After
finishing C. S. Lewis’s
(1898–1963) English Literature in the
Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama)
(1954) last autumn, I was curious to then read Sir. Philip Sidney’s Arcadia(1580): a strange work of mostly prose, but interspersed with much poetry.
I’d read Sidney’s Apology(1580)
several times and mostly understood it, but the Arcadia was more ambiguous. When reading it, sometimes (at least the
older version) felt like a medieval romance (like the first part of the Roman de la Rose[c.
1230]). At other times, the Arcadia
felt like an ancient epic (the Argonautica(c. 200
BC) comes to mind). Either way, Arcadia
is definitely not a novel, though it is a fantasy.
And it also
reminded me much of J.
R. R. Tolkien’s (1892–1973) works—another fantasy world told mostly in
prose but containing much poetry. Both authors take these old literary forms
and add something fresh to them by mixing them together. They are “fun,†even
when their tones turn toward things serious. In this regard, they have mirth.
This freshness of song and speech also reminded somewhat of Miguel Cervantes (1547–1616) Don Quijote (1605, 1616), which contains a few handfuls of sonnets, and along these lines we might add Johanna Spyri’s (1827–1901) Heidi’s Lehr- und Wanderjahre (Heidi’s Years of Wandering and Learning) (1880) and Heidi Kann Brauchen, was es Gelernt Hat (How Heidi Used What She Learned) (1881) as well as John Bunyan’s (1628–1688) The Pilgrim’s Progress(1678) with their Protestant hymns and songs intermixed with prose tales.
But the going-back-and-forthness between prose and poetry in Sidney’s Arcadia and Tolkien’s Middle-Earth mostly reminded me of classic Hollywood musicals. (I’m a South Pacific(1958) and My Fair Lady(1964) kind of guy.)
Post Scriptum
Finally, with feelings more of somberness than sadness do we wish Christopher Tolkien (1924–2020) and his kin the best as he now journeys westward toward the Grey Havens. His task as steward to his father’s work is now complete. And I expect the father to soon say to all around him, “This is my son, with whom I am well pleased.â€
The title character of Johanna Spyri’s (1827-1901) Heidis Lehr– und Wanderjahre (Heidi’s Years of Wandering and Learning) (c. 1880) and its sequel Heidi Kann Brauchen, Was Es Gelernt Hat (How Heidi Used What She Learned) (c. 1881) lives in a true Arcadian paradise along the slopes of the Swiss Alps:
By now the sun was ready to go down behind the mountains. Heidi sat on the ground again and gazed at the bluebells and the rock-roses glowing in the evening light. The grass seemed tinted with gold, and the cliffs above began to gleam and sparkle….[1]
May had come. From every height the overflowing brooks were rushing down into the valley. Warm, bright sunshine lay on the mountain. It had grown green again; the last traces of snow had melted away, and the first little flowers were peeping up out of the fresh grass. The spring wind blew through the fir trees and shook off the old, dark needles, so that the young, bright green ones could come out and dress the trees in splendor. High above, the old robber-bird was swinging his wings in the blue air, and around the Alm hut the golden sunshine lay warm on the ground. [2]
Yes, as Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
has taught us beforehand, Heidi’s world is founded in that literary setting of
poetic pastoral that so often can become (as Americans say) “tacky†with its
kitsch motifs, followed by the inevitable banality in meaning behind them. As
Johnson puts it:
In consequence of these original errours, a thousand precepts have been given, which have only contributed to perplex and confound. Some have thought it necessary that the imaginary manners of the golden age should be universally preserved, and have therefore believed, that nothing more could be admitted in pastoral, than lilies and roses, and rocks and streams, among which are heard the gentle whispers of chaste fondness, or the soft complaints of amorous impatience. In pastoral, as in other writings, chastity of sentiment ought doubtless to be observed, and purity of manners to be represented; not because the poet is confined to the images of the golden age, but because, having the subject in his own choice, he ought always to consult the interest of virtue. (Rambler no. 37, July 24, 1750)
Johnson is almost always right about this sort of thing.
Still, it is good for children to read about the world Heidi lives in, for
though it is a beautiful world, it is certainly not a paradise. Through her
innocence and innate goodness, Heidi “was never unhappy, for she could always
find something about her to enjoy.â€[3] But
those around her must struggle (and it’s important for children to read about
this contrast, for depicting it is one of the things good fiction, for any age,
tends to do).
