echoing down the corridor of four centuries.

One can’t tell yet whether nonfiction novels like Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” and Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song” will last as long. Probably not, since very little literature endures as well as “A Modest Proposal” has. But I do not mean to criticize Mailer and Capote on this account. Their efforts to create a new genre that fit their own time were both brave and compelling. It is probably no coincidence that these two books, like Swift’s essay, dealt with the subject of murder, for that is a subject that habitually causes us to mingle lies with truths.

“In Cold Blood” came first chronologically, but it is “The Executioner’s Song” that has, over time, stayed with me as the greater book. My profound affection for Mailer, which stretches beyond this single work and covers much of his nonfiction writing, is something I can’t fully explain. I do not particularly care for war stories or boxing or Marilyn Monroe or ancient Egypt; I have little patience with masculine posturings about violence and sexual prowess. But there is something about Mailer’s voice that I have always loved—not the voice of the fiction, which often strikes me as crude and undeveloped, but the sinuous, chatty, abrasive, self-mocking voice of the essays and nonfiction books. Mailer can be just as crazy in his nonfiction as he is in his fiction (witness his bizarre theories about cancer, or about the communal need for blood revenge), but in the memoirs, essays, and political accounts, that craziness is couched in a prose style that knows itself better than we can ever know it. A good Norman Mailer sentence is a complicated work of art that can be unpacked in many ways, but at its heart there is always a simple mechanism: a two-way mirror that allows the author to reflect on himself even as we peer in at him.

The odd thing about “The Executioner’s Song” is that it manages to capture something of this reflective quality even though, for perhaps the first and only time in his nonfiction work, the author is utterly absent from its pages. In this case, the two-way mirror is there primarily for our benefit. If we are alert enough, we can see our avid, amoral selves reflected back at us even as we examine the ostensible subject: the murders committed in 1976 by Gary Gilmore, and the media circus that surrounded his execution. But this self-reflectiveness does not account for the full extent of the book’s value, nor for its allure. What makes it succeed as a narrative work of art is that Mailer, aided by his enormous respect for reality and history, is able to create credible literary characters out of actual people. This is not as easy as you might think. Read just about any news story about a killing or a trial and you will see what I mean, for in most cases all we get—if that—is a wisp or shred of character, a fleeting phrase or a single descriptive term. Only a novelist (as Janet Malcolm suggested) can really know about the interior lives of his characters; the nonfiction writers have to guess.

Malcolm happens to be one of the few writers whose journalistic characters, like Mailer’s, have the fullness of people in a novel. Yet her authorial voice couldn’t be more different from his. Where Mailer is loud and heated, Malcolm is subdued and cool. If he bodily intrudes on almost every situation he is observing—“The Executioner’s Song” is the great exception, in this regard—she tends instead to dwell in the shadows, emerging only intermittently. (I suppose “Iphigenia in Forest Hills” would be her equivalent exception, her single instance of placing herself onstage in the drama.)

I suspect I am drawn to them both for similar reasons, which may well be connected to the fact that all three of us are fascinated by murder stories. This preoccupation is not quite the same as the one that causes millions of people to consume mysteries (though I share that one, too). Mailer and Malcolm feed a somewhat different level of curiosity. The whodunnit aspect is relatively submerged in their work: we might know who the killer is from the very beginning of the story, or we might never find it out. Even the why remains relatively opaque, in a book like “The Executioner’s Song” or “The Journalist and the Murderer,” because part of the point of each of these books is that we cannot hope to plumb the causes and motivations behind extreme violence. The central characters themselves, those characters who began as real people, do not appear to understand fully why they have done what they are accused of doing; they either cannot or will not explain it to our satisfaction. And yet we have a desperate desire to know.

