Book by Book (12 page)

“It is my belief,” said Joseph Conrad, “that no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.” Our reflexive bent is to excuse, somehow, even our most reprehensible behavior. Self-justification, rationalization, “blaming the victim,” “appropriate response”—all
these, and many other phrases, are generally feints to elude the truth: We have done wrong and either wish to continue to do so, or hope to deny that we have done so.

Benjamin Franklin—the echt American moralist—long ago recognized this rationalizing side to all of us: “So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.” As Conrad—the author of
Lord Jim
thought a lot about moral weakness—further said, the so-called wisdom of life too often “consists in putting out of sight all the reminders of our folly, of our weakness, of our mortality, all that makes against our efficiency—the memory of our failures, the hints of our undying fears, the bodies of our dead friends.”

The moral essayist and activist Simone Weil made of her very life a critique of modern society. Austere and unswerving in her beliefs, she ultimately died of self-imposed malnutrition, refusing to eat more than those interned by the Nazis. Before her death, she wrote brilliantly about education, the need for roots, the religious impulse, and much else. In one of her greatest essays she analyzes
The Iliad
as what she calls “the poem of force” or “might.” It opens:

The true hero, the true subject, the center of the
Iliad
is force. Force as man's instrument, force as man's master, force before
which human flesh shrinks back. The human soul, in this poem, is shown always in its relation to force: swept away, blinded by the force it thinks it can direct, bent under the pressure of the force to which it is subjected. Those who had dreamed that force, thanks to progress, now belonged to the past, have seen the poem as a historic document; those who see that force, today as in the past, is at the center of all human history, find in the
Iliad
its most beautiful, its purest mirror.

Though force does rule much of the world, it sometimes takes on various guises, appearing as social pressure, the constricting cult of bureaucratic habit, the old excuse of “I'm just carrying out orders,” Kafka's world of
The Trial
and
The Castle.
Beware of such officialism. Nearly all the theories, abstractions, hierarchies, and isms of contemporary culture tend toward the same end: to saddle people, in all their glorious and individual messiness, with simple, easy-to-read labels. That which is unique is treated as generic. And the generic, unlike the unique, is always expendable.

It's so easy to be co-opted by this kind of thinking, to sacrifice kindness and human feeling to standardized procedures and tidy regulation. “The terrifying thing is that systems grow too big for men and hold them in a satanic grip, the builders no less than the victims of the system, much as large edifices and spires, created by men's hands, tower high above us, dominate us, yet may collapse over our heads and bury us.” This was said by Etty Hillesum, not long before she died in a World War II concentration camp.

Alas, all too often, as the novelist Henry de Montherlant noted, if you look back at history you find that “the world has been laid
waste to ensure the triumph of conceptions that are now as dead as the men that died for them.” Nationalism, religious shibboleths, racial purity—the heart sinks. Civilization, said the Spanish essayist Jose Ortega y Gasset, “is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.” We have a ways to go.

One of the reasons we should read widely is to avoid falling into the more obvious rifts of prejudice and paranoia. Shirley Jackson's famous story “The Lottery,” in which murder is sanctioned by civic tradition, reminds us of how easy can be the slide into accepting as normal what is in fact utterly horrible. “There has always been a lottery.” Books, by their very nature and variety, help us grow in empathy for others, in tolerance and awareness. But they should increase our skepticism as well as our humanity, for all good readers know how easy it is to misread. What counts is to stay receptive and open, to reserve judgment and try to foresee consequences, to avoid the facile conclusion and be ready to change one's mind. No matter how sure you may be of a course of action, no matter how committed to any belief, remember Oliver Cromwell's plaintive entreaty: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”

As Terry Pratchett reminds us in one of his comic novels, “the truth will make you fret.” People complain about the news, that it's “all bad,” nothing but hurricanes and wars and rampant corruption and higher taxes and genocide and terrorism. Alas, this is
the world, my friend. If you don't like what you read about in the paper, you need to go out and help change things for the better.

Newspapers after all aren't called heralds and beacons or even—in Youngstown, Ohio—the Vindicator for nothing. Our great dailies aim to give us the facts, to tell us the truth, and by so doing to make us think hard about society, politics, almost everything. A free press really is the greatest bastion of democracy.

That sounds corny. And, of course, newspapers sometimes fail to live up to their own ideals. (Which is why they all run correction boxes.) But people who take the daily paper, if only to glance at the headlines and catch the sports scores, or to check out new scientific breakthroughs and read the book reviews, find themselves better connected with the life of their time. The news will almost certainly make you fret. If it didn't, reporters wouldn't be doing their job. But how else can you be an informed citizen, not only of your own country but of the world?