There is, for example, the goatherd boy Peter, who has
literally never eaten is fill, and a grand moment where he marvels when Heidi
gives him some of her leftovers as they share a mountainside lunch.[4]
And there is Heidi’s friend from Frankfurt, Clara, a girl (temporarily?) lame,
perhaps from polio. Life is certainly not a paradise for Clara, which is one
reason while Heidi comes to visit her. [5] There
is the doctor who suffers melancholy and finds relief in the mountains. [6] And
finally, there is Heidi’s grandfather, whom she loves dearly, but is someone
who remains stubborn (for reasons never quite explained) in his unforgiveness
toward the town beneath his mountain cabin.
But the Arcadia of the Heidi books is quite
different from the original Arcadia
(1580) by Sir Philip
Sidney (1584-1586), which is a work that paints a world without children,
but also a world full of young love and (occasionally) lust, as readers find at
the end of Book III:
   Thus hath each part his beauty’s part; But how the Graces do impart To all her limbs a special grace, Becoming every time and place, Which doth e’en beauty beautify, And most bewitch the wretched eye! How all this is but a fair inn Of fairer guest which dwells within, Of whose high praise, and praiseful bliss, Goodness the pen, heav’n paper is; The ink immortal fame doth lend. As I began, so must I end:    No tongue can her perfections tell,    In whose each part all pens may dwell.[7]
Upon encountering Sidney’s fictional work, I expected
(as Johnson has taught me) green pastures and white sheep abounding. But here Sidney’s
prose fiction rarely has anything to say about landscape. Instead there is
a wild variety of poetry sprinkled throughout this strange prose creation, some
of it beautiful, but some of it too rugged (in its style and structure) to be
recited aloud with ease.
And I don’t know how reading these two highly
contrasting works will ever make me a better writer (or reader), but after
having read them, I do feel both better informed and thoroughly refreshed from
the workaday world of Austin, Texas. As the doctor says to Heidi after
recovering from his melancholy:
It is good to be on the mountain. Body and soul get well there, and life becomes happy again.â€[8]
[1] Spyri, Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre (Heidi’s Years of Wandering and Learning)
in Heidi, illustrated Arthur Jameson,
trans. Helene S. White [?], (Racine, WI: Whitman Publishing Co., 1944) I, iii,
p. 36.
[2] Spyri, Heidi Kann Brauchen, Was Es Gelernt Hat (How Heidi Used What She Learned) (c.
1881) in Heidi, illustrated Arthur
Jameson, trans. Helene S. White [?], (Racine, WI: Whitman Publishing Co., 1944)
II, vi, p. 183.
[3] Spyri, Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre (Heidi’s Years of Wandering and Learning)
I, iv, p. 40.
[4] Spyri, Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre (Heidi’s Years of Wandering and Learning)
I, iii, p. 32.
[5] Spyri, Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre (Heidi’s Years of Wandering and Learning)
I, vi.
[6] Spyri, Heidi Kann Brauchen, Was Es Gelernt Hat (How Heidi Used What She Learned) II, iii.
[7] Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia) (c. 1580), ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones, (New York: Oxford
UP, 1973; 2008) 210–11.
[8] Spyri, Heidi Kann Brauchen, Was Es Gelernt Hat (How Heidi Used What She Learned) II,
iii, p. 164.
Until
recently, I’d never heard of George Sessions
Perry (1910–1956), even though for the past several years I’ve made my way
to his hometown of Rockdale, Milam County, Texas to eat barbeque and attend rodeos.
Sessions was a writer, mostly of fiction, and most notably for his 1942 novel Hold Autumn in Your Hand, a book which
tells the story of a white tenant farmer family in the central-eastern portion
of the Lone Star State.
There is a
moment in the novel’s sixth chapter that particularly stands out: a scene where
a family wants to send their daughter to school on a cold and rainy morning until
they realize she has no coat. What follows is a three-page description of how the
daughter’s coat comes to be produced—a scene somewhat moving in its intentions,
somewhat sappy in its melodrama––somewhat reminiscent of the rugged
practicalities behind the madness of the protagonist in Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 short
story “Шинель†(“The
Overcoatâ€), and yet also somewhat resembling the soft sentimentality running
through the narrator of Dolly Parton’s ballad of a “Coat of Many Colors†(1971).
But it was a scene that made reading the book worthwhile, and I now find myself curious to encounter what else Perry wrote about.
Johnson once described the ideal happiness which he would choose if he were regardless of futurity. My own choice, with the same reservation, would be to read the Italian epic—to be always convalescent from some small illness and always seated in a window that overlooked the sea, there to read these poems eight hours of each happy day. (The Allegory of Love, (Oxford UP, 1936; Second Edition, 1946) 304)
Having fallen into a very serious frame of mind, in which mutual expressions of kindness passed between us, such as would be thought too vain in me to repeat, I talked with regret of the sad inevitable certainty that one of us must survive the other.