That, among many other things, is what Malcolm’s and Mailer’s books are about—our readerly desire to penetrate what Joseph Conrad, in “The Secret Agent,” wryly called the “impenetrable mystery … destined to hang for ever over this act of madness or despair.” Conrad’s wryness comes in large part from the fact that he is ostensibly quoting the overheated language of a newspaper account. (Another part of it, though, comes from the mere fact that he is Conrad: that kind of distance was always inherent in his worldview.) It is through newspapers that most of us get our first intimations of such murderous and self-murderous acts, so it should not be surprising that the news media themselves form a large part of the subject of both “The Journalist and the Murderer” and “The Executioner’s Song.” Yet it is surprising, in that we have rarely witnessed it before. We have hardly ever seen the newsgathering telescope turned in both directions at once. That dual perspective, that capacity to look both outward and inward at once, is part of what makes Malcolm’s and Mailer’s works “novel” in both senses: new, and also fiction-like. The great authorial innovation, which is both structural and ethical, lies in turning the reflecting mirror back on the investigating press at the same time as the reader is forced to credit the discoveries of that flawed press—a category which includes, naturally, the author of the work in hand.

Something like that double-sided mirror also appears in the work of Roberto Bolaño, one of the few recent fiction writers who has been able to bridge the gap between overt formal invention and a steadfast investigation of human behavior. Bolaño, a Chilean novelist who died in 2003 at a very young but also very old fifty, was obviously a fan of the French surrealist poets and their often bizarre followers. In book after book, his characters club together to start literary movements whose main function appears to be to confound bourgeois expectations. As elements in the novels, we are offered meandering and incomplete plot summaries, digressive anecdotes that overwhelm their settings, ridiculous journal titles, cut-and-paste versions of poetry, and all manner of stylistic tics that cover the ground between piquant entertainment and purposeful tedium. Sometimes Bolaño’s novels even partake of these experimental quirks as well as describing them. But always, underneath, lies a recognizable, morally astute, amused but serious narrative voice which cares about the fates of specific characters. This is as true of the unfinished “Woes of the True Policeman”—whose central figure, Amalfitano, is one of the most appealing characters in all of Bolaño’s work—as it is of fully achieved novels like “Distant Star” and “By Night in Chile.” And indeed, the fact that his final novel remains unfinished does little to damage its emotional impact on us, for it is in the nature of Bolaño’s fictional worlds that they trail off: incompletion is one aspect of their special kind of realism, just as our inability to know everything is one of the truths they leave us with.

If I had to name a single quality that makes Roberto Bolaño’s fiction compelling, it would be his capacity for stringent, hard-nosed sympathy. This is not the same as universal empathy or divinely inspired forgiveness or any of that softheaded nonsense. Bolaño is never blind to the crimes of humanity and of particular humans. They are, after all, his major subject. But he is able to create fictional works that enter equally into his own mind and the minds of others, even when those others are killers, or hypocrites, or madmen, or literary critics. It is not that he leaves behind notions of good and evil, but that he makes them seem inadequate as categories. There is a continuum that links his monsters and killers, on the one hand, and his writers and dreamers, on the other—or rather, a mirror, with those on opposite sides twinned in the reflective surface.

Overtly and covertly, the idea of twins and other paired figures pervades Bolaño’s universe. Sometimes he gives us a fictional stand-in for himself, a character named Arturo Belano. More often the narrator himself is a Bolaño-like figure who gets paired with someone else. At the end of “Distant Star,” for instance—a short novel about a right-wing Chilean killer named Carlos Wieder, in which twins, mirrorings, and pairings have riddled the plot—the Bolaño-esque narrator is sitting in a café in Catalonia, reading Bruno Schulz:

Then Carlos Wieder came in and sat down by the front window, three tables away. For a nauseating moment I could see myself almost joined to him, like a vile Siamese twin, looking over his shoulder at the book he had opened … He was staring at the sea and smoking and glancing at his book every now and then. Just like me, I realized with a fright, stubbing out my cigarette and trying to merge into the pages of my book.

“Sympathy” is too paltry and flaccid a word for the state of mind this describes. It is a powerful and unwilled form of identification, a Houdini-like vanishing act that allows Bolaño to merge with his scariest and most repellent creations as much as with his likable ones.

Nowhere in his work is this strategy clearer than in “By Night in Chile,” a short masterpiece published just three years before his death. The whole novel is a rant, or contemplation, or act of memory taking place in the mind of its main character, Father Urrutia Lacroix, also known as the literary critic H. Ibacache (he is his own twin, in other words, like all the other double-named villains in Bolaño’s work). Now on his deathbed, Father Urrutia is recalling his experiences as a Chilean literary figure before and after the coup. He thinks back on an encounter with Pablo Neruda; he remembers various figures of the left and (mostly) right; and he recounts—not just once, but three times—his glimpsed or imagined vision of the basement torture chamber where an American agent interrogated suspects during his wife’s literary salons. All of this is done in a vibrantly alive yet hushed voice that floats somewhere between willed stupidity and luminous knowledge, between self-communion and self-justification, between exhilaration and despair.

