It can be a little too easy to pin
labels on James Baldwin: black, gay, expatriate, aesthete. But every label
sells him short, diminishing the singularity of his work. That he wrote
specifically of his time and place—America in the middle of the twentieth century—and
engaged its most dangerous themes—race, Civil Rights, the persisting degradations
of history—does not limit the reach of his sentences into the past and the future:
They are, and will remain, acute inquiries into the moral and political
quandaries of our being, regardless of the age in which they’re read. While the
books are indeed indelible documents of their era, they ponder questions of
inheritance, race, and social justice with a sense of perplexity and purpose
that resonates far beyond their contemporary context, and that makes them
especially timely today.
His essays especially are provocative
exercises for the reader. The volumes that first gathered them—Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name,
The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street—made his reputation as a
refulgent if often recalcitrant prophet of the Civil Rights era, landing him on
the cover of Time magazine and keeping him in the public eye. In every paragraph,
Baldwin’s language reaches forward and back in time with a tragic sense of continuity
and consequence. His deep well of evolving private memory enriches his—and our—perspective
on current events. His writing is as challenging as it is rewarding exactly because
his probing of complex realities realizes that their complexity emanates from
contradictions at their cores. Truths, he’d learned, were never singular, and
seldom in agreement; yet he remained unrelenting in his pursuit of them. This
commitment to capturing the contradictions of lived experience imbued his explorations
with an equivocal ferocity that revealed both the naïveté and the arrogance of others’
certainties. If America, as he wrote in Notes of a Native Son, is a
“country devoted to the death of the paradox,” Baldwin realized that such
devotion was a kind of suicide.
Baldwin’s essays move with restlessness and agility and, now as then, they offer his readers not solace but a kind of education in sorrow, teaching us that morality is far more fatal, and perhaps more unforgiving, than our sentimental narratives of reconciliation and redemption allow us to believe. And more personal as well: Baldwin knew that the subject of race in America was also the story of him in America, and his essays make of his insights and bewilderments a tortured light. As he writes in No Name in the Street, “the moral of the story (and the hope of the world) lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself.”
Over a shoulder, through the humming cloud, A newspaper focuses my attention Upon a quiet headline with its mention Of City’s OldestBookstore, Shutting Down.
Imagining a map, I scour the town But the damned store eludes my apprehension — Aloft in our Florida-bound suspension I wish my fellow passenger would read aloud.
No such luck. The baby squirms as I crane My neck, hoping to catch a clearer word From the faint gray column of the Times’s prose.
Then letters squint louder to make it plain And at once I’m wondering if you’ve heard: Mendoza’s bookshop is about to close.
2
“Mendoza’s bookshop is about to close,” I mutter to my wife, my daughter, too, But silently I speak volumes to you, Axel’s Castle, A Mass for the Dead, Rose
Macaulay’s Pleasure of Ruins, all those Bound enthusiasms we would pursue — Saroyan, Zukofsky, Marshack, Camus — Through the cryptic cities a reader knows.
Title by title, we worked miles of shelves, Unearthing our own dusty alphabet That spelled out, within dim tottering nooks,
Definitions of our unspoken selves That will murmur meanings till we forget The hide and seek of the sibylline books.
3
The hide and seek of the sibylline books Began when old letters enhanced young fate With prophecies difficult to translate Into the language that a schoolroom speaks.
Typefaced sirens, disguised as quaint antiques, Seduced us to their paged estate Where knowing sentences would conjugate The moods and tenses of our urgent looks.
Such voices lured us to our first bookcase. The large, low volumes within childish reach Led us down alleys alert with spines
To intuition’s spellbound hiding-place: There unfathomed scripture could start to teach Before a mind learned to linger between the lines.
4
Before a mind learned to linger between the lines In love with each sentence’s warp and woof, Naked intelligence remained aloof From the deep weavings of a text’s confines.
Worn cloth covers bore talismanic signs That spoke to starlight through the homebound roof Which sheltered thought, demanding proof Of the powers conjured by a book’s designs.
To acolytes serving the will of words Every book possessed is an oracle: We swallowed whole bodies of arcane lore
To read the dense entrails of printed birds Where the guts of life were grammatical, Encoded in black-and-white metaphor.
5
Encoded in black-and-white metaphor, Conversation surfaced as best it could; In Isaac Mendoza’s the talk was good. The titles’ potential in semaphore
Flashed between us through the word-weary store While a gas flame fluttered in its brass hood To warm the close, asphyxiant mood Poets indulge in, but Muses abhor.
In the bookshop’s mind-webbed, graying air We sought correlatives to our desire To find a voice within our intellects,
Shaping a language to be kept with care On the many pages it might inspire When we rose from among the analects.
6
When we rose from among the analects We’d wordlessly study, with restless eyes, One another’s ration of bound supplies Exchanging in glances our best respects
Toward the strange interests a friend collects (In which we’d vaguely recognize The ghost of our own elusive prize: The heart’s horn book, with which no eye connects).
A memory ago my parents stored A box of books for a transient friend Whose life was running out of space and time;
Up in the attic I honored the hoard With all the attention a boy could spend Searching lost libraries to find a rhyme.