JOHNSON. ‘Yes, Sir, that is an affecting consideration. I remember Swift, in one of his letters to Pope, says, “I intend to come over, that we may meet once more; and when we must part, it is what happens to all human beings.â€â€™
BOSWELL. ‘The hope that we shall see our departed friends again must support the mind.’
JOHNSON. ‘Why, yes, Sir.’ Boswell. ‘There is a strange unwillingness to part with life, independent of serious fears as to futurity. A reverend friend of ours [Dr. Percy] tells me, that he feels an uneasiness at the thoughts of leaving his house, his study, his books.’
JOHNSON. ‘This is foolish in [Percy]. A man need not be uneasy on these grounds: for, as he will retain his consciousness, he may say with the philosopher, Omnia mea mecum porto. [‘All that is mine, I carry with me,’ Cicero, Paradoxa, i]’
BOSWELL. ‘True, Sir: we may carry our books in our heads; but still there is something painful in the thought of leaving for ever what has given us pleasure. I remember, many years ago, when my imagination was warm, and I happened to be in a melancholy mood, it distressed me to think of going into a state of being in which Shakepeare’s poetry did not exist. A lady, whom I then much admired, a very amiable woman, humoured my fancy, and relieved me by saying, “The first thing you will meet with in the other world will be an elegant copy of Shakspeare’s works, presented to you.â€â€™
Dr. Johnson smiled benignantly at this, and did not appear to disapprove of the notion…. (Boswell, Life of Johnson, ÆTAT 69, April 1778)
hospital patients get first priority—oh yes, there are four hospitals in the suburbs, just outside the walls. Each of them is about the size of a small town. The idea of this is to prevent overcrowding, and facilitate the isolation of infectious cases. These hospitals are so well run, and so well supplied with all types of medical equipment, the nurses are so sympathetic and conscientious, and there are so many experienced doctors constantly available, that, though nobody’s forced to go there, practically everyone would rather be ill in hospital than at home. (Utopia (c. 1516, 1551), trans. Paul Turner, (New York: Penguin, 1965) II, 61–62)
To be a patient in Utopia is to be a king: everyone attends to you. Compare Mayra Hornbacher: “Hospital policy is to impose the least level of restriction possible,†(Madness: a Bipolar Life, (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008) 5).
You must walk like a camel which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveller asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered “Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.”
I’ve been in a Thoreau-esque mood lately. I’ve been gardening, photographing, paying closer attention to the nature around me, trying to figure out how this relates to my writing, wondering how it might make me a better writer.
And in reading those things above, it reminded me of a passage toward the end of the manuscript to Thucydides‘ (460-400 BC) unfinished History, where he observes:
The Assembly and the Council of the Bean* still met notwithstanding, although they discussed nothing that was not approved of by the conspirators, who both supplied the speakers, and reviewed in advance what they were to say.
Fear, and the sight of the numbers of the conspirators, closed the mouths of the rest; or if any ventured to rise in opposition, he was presently put to death in some convenient way, and there was neither search for the murderers nor justice to be had against them if suspected; but the people remained motionless, being so thoroughly cowed that men thought themselves lucky to escape violence, even when they held their tongues.
An exaggerated belief in the numbers of the conspirators also demoralised the people, rendered helpless by the magnitude of the city, and by their want of intelligence with each other, and being without means of finding out what those numbers really were.
For the same reason it was impossible for any one to open his grief to a neighbour and to concert measures to defend himself, as he would have had to speak either to one whom he did not know, or whom he knew but did not trust.
Indeed all the popular party approached each other with suspicion, each thinking his neighbour concerned in what was going on, the conspirators having in their ranks persons whom no one could ever have believed capable of joining an oligarchy; and these it was who made the many so suspicious, and so helped to procure impunity for the few, by confirming the commons in their mistrust of one another.
Peloponnesian War, trans. Richard Crawley, Everyman Library (New York: J. M. Dent, 1910) (8.66).
*The Council of the Bean was so-called because voted were indicated and tallied by a jar of differently colored beans.