That there is indeed a hidden connection between despair and exhilaration is made explicit by a character in another novel, the female narrator of “Amulet”: “And when I heard the news it left me shrunken and shivering, but also amazed, because although it was bad news, without a doubt, the worst, it was also, in a way, exhilarating, as if reality were whispering in your ear: I can still do great things; I can still take you by surprise, silly girl, you and everyone else…”

“Amulet,” which was written immediately before “By Night in Chile,” was like a dry run leading up to the greater work. Bolaño made two advances in the later novel: he put the narrative into the mouth of a dislikable character, and he eliminated himself entirely from the book. There is no Arturo Belano in “By Night in Chile.” There is no Bolaño figure of any kind, unless we count the “wizened young man” of whom the priest seems so afraid, but he could be anybody, including Death. In “By Night in Chile,” the author has finally done exactly what he feared so greatly in “Distant Star”: that is, merged bodily with his most despicable character. Without even the separateness of “vile Siamese twins,” they have become a single person, a frightened and dying man living off the memories of his Chilean past, dreading the annihilation of himself and all his writings. There could be no character less like the real Roberto Bolaño than Father Urrutia—a member of Opus Dei, a smarmy literary careerist, a right-wing snob, a religious hypocrite, a worm in the service of Pinochet. And yet for the duration of “By Night in Chile” we are horribly and, yes, exhilaratingly inside him.

It is rightly said of W. G. Sebald, a writer with whom Bolaño is sometimes compared, that all his characters are essentially versions of their author. This, I think, is a flaw in his novels, particularly “Austerlitz,” which purports to be about someone else. A similar flaw afflicts an even greater writer, Franz Kafka, whose strongest works are almost unbearable because of the airlessness of their self-enclosure. Roberto Bolaño is an author who risks exactly this charge and then triumphs over it. Finally, it is not that all his creations are projections of himself, but the opposite: in his novels, he becomes a mere figment of his characters’ reality, a shadow in their dreams. Like the French surrealist poets he so admires, he carefully sets up the trick mirrors, constructs all the cunning aesthetic parallels, assures us that he is playing with us—and then smashes the whole construction to bits. When the dust clears, all that’s left (but it is more than enough) is a moment of true feeling.

The desire to innovate is not what lies at the heart of books like these. If it were, they would feel much flimsier, morally and aesthetically, than they do. In each case, the author’s primary aim is to reveal the truth, and the novelty of form is just a by-product of that aim. This is the paradox that lies behind formal inventiveness: you can only achieve an exemplary kind of novelty if it is not, primarily, what you are trying to achieve. As an end in itself, stylistic innovation is merely a way of showing off, a useless if mildly entertaining trapeze act; only when harnessed to the author’s fervent truth-telling does it become significant.

To tell the truth in literature, each era, perhaps even each new writer, requires a new set of authorial skills with which to rivet the reader’s attention. We are so good at lying to ourselves, at lapsing into passive acceptance, that mere transparency of meaning is insufficient. To absorb new and difficult truths, we need the jolt offered by a fresh style. Yet what is startling at first eventually hardens into either a mannerism or a tradition. Even Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” if read too early and too often (in a classroom setting, say), can come to seem a mere example of Satire. So every writer—every good writer, every writer who really has something to say—must figure out for herself a new form in which to say it. The figuring need not be conscious, and the innovation need not be dramatic or obvious; we can be affected by style without necessarily perceiving the sources of the effects. But if we do perceive them, they cannot detract from our sense of the writer’s seriousness (a seriousness that, in the case of an innovator like Mark Twain, may partake of a great deal of humor). The structural and stylistic eccentricities must seem—and be—essential, not merely ornamental.

