Today, this strikes me as terrible reasoning. I now understand that love is a rare and valuable thing, and you don’t get to choose its object. You just go around getting hung up on the all the least convenient things—and if the only obstacle in your way is a little extra work, then that’s the wonderful gift right there.
from The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
Stumbled across this fantastic article yesterday encouraging everyone to talk to strangers. My favourite bit:
People don’t usually go around telling strangers stuff – it’s why God invented talk radio – and that’s why you have to ask them questions. When people start their answer, those first few clacks of the tongue will reveal an ocean of information: where their grandparents’ grandparents’ came from; whether they smoke and drink whiskey; whether or not they’ve chipped any teeth after falling against a table-edge or shoreline rock; whether they prefer garlic or curry; whether they are grateful that you asked or annoyed that you bothered them.
And you know, those answers are the stuff of life. So go get some.
Two quotes from Secondary Worlds that I find shocking (and imagine that others will, too). They’re both restrictive and yet somehow liberating.
#1 (against O’Connor-esque art, perhaps?)
It is necessary that we know about the evil in the world, about past evil that we may know what man is capable of, and be on the watch for it in ourselves, and about present evil so that we may take political action to eradicate it. This knowledge it is one of the duties of the historian to impart. But the poet cannot get into this business without defiling himself and his audience. To write a play, that is to construct a secondary world, about Auschwitz, for example, is wicked: author and audience may try to pretend that they are morally horrified, but in fact they are passing an entertaining evening together, in the aesthetic enjoyment of horrors.
(page 84, “The World of the Sagas”)
#2 (against art as evangelism)
In a magico-polytheistic culture all events are believed to be caused by personal powers who can be understood and to some extent controlled by speech, and the nearest that man can come to the concept of necessity is in the myth of the Fates who determine events by whim; in such a culture, therefore, poets are the theologians, the sacred mouthpieces of society: it is they who teach the myths and rescue from oblivion the great deeds of ancestral heroes. That to which the imagination by its nature responds with excitement, namely, the manifestly extraordinary and powerful, is identified with the Divine. The poet is one whose words are equal to his divine subjects, which can only happen if he is divinely inspired. The coming of Christ in the form of a servant who cannot be recognized by the eye of flesh and blood, only by the eye of faith, puts an end to all such claims. The imagination is to be regarded as a natural faculty the subject matter of which is the phenomenal world, not its creator. For a poet brought up in a Christian society, it is perfectly possible to write a poem on a Christian theme, but when he does so, he is concerned with it as an aspect of religion, that is to say, a human cultural fact, like other facts, not as a matter of faith. The poet is not there to convert the world.
(pages 137-138, “Words and the Words”)
Thoughts?
“Impenetrable Forest,” from The Tent by Margaret Atwood.
The person you have in mind is lost. That’s the picture I’m getting. He believes he is lost in the middle of an impenetrable forest. His head is full of trees. Branches he’s bumping into. Brambles he’s tangled up in. Paths that lead nowhere. Animals that jeer at him and run away. Here and there the glimpse of an elusive maiden, wearing a dress of what appears to be white cheesecloth. I’m getting some insects too, the stinging variety. This is not pleasant. The sun is sinking. The shadows are darkening. Things could hardly be worse.
Then there’s you. Where do you come into it? You’re not one to resist an opportunity, the sort of opportunity he presents. Some would call it meddling, but you think of it as helpfulness. I apologize for being so frank but I’m just the messenger. Here you come, descending in our pinkish cloud, glowing like a low-wattage light bulb or an aquarium in a chintzy bar. Feathers sprout from your shoulders, rays of light shoot out from you, silver-and-gold confetti wafts down from you like metallic dandruff. It does not occur to you that your dress is covered with tiny fish hooks. On some of them scraps of bait are still hanging: cricket wings, worm torsos, old bank deposit slips.
There there, you say. A whisk here, a flick there, with your magic wand – transparent plastic, with a miniature motorcar in it that slides up and down in a sparkly fluid when shaken – and the brambles vanish. The sun reverses directions, the paths straighten out, dawn occurs.
Voila! you say. Your debts are paid, your emotional problems are solved, your illnesses are cured. Not only that, but your childhood sorrows – the ones that held you back and bogged you down – they’ve been erased. Now you can get on with it.
He looks at you without gratitude. What is this it I’m supposed to be getting on with? he says.
You don’t know? you ask, with an irritation you try to conceal. I’ve come down into this stupid woodlot, gone to major trouble, cleared away a lifetime of junk for you, and you still don’t know?
You don’t understand much, he says. Why do you think I was lost in the impenetrable forest in the first place?
I am the prodigal returning.
After reading Austin’s celebratory post last week, I realized that I really missed HPN. Plus, blogging here is way more fun than blogging by myself. So I’m moving back in and will hopefully coax the rest of you to do the same. HPN, version 3.0.
I’ve been reading Bleak House sporadically over the past year. I’m over 300 pages in, but I’m still not at the halfway point, so I find it easy to lose interest and put it down for a while. But I’m learning to appreciate Dickens, which is good. Case in point: descriptions.
During the whole time consumed in the slow growth of this family tree, the house of Smallweed, always early to go out and late to marry, has strengthened itself in its practical character, has discarded all amusements, discountenanced all story-books, fairy tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact, that it has had no child born to it, and that the complete little men and women whom it has produced, have been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds. (Ch. XXI)
That last sentence is priceless. So absurd and yet so vivid.
Emma over at the Avery blog quotes someone else who quotes Auden on his daydream curriculum for a college. Very enjoyable. My favorite part:
3) The library would contain no books of literary criticism, and the only critical exercise required of students would be the writing of parodies.
Ironic, considering that Auden wrote several thick volumes of what is best described as criticism. Still, can’t say I blame him. One would hope that we could one day learn to read and absorb without requiring a literary dissection or lobotomy first.
You ever actually tried to take something off the internet? It’s like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.*
* quote courtesy Joe Rogan