Nietzsche has a deeper reverence than any other beholder for the sacred tables of the Hebrews as well as of the other nations in question. Yet since he is only a beholder of these tables, since what one table commends or commands is incompatible with what the others command, he is not subject to the commandments of any. This is true also and especially of the tables, or “values†of modern Western culture. But according to him, all scientific concepts, and hence in particular the concept of culture, are culture-bound; the concept of cultures is an outgrowth of 19th century Western culture; its application to “cultures†of other ages and climates is an act stemming from the spiritual imperialism of that particular culture. There is then a glaring contradiction between the claimed objectivity of the science of cultures and the radical subjectivity of that science. Differently stated, one cannot behold, i.e., truly understand, any culture unless one is firmly rooted in one’s own culture or unless one belongs in one’s capacity as a beholder to some culture. But if the universality of the beholding of all cultures is to be preserved, the culture to which the beholder of all cultures belongs, must be the universal culture, the culture of mankind, the world culture; the universality of beholding presupposes, if only by anticipating it, the universal culture which is no longer one culture among many. The variety of cultures that have hitherto emerged contradicts the oneness of truth. Truth is not a woman so that each man can have his own truth as he can have his own wife. Nietzsche sought therefore for a culture that would no longer be particular and hence in the last analysis arbitrary. The single goal of mankind is conceived by him as in a sense super-human: he speaks of the super-man of the future. The super-man is meant to unite in himself Jerusalem and Athens on the highest level.(“Jerusalem and Athens: Some Preliminary Reflections,†Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, (University of Chicago Press, 1983) 148–49.)
And:
Democracy is then not indeed mass rule but mass culture …. An illiterate society at its best is a society ruled by age-old ancestral custom which it traces to original founders, gods or sons of gods or pupils of gods; since there are no letters in such a society, the late heirs cannot be in direct contact with the original founders…. Hence an illiterate society cannot consistently act on its principle that the best is the oldest…. (Strauss “What is Liberal Education?†Address Delivered at the Tenth Annual Graduation Exercises of the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults. June 6, 1959)
The notion that we have limited access to the workings of our minds is difficult to accept because, naturally it is alien to our experience, but it is true: you know far less about yourself than you feel you do…. [1]
the confidence that people have in their intuitions is not a reliable guide to their validity. In other words, do not trust anyone—including yourself—to tell you how much you should trust their judgment….[2]
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.[3]
–––––. Aus Meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth from My Own Life) (1811–1830)
–––––. Novella
(1828)
–––––. Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors), “Preface to the First Edition of 1810.â€
–––––. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship) (1795)
–––––. Faust Part I (1808)
–––––. Faust Part II (1832)
Rudolf Steiner, Goethe’s Weltanschauung (1897)
–––––. Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung (A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception) (1886)
–––––. Nietzsche, ein Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit (Friedrich Nietzsche: Fighter for Freedom) (1895)
–––––. Education as a Social Problem (1919)
–––––. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1922)
–––––. Mysticism and Modern Thought (1928)
George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “Preface to Phenomenology†(1807)
Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms [taken from Parerga and Paralipomena] (1851)
Nietzsche, Writings from the Early Notebooks, (1870-1873)
––––-. The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit ofMusic (1872) (1886)
–––––. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873)
8 Thoughts on the New York Times Article about the Demise of The Weekly Standard.
So Jim Rutenberg wrote this article in the New York Times. In that article you will not find out that:
1. I think most casual readers of The Weekly Standard [TWS] would agree it has been going downhill since, at least, Bush 43’s second term.
2. For a time TWS was a strong voice of neoconservatism–which itself emerged in the 1970s as a theory, but only matured into an applied political praxis during a post-Clinton presidency–and even then–only after September 10, 2001.
3. When Clinton lost to Trump, TWS lost a lot of its original enemies, hence its original purpose.
4. For most non-Jewish observers, Commentary is the nation’s premier conservative, political Jewish magazine–something TWS might’ve been at one point (that’s neither here nor there)–and it appears this country has room for only one commercially viable publication for such a niche market.
5. Sometime during the Obama administration, TWS put up a great paywall to keep out invaders. This was Chinese-esque in its ambitions: TWS’s RSS feed was minimized, while giant pop-ups to “subscribe now” began to bombard any would-be reader on any subject–carnival-barker style. Basically TWS’s online presence became as technically unreader-friendly as a MySpace page.
6. With regard to topics TWS covered and the writers it chose to publish, all of the above adds up to it being an insular institution that seemed less than interested in outsiders’ opinions, submissions (I never did), and subscriptions (ditto).
7. When was the last time TWS had an article at the top of Memeorandum?
8. None of Much to none of the above is mentioned or considered in the New York Times‘ article by Jim Rutenberg.
Conclusion: Even a casual reader of TWS would know it is much more plausible to use the trope that Trump’s election was a “final nail in the coffin” for TWS than to say the Donald is the reason for TWS’s demise, as the NYT’s headline implies.Â