LA BELLA VITA

John Armstrong

2014

The only popular thought about beauty today, the one that has the widest currency in the world, is the idea that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. It’s a kindly notion. It seeks to make peace between people who have very different tastes. People are delighted by wildly variant things and that’s how it should be, the thinking goes—so don’t get worked up trying to figure out which things are beautiful.

Yet the success of this generous approach keeps attention away from deeper, more important questions. Whether it is a Baroque Cathedral, the face of a child, or the coast of Sweden seen from a plane window, we have all had the mysterious experience of finding something beautiful. But what is actually going on when we find these things beautiful?

In 1795, the German dramatist and poet Friedrich Schiller published a book with a fearsome title—On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. It has never become well-known, which is a pity, because it contains some of our most useful insights into the nature and value of beauty. Schiller’s starting point is an analysis of the human condition. He wants to understand our delight in what we find beautiful. Instead of asking which things are beautiful, Schiller is curious about what is going on in us when we respond with this distinctive, intimate thrill and enthusiasm that leads us to say ‘that’s beautiful’. Different things might provoke this response in different people. But why do we have it at all?

Schiller thinks of human nature as an arena in which two powerful psychological drives are at work. On the one hand, there is the ‘sense’ drive which lives in the moment and seeks immediate gratification. It craves contact and possession. It can be coarse, as when one yearns to swig great draughts of beer; but it can also be elevated. Schiller associated the sense drive with his friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who longed to see things with his own eyes. Goethe was a direct observer, a natural empiricist who immersed himself in practical detail.

The second drive identified by Schiller was the ‘form’ drive: the inner demand for coherence over time, for abstract understanding and rational order. This drive, thought Schiller, seeks to leave behind the peculiarities of one’s own experience and discover universal principles. It is at the heart of justice—which is not about getting what you want for yourself—and is animated by principle. When we think that a person is entitled to a fair trial, we are motivated, Schiller says, by the rational ‘form’ drive. We are loyal to the abstract, general ideal of due process.

What he’s calling the sense drive and the form drive are powerful impulses in us. But they are often in conflict. The demands of the short term are at odds with the hopes of the longer view. Comfort and ease struggle against a sense of duty and responsibility. The allure of freedom clashes with the longing to be steadfast and rooted in existing commitments.

Schiller’s point is that human nature is fired by two divergent kinds of longing: we can’t hope to see why beauty matters to us unless we pay attention to them both. If we want to understand beauty, we can’t just talk about the things we find beautiful. We have to talk about our lives.

It might look as though Schiller is trying to resuscitate an old religious theme, the struggle between the flesh and the spirit. But there is a crucial difference. Thinkers ranging from St Paul to Immanuel Kant have all believed that one of these aspects of our nature—which they usually call the spiritual or rational—should triumph. But Schiller does not believe that one side is more important than the other. Rather, the two sides are in need of each other. If the sense drive dominates, we become brutish and superficial. If the form drive is too dominant, we become dry and callous. We need the two to interact harmoniously in order to see the role that beauty can play in our lives.

For Schiller, true beauty is whatever speaks powerfully to both sides of our nature at the same time. When we find something beautiful, we are called towards a vision of harmonious perfection. This is not only a quality in the object, but a longing in ourselves.

Take the statue of Apollo—known as the Belvedere—which allows us to feel the sensuous joy of a body at the peak of development and ease. Apollo looks strong but not too muscular, and agile but not in any way skittish or unstable. We admire, and maybe desire, his physique. Has he just unleashed an arrow, we wonder, or is he about to set the arrow to the string? Either way, he is active, energetic and concentrated, and our sense drive responds powerfully to him.

At the same time, the form drive is also at work in the Belvedere. We respond to the artistic structure to it, its proportion and unity. The hands extend away from the body but not too far. The technical problem of how to imply motion in a still object has been elegantly resolved. The folds of the cloak round the neck and over the arm have been coaxed into a clear rhythm. Here is a man of self-possession and poise.

In this case—a case of beauty—both drives are at full power, but they do not work against one another. Instead, they co-operate, and Schiller’s point is that to experience a statue in this dual way is to find it beautiful. More importantly, these experiences of beauty teach us how we should be. Not that we should try to adopt the pose or hairstyle of Apollo, or to pick up a bow and arrow. Rather, we should seek to realise in ourselves the fusion of the drives embodied by the sculpture.