7
Searching lost libraries to find a rhyme The heart dispenses with its own regard, Trying out postures from the avant-garde Three parts ridiculous to one sublime.
The books that once scripted our pantomime, Asleep in their jackets, paper and hard, Now taunt us, old habits we can’t discard As we career, head last, into our prime.
I pick up a book and fondle its cover; At my side, a new hunger nurses, mumming Her mother through infancy’s shroud.
The plane rushes past the place where thoughts hover, Yet still I reach back for faint verses coming Over a shoulder, through the humming cloud.
We
invest all creation stories (large and small, universal and individual) with
our sense of time, so that every birth is a beginning rather than a revelation,
every death an ending rather than a return to the dark waters from which life
sprang.
Despite
the solemn invocations of our preaching and our prayers, we ignore eternity
because our minds do not comprehend it, our hearts cannot hold it; we’re
dizzied by its lack of definition.
We
cast our lot with time because it is our worthiest tool: time alone gives shape
to things, makes a habitable dwelling within whatever’s everlasting.
I suspect my antennae were alert to Elisabeth Murray’s book because I’ve been using much of the time reclaimed these past several weeks from commuting, and from both the purposeful and the pointless scurrying allowed by the freedom to go anywhere at any time, to dawdle in dictionaries, weighing words and tracing their nuances for pleasure as well as expressive advantage. Upstairs, in my usual workspace, I have, conveniently arrayed, the full OED, purchased four decades ago, when I combined an Oxford University Press special warehouse offer to bookstores with my employee discount to bring—with a little scrimping—the then $795 price of the set within range of my $125 per week take home pay. Also within reach of my usual desk are Webster’s Third New International; the American Heritage Dictionary; the Oxford American, notable for its especially readable typography; a Merriam-Webster Collegiate; and assorted other language reference works, including a couple of thesauri and several usage books, with pride of place given to the original edition of H. W. Fowler’s ADictionary of Modern English Usage and Bryan A. Garner’s Modern American Usage (now Garner’s Modern English Usage in its latest release), which, in addition to be invariably helpful, is almost as delightful to read as Fowler—high praise indeed. (While I’m at it, here’s a clip of the estimable Mr. Garner extolling the benefits of stocking one’s mind, and explaining what commonplacing means; it’s well worth watching.) All of these compendiums make for a happy anchorage in the Sargasso Sea of words I sail back and forth upon.
Back downstairs in the basement, where I am working now, I’ve
dusted off the Compact Edition of the OED that I used to have in my office back
in Common Reader days; not an abridgment, this two-volume version is a
direct photo reduction of the complete dictionary, with four of the original
pages arranged on each page of the compact volumes. The catch is that you need
a magnifying glass to read the text (a fine one comes in a small drawer at the
top of the boxed set), but this easily becomes a habit, if not a badge of
honor: “Wordhound at Work!”
“I have always been greedy for words,” writes Edmund Wilson at
the start of “My Fifty Years with Dictionaries and Grammars,” his long 1963
essay on his sojourns in the linguistic lands of Greek, Hebrew, Russian, and
Hungarian (it’s collected in the volume The Bit Between My Teeth). “I
can never get enough of them.” He could have been speaking for me. But except
for an early infatuation with Latin (see A Classical Education), I’ve never
ventured outside English, and am still enraptured by sounding its words to
discover what I mean to say along paths of sense, cadence, and surprise. Josh
Billings once said, “Words are often seen hunting for an idea, but ideas are
never seen hunting for words.” For me, I’m afraid, it’s often the other way
round. The dictionaries I collect are props I lean on to liberate my thoughts.
Writing sentences, to steal a phrase recklessly from Beckett’s Molloy, I
am “restored to myself, free—I don’t know what that means but it’s the word I
mean to use.”
One book my eye alighted on as I worked in the basement
last week, when I lifted my eye from my laptop and looked to the left, was Caught
in the Web of Words, K. M. Elisabeth Murray’s biography of her grandfather,
James A. H. Murray, founding editor and guiding light of the Oxford English
Dictionary (OED). In the photograph reproduced in the header to this post,
Murray is shown at work in The Scriptorium, which housed the hundreds
and hundreds of thousands of index slips, inscribed with a word and a quotation
illustrating its usage, recorded and sent to Oxford by an army of readers from
around the globe, albeit primarily in Britain and America. Nearly two
million such quotations, excerpted from all manner of books as well as
newspapers, magazines, and other documents, found a place in the first edition
of the OED, whose final volume was published in 1928, nearly a half-century
after James Murray had signed on for what was projected to be a ten-year
project (five years into it, as an emblem of their collaborative intensity and
insect-like application, the editors had reached ant). While Murray, who
died in 1915, did not live to see the end of alphabet, he engineered the
machinery that ensured the project’s completion; few scholars have left a
grander monument as a literary legacy.