The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.                           Velázquezs   
— GLENN GOULD

To interest is the first duty of art; no other excellences will ever begin to compensate for failure in this, and very serious faults will be covered by this, as by charity.—C. S. Lewis

The perfection of art is to conceal art.—Quintilian

We were put on this earth to make things.—W. H. Auden

I am only an entertainer who has understood his time. —Pablo Picasso

My desire and my hope is to gain honor, fame, and money. —Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

An artist cannot do anything slovenly.—Jane Austen

A picture is—primarily—a conjunction of colored planes. —Giotto

Art and science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars. —William Blake

It is not the parts that matter, it is their combination. —Vladimir Nabokov

The trouble with me is I have no imagination.—James Joyce

A poem is never finished, it is only abandoned.—Paul Valéry

The reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust—the female spider or the queen-bee whose embrace is death. —Robert Graves

A pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations, developed through a temporal scheme.—Cleanth Brooks (defining a poem)

Slowly now, nice neat letters; / The point is to do things well/not just to do them. —Antonio Machado

Genuine criticism will never seek to prove but to point out. —E. R. Curtius

Our intercourse with the dead is better than our intercourse with the living. There are only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all derive from inanimate things—books, pictures, and the face of nature.—William Hazlitt

The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. —G. K. Chesterton

There is a moment when every work in the process of being created benefits from the glamour attaching to uncompleted sketches. ‘Don't touch it any more,' cries the amateur.
It is then that the true artist takes his chance.
—Jean Cocteau

The only real voyage of discovery, the only Fountain of Youth, consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of a hundred others, in seeing the hundred universes that each of them sees. And this
we can do with a Renoir or a Debussy; with such as they we fly indeed from star to star.—Marcel Proust

“You see this important mass of colour here,” the art critic Roger Fry once remarked during a lecture, indicating with his pointer the body of Christ on the cross.

Our age, like any other, is an age of ideology, where works of art are regularly judged by their faithfulness to various political or social models. At one extreme, stern traditionalists call for a return to a high Victorian curriculum, based on the age-old classics, the melancholy, no-nonsense wisdom of Samuel Johnson and a pious Arnoldian seriousness about literature as a corrective to life. At the other extreme, tenured professors gaily announce that books are outmoded and we should be studying, with the devotion of Talmudic scholars, “reality” TV programs, biker magazines, and rap lyrics.

There are some thinkers who maintain that everyone is right, that art and literature thrive on just this conflict and excess and abundance. Dialectic is a sign of health. To further adopt a pseudo-Hegelian perspective, we should welcome the work of previously marginalized groups, not because to do so is “fair” but because by integrating their work into the canon, art as a whole is reinvigorated, enlarged, made new again. How else can we keep things fresh and exciting?

Still, there remains another view, whose advocate is Walter Pater (1839-94). Usually called “art for art's sake,” Pater's aesthetic doctrine might be better described as “art for my sake.” In a series of essays, collected in books like
The Renaissance, Appreciations
, and
Imaginary Portraits
, this shy, retiring Oxford don—plain of face, homosexual, and heterodox in his religious beliefs—proposed that the purpose of art is simply to give personal pleasure. Painting, poetry, and music don't teach us moral lessons or make us better citizens. No, they enrich our all-too-brief lives by investing each moment with the highest quality. Through art we may not live any longer, but we can live better, more intensely. As one of Pater's best-known purple patches has it: “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”

That's from the postscript to
The Renaissance.
In its preface Pater impudently defines the essential critical act: “What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? And if so, what sort or degree of pleasure?”

For Pater the function of aesthetic education must be to create “a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.” Yet he insists one should “remember always that beauty exists in many forms” and that “all
periods, types, schools of taste, are in themselves equal.” In an era that emphasized socially responsible, at times almost civic art (among writers, think of John Ruskin, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold), the timid Pater was deeply subversive, his antinomian instincts calling always for more freedom, passion, and delight. He is, after all, the man who looked to the Renaissance as a time of “brilliant sins and exquisite amusements.” Against the strictures of his own moralizing age, he maintained that the wider, deeper, and more various our aesthetic sympathies, the richer will be our lives at every moment.

People who live near the seashore no longer hear the waves. Our senses are deadened by the routine and quotidian. Art, though, makes the familiar strange again, so that it can be freshly perceived. This necessary “defamiliarization” or “enstrangement”— to use terms coined in the 1920s by a group of critics called the Russian formalists—explains why true art often appears outlandish, disturbing, grotesque, or very, very puzzling: It is trying to break through the automatization of our dulled response to the world around us. The novelist's task, as Joseph Conrad famously said, is simply “to make you see.”