Schiller was obsessed with the way we seem to be able to read a person’s character in his or her face. And he thought that the beauty of a face was—as with the statue of Apollo—dependent upon the implied integration of the otherwise divergent drives that power our lives.

Portrait of Madame Devaucay by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1807. Musée Condé, Chantilly. Photo by Getty

The portrait of Madame Devaucay, painted by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in Rome in 1807, exemplifies his ideal. In one sense, the portrait is highly organised. Each detail has been manipulated so that it fits with every other. The rounded back of the chair is calculated to take the eye to her mouth, but it also balances the curve of her draped arm. The point of her chin is exactly halfway between the top of her head and the neckline of her gown. Nothing is left to chance. A hugely determined will to order dominates the image, meaning that the form drive is at full stretch. And this clarity and organisation appear to belong to the sitter as well. She seems calm, lucid and intellectually elegant.

Equally, however, the sense drive is given free rein. She appears merely to be sitting in her natural way, as we might encounter her by chance in the corner of a salon. Maybe in a moment she will laugh or adjust her necklace. For all her finery, she looks as if she would be warm and understanding—the perfect person with whom to discuss one’s troubles. The beauty of the painting is the way it calls simultaneously to our need for control and our longing for tenderness and intimacy.

It’s not a problem for Schiller if someone happens not to be moved by the particular examples that excite him. What matters is that something does, and that something is what we call beautiful. This explains why beauty can be so moving—why it can make us weep. When we recognise beauty in a piece of music, or the graciousness of someone’s conduct, we see things that we know we have neglected or betrayed, and we feel an astonishing combination of anguish and delight.

Like many people today, Schiller worried that beauty was too connected to social status. And indeed, many loathsome people own beautiful things, and the possession of these objects does not seem to make them more humane or especially gracious. Schiller was convinced that to regard beauty as a luxury adornment or a social signifier was to miss the true potential of the experience, because for him the point of beauty is to elevate the soul.

Schiller was an enthusiastic reformer, desperate to usher in a newly just and noble society. But he had grown pessimistic about what political reform could achieve. In his lifetime, he had watched the French Revolution degenerate into terror and what looked to him like a combination of mob anarchy and cold, bureaucratic tyranny. He saw the ferocious ‘san-culottes’ of his day as the sense impulse acting alone, and the French government’s Committee of Public Safety as the form drive manifested in a fanatical devotion to purity. The Revolutionary situation in France seemed to exemplify—on the scale of society as a whole—what happens when the basic drives of human nature are split off from one another.

Schiller’s diagnosis of the ills of society ran parallel to his account of the strife within an individual life. What was missing, he argued in both cases, was a full, harmonious humanity, and he thought it would stay missing—both in the leaders and the people. And he came to the unnerving—but perhaps correct—conviction that ambitious social reform would always be frustrated until a much larger number of people had reached a higher level of inner development of the sort enabled by beauty.

Sometimes, we seek to understand thinkers such as Schiller out of curiosity, or to understand a larger trend in the history of ideas. We are fascinated to learn how the cosmos was conceived before the revelations of modern science. Or how prehistoric times were understood before the advent of archeology. We encounter such thoughts as observers, sympathetic perhaps, but not as potential converts. We do not expect to be convinced. We have progressed, after all, and we live in a new world. But every once in a while we encounter ideas from the past that are sorely missing from the present. And so it is with Schiller, whose notions about beauty are more than a dry record of what one man living in the town of Weimar at the end of the 18th century happened to believe. Instead, they are a guide, for how we might elevate ourselves with beauty today.

YOU’RE REGRETTING WRONG

Judith Shulevitz

2014

We are a nation gnawed by regret. The most visible symptom of this condition is celebrity regret, which sloshes through nearly every news cycle. “I regret doing that,” said Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman a few days after calling San Francisco 49er Michael Crabtree a “sorry receiver” on live television. “I regret the use of that word,” said Tom Perkins, co-founder of a powerhouse venture-capital firm, after comparing verbal attacks on America’s richest 1 percent to Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom against German Jews. “I deeply regret accepting legal gifts and loans” from a diet-supplement executive, said Virginia’s ex-governor, Bob McDonnell, after his indictment for corruption, though he didn’t say what there was to regret if the gifts and loans were legal. “I am sorry that so many people have been making insincere apologies,” wrote The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank in a recent sardonic column. “I hasten to add that I am not to blame for these terrible apologies, but I regret them deeply, all the same.”

These public shows of regret come off as cringe-worthy because they fall short of apologies and stink of self-justification, but in fact they express a real emotion and reveal a plain truth. Regret is what we feel when we realize that we’ve hurt ourselves—damaged our careers, tarnished our reputations, limited our options. Regret is not remorse, which is what we feel when we’ve hurt others. Remorse—from the Latin mordere, to bite—implies the nip of conscience. It’s remorse that we want from our public figures after they misbehave, and remorse that they’ll almost never admit to.

For one thing, their lawyers advise them not to. But the current explosion of self-absorbed self-criticism reflects more than just American litigiousness. We rue our actions even when we don’t have to apologize for them. Personally, I’m convinced that regret is the dark counterpart to American optimism, as widespread and characteristic. It’s certainly what I feel most of the time, and while I realize that that makes me sound neurotic, I refuse to regret the confession.

I do, however, regret almost everything else. If life is a series of choices, I know before I make them that most of mine will be bad. My lousy decision-making process includes more than just my endless vacillations over buying and spending, though those do launch me into melodramas of hope vying with self-disgust: Shall I wear skinny jeans, or will I embarrass myself? May I please not spend hours updating my operating system, or will days be lost when my MacBook Pro/iPhone/iPad crashes? I’m also talking about more consequential life choices, like which investment vehicle to put money into, where to live, and which school to send my children to.

People talk about “buyer’s remorse,” but the phrase gets it wrong. What I suffer from—and you do too—is buyer’s regret, because the bulk of our choices affect us more than other people. Buyer’s regret has much less moral import than buyer’s remorse but is more mortifying. If you do something to somebody, it’s awful, but there’s a chance that you can make amends. If you do something to yourself, you’re doomed to stew in gall for, well, however long you stew about such things.

Psychologists suspect that we regret more than we used to, because we make more choices than we used to. Economists spend a great deal of time nowadays trying to quantify both regret and “regret aversion,” because second thoughts, and the fear of having them, can have a volatile effect on markets. French novelist Michel Houellebecq likens our floundering in the face of proliferating goods and services to purgatory, “an endless wandering between eternally modified product lines.” So maybe the cold liberty of individual choice is God’s judgment upon our insatiable culture. But more effable causes have also wrought this brave new world, more of them than I can itemize without writing a book. (In any case, it has been written. It’s called The Paradox of Choice, it’s by psychologist Barry Schwartz, and everyone should read it.) There’s the deregulation of utilities and media; the supposedly empowering transfer of decision-making from experts to ignorant laypeople like me; and most of all, the rise of the free-agent approach to labor relations that requires the perpetual crafting and maintenance of Brand Me.

And yet, although the list of choices required of even a minimally functional person is now very long and very tiresome, its lengthiness alone doesn’t explain the psychic torment it can occasion. So here are a few theories about that. First, regret hurts because we venerate competence. Personal success is as much an American fetish as freedom of choice, so we feel duty-bound to make the kinds of decisions that lead to the best possible outcomes—to maximize our utility, as the economists say. If you subscribe to the cult of competence, it will feel like a bigger sin to sabotage yourself than others. The shame you suffer when caught doing something wrong will have less to do with having violated someone’s trust than with knowing you now look stupid or crazy.

Second, regret is the product of a simple but discomfiting contradiction. Though we have near-infinite options, we have a finite amount of time to sort through them. Given how much we prize proficient decision-making, this puts us in a bind: We can never obtain enough information to choose wisely. And that leads to a paralysis akin to the learned helplessness that experimental psychologists like to induce in dogs and rats through the administration of random, unavoidable shocks. Consider the famous experiment (on humans) about the effect of too much choice. When psychologists set up a booth in an upscale food store offering samples of different high-end jams, the percentage of tasters they converted into buyers was ten times higher when they put out six jars than when they put out 24. Variations on this experiment have been conducted over the years with Godiva chocolates, microwave ovens, and various other products, and the message is always the same: more choice, less action.

Here are two more findings about regret that psychologists have repeatedly replicated. One, we deplore loss more than we enjoy gain, just as we remember unhappy experiences more vividly than happy ones. And two, in the heat of the moment, we brood more obsessively about the dumb things we did, and as we age, we grieve more about all the things we failed to do.

Finding number two strikes me as the more disheartening. I have come to see it as the lifelong tyranny of the counterfactual. I can never stop dreaming of what might have been, because it will always be better than what is. And this turns regret into a sort of existential tragicomedy. The regret I’m afraid of being pierced by, right here and now, traps me inside the farcicality of a detergent commercial. At some inadmissible level, I really do fear that buying the wrong product will lead to the wrong me—and so do you, because the brand-makers have always already outsmarted us both. But the regret we endure when we look back at everything we didn’t do, perhaps because we wasted so much time not being stupid, is the stuff of despair. In literature, it may also be the stuff of redemption. Think of Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, who understands on his deathbed how meaningless his careerist life has been and is thereby freed to love. But that’s art, not life. Me, I’m already anticipating my future regrets, but that probably just means I’ll do nothing about them.

THE PROBLEM WITH TOO MUCH INFORMATION

Dougald Hine

2014

On my morning bus into town, every teenager and every grown-up sits there staring into their little infinity machine: a pocket-sized window onto more words than any of us could ever read, more music than we could ever listen to, more pictures of people getting naked than we could ever get off to. Until a few years ago, it was unthinkable, this cornucopia of information. Those of us who were already more or less adults when it arrived wonder at how different it must be to be young now. ‘How can any kid be bored when they have Google?’ I remember hearing someone ask.

The question came back to me recently when I read about a 23-year-old British woman sent to prison for sending rape threats to a feminist campaigner over Twitter. Her explanation for her actions was that she was ‘off her face’ and ‘bored’. It was an ugly case, but not an isolated one. Internet trolling has started to receive scholarly attention—in such places as the Journal of Politeness Research and its counterpart, the Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict—and ‘boredom’ is a frequently cited motive for such behaviour.

It is not only among the antisocial creatures who lurk under the bridges of the internet that boredom persists. We might no longer have the excuse of a lack of stimulation, but the vocabulary of tedium is not passing into history: the experience remains familiar to most of us. This leads to a question that goes deep into internet culture and the assumptions with which our infinity machines are packaged: exactly what is it that we are looking for?

‘Information wants to be free’ declared Stewart Brand, 30 years ago now. Cut loose from its original context, this phrase became one of the defining slogans of internet politics. With idealism and dedication, the partisans of the network seek to liberate information from governments and corporations, who of course have their own ideas about the opportunities its collection and control might afford. Yet the anthropomorphism of Brand’s rallying cry points to a stronger conviction that runs through much of this politics: that information is itself a liberating force.

This conviction gets its charge, I suspect, from the role that these technologies played as a refuge for the Californian counterculture of the 1960s. Brand himself embodies the line that connects the two: showing up to meet Ken Kesey out of jail in the opening of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)—‘a thin blond guy with a blazing disk on his forehead… an Indian bead necktie on bare skin and a white butcher’s coat with medals from the King of Sweden on it’—then creating the Whole Earth Catalog, the bible of the back-to-the-land movement, or, as Steve Jobs would later call it, ‘Google in paperback form’.

Before there was a web for search engines to index, Brand had co-founded the WELL (the ‘Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link’), a bulletin board launched from the Whole Earth offices in 1985. Its members pushed through the limitations of the available technology to discover something resembling a virtual community. At the core of this group were veterans of the Farm, one of the few hippie communes to outlast the early years of idealism and chaos; in the WELL, these and other paisley-shirted pioneers shared their experiences with the people who would go on to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990 and Wired magazine in 1993.

This line from counterculture to cyberculture is not the only one we can draw through the prehistory of our networked age, nor is it necessarily the most important. But it carried a disproportionate weight in the formation of the culture and politics of the web. When the internet moved out of university basements and into public consciousness in the 1990s, it was people such as Brand, Kevin Kelly (founding editor of Wired) and John Perry Barlow (founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) who were able to combine the experience of years spent in spaces such as the WELL with the ability to tell strong, simple stories about what this was and why it mattered.

The journalist John Markoff, himself an early contributor to the WELL, gave a broader history of how the counterculture shaped personal computing in his book What the Dormouse Said (2005). As any Jefferson Airplane fan can tell you, what the Dormouse said was: ‘Feed your head! Feed your head!’ The internet needed a story that would make sense to those who would never be interested in the TCP/IP protocol, and the counterculture survivors gave it one—the great escapist myth of their era: turn on, tune in, drop out. In this new version of the fable, information took the place of LSD, the magic substance whose consumption could transform the world.

The trouble is that information doesn’t nourish us. Worse, in the end, it turns out to be boring.

A writer friend was asked to join a pub quiz team in the village where he has lived for more than half a century. ‘You know lots of things, Alan,’ said the neighbour who invited him. The neighbour had a point: Alan is the most alarmingly knowledgeable person I know. Still, he declined politely, and was bemused for days. There can be a certain point-scoring pleasure in demonstrating the stockpile of facts one has accumulated, but it is in every other sense a pointless kind of knowledge.

This is more than just intellectual snobbery. Knowledge has a point when we start to find and make connections, to weave stories out of it, stories through which we make sense of the world and our place within it. It is the difference between memorising the bus timetable for a city you will never visit, and using that timetable to explore a city in which you have just arrived. When we follow the connections—when we allow the experience of knowing to take us somewhere, accepting the risk that we will be changed along the way—knowledge can give rise to meaning. And if there is an antidote to boredom, it is not information but meaning.

There is a connection, though, between the two. Information is perhaps the rawest material in the process out of which we arrive at meaning: an undifferentiated stream of sense and nonsense in which we go fishing for facts. But the journey from information to meaning involves more than simply filtering the signal from the noise. It is an alchemical transformation, always surprising. It takes skill, time and effort, practice and patience. No matter how experienced we become, success cannot be guaranteed. In most human societies, there have been specialists in this skill, yet it can never be the monopoly of experts, for it is also a very basic, deeply human activity, essential to our survival. If boredom has become a sickness in modern societies, this is because the knack of finding meaning is harder to come by.

It is only fair to note that the internet is not altogether to blame for this, and that the rise of boredom itself goes back to an earlier technological revolution. The word was invented around the same time as the spinning jenny. As the philosophers Barbara Dalle Pezze and Carlo Salzani put it in their essay ‘The Delicate Monster’ (2009):

Boredom is not an inherent quality of the human condition, but rather it has a history, which began around the 18th century and embraced the whole Western world, and which presents an evolution from the 18th to the 21st century.

For all its boons, the industrial era itself brought about an endemic boredom peculiar to the division of labour, the distancing of production from consumption, and the rationalisation of working activity to maximise output.

My point is not that we should return to some romanticised preindustrial past: I mean only to draw attention to contradictions that still shape our post-industrial present. The physical violence of the 19th-century factory might be gone, at least in the countries where industrialisation began, but the alienation inherent in these ways of organising work remains.

When the internet arrived, it seemed to promise a liberation from the boredom of industrial society, a psychedelic jet-spray of information into every otherwise tedious corner of our lives. In fact, at its best, it is something else: a remarkable helper in the search for meaningful connections. But if the deep roots of boredom are in a lack of meaning, rather than a shortage of stimuli, and if there is a subtle, multilayered process by which information can give rise to meaning, then the constant flow of information to which we are becoming habituated cannot deliver on such a promise. At best, it allows us to distract ourselves with the potentially endless deferral of clicking from one link to another. Yet sooner or later we wash up downstream in some far corner of the web, wondering where the time went. The experience of being carried on these currents is quite different to the patient, unpredictable process that leads towards meaning.

The latter requires, among other things, space for reflection—allowing what we have already absorbed to settle, waiting to see what patterns emerge. Find the corners of our lives in which we can unplug, the days on which it is possible to refuse the urgency of the inbox, the activities that will not be rushed. Switch off the infinity machine, not forever, nor because there is anything bad about it, but out of recognition of our own finitude: there is only so much information any of us can bear, and we cannot go fishing in the stream if we are drowning in it. As any survivor of the 1960s counterculture could tell us, it is best to treat magic substances with respect—and to be careful about the dosage.