The poet Richard Wilbur once described a particular volume as
belonging to the “aristocracy of reference books.” In such a category, the OED
is the entire House of Lords. Among the most comprehensive, authoritative
dictionaries ever conceived, its subject matter is the vocabulary of English
since 1150; its method is historical: each word is traced from its first
documented appearance through all its slow drifts and dramatic shifts in
meaning. Yes: it was condemned by its own operating principles to be slipping
out of date as its type was being set, yet the natural resources it catalogued
and described remained on display, in a newly refulgent and useful way, to
whatever imagination could mine them and put them to work.
In his own great dictionary of 1755, Samuel Johnson poked fun at
his own labors when he defined lexicographer as a “harmless drudge.”To some degree, James Murray fit that description: a largely self-educated
boy from a village of Denholm in the Scottish Borders, he nurtured his
fascination with languages through stints as schoolmaster and bank clerk,
producing in his off hours various small works of philological scholarship.
Elisabeth Murray relates the circuitous route by which the man found his
moment, telling, in delicious detail (delicious, at least, to book geeks amused
by the publishing vagaries that distract—and the commercial imperatives that
obstruct—the unfettered application of high-minded editorial attention) how her
grandfather and his Victorian associates built the massive edifice of the OED
out of all those slips of paper. In its way, the journey which editor-in-chief
Murray and his team made from “A” to “Zymurgy” is a grand adventure yarn.
Polymathic novelist Anthony Burgess called Caught in the Web of Words, “One
of the finest biographies of the twentieth century, just as its subject was one
of the finest human beings of the nineteenth. Everybody who speaks English owes
Murray an unpayable debt. Everybody even dimly aware of that debt ought to
devour, as I have done, this most heartening story of learning, energy, faith,
and sheer simple humanity.”
For those of you to whom this nonetheless sounds like reading
drudgery, let me recommend Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman:
A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford
English Dictionary, which reveals a surprisingly lurid
subplot to the enterprise’s main narrative, focusing on the most assiduous and
skilled of the readers who supplied the word slips that filled The Scriptorium,
a transplanted American named Dr. William Chester Minor. Dr. Minor’s neatly
handwritten contributions—nearly ten thousand in all—were sent to the
dictionary’s Oxford offices from the village of Crowthorne, barely fifty miles
away. Editor Murray was understandably curious about his prolific collaborator,
but it wasn’t until 1896, after some twenty years of corresponding, that the
two men met. When they did, an astounding secret came to light: namely, that
the erudite Minor was a long-standing inmate at the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic
Asylum. A Yale-educated surgeon who had served in the Civil War, Minor was
incarcerated at the mental hospital for a murder he committed while in the grip
of the paranoid schizophrenia that blighted fifty of his eighty-five years (he
died in Washington, D.C. in 1920). Winchester tells his sad, tormented,
remarkable story with reportorial verve.
I didn’t expect to be spending so much time in my basement this spring.
Displaced from my usual working space upstairs by another family member during
our time of surreally pleasant and preternaturally anxious lockdown, I set up a
desk (read: cleared off the flotsam and jetsam that the tides of busy life had
asked up on it over the past few years) in a warren of bookcases we’d created
to house the overflow from the shelves and piles in the living room, library,
and bedrooms on the floors above. Although the lighting isn’t optimal for
reading and writing, otherwise the ambience is conducive to contemplation,
especially since I am surrounded by once familiar books, hundreds of volumes I
haven’t attended to with any concentration in recent, and not so recent,
memory, but many that, at one point or another, embodied a present interest,
meaning, or aspiration: William Maxwell’s short fiction, collected in All
the Days and Nights; Iris Origo’s commonplace anthology, The
Vagabond Path; Christopher Alexander’s The Timeless Way of Building (more
on this marvelous book later in this newsletter); the poems of Anna Akhmatova,
the Russian poet who, from 1912 until her death in 1966, created a body of work
filled with the biggest virtues—beauty, strength, wisdom, love, sympathy,
honesty, courage, loyalty, imagination—while being subjected to the terrors of
war and the censure of a brutal government; Robert Coles’s The
Spiritual Life of Children, ”an investigation of the ways in which
children sift and sort spiritual matters,” that I remember being absolutely
engrossing, both in the author’s description of his own intellectual struggle
to see, through the dark glasses of science and psychoanalysis, children’s
turning toward a spiritual light, and in the webs of words his young subjects
weave in explaining their soulful yearnings; Of Time, Passion, and Knowledge
by J. T. Fraser, founder of the International Society for the Study of
Time, who, I’d learned in a letter from the author that I received after I’d
written about his book in A Common Reader, had been a regular customer
in my father’s grocery store (“Julius!” my father exclaimed when I’d mentioned
the letter. “Nice guy. He liked broccoli. I didn’t know he wrote books.”)
And more: Innocence, Penelope Fitzgerald’s Florentine
comedy of manners and family eccentricity; A Prosody Handbook by Karl
Shapiro and Robert Beum, the signature “E. H. Cap” inscribed on its title page
to indicate an ownership that would pass to me when, sometime after high
school, that former teacher allowed a few of us to cull, in pursuit of whatever
literary agendas then possessed us, the overstuffed bookshelves in the walkup
apartment on West 16th Street, a few steps off 5th Avenue, he was trying to
declutter; a signed first edition of Harold Brodkey’s Stories in an Almost
Classical Mode, procured for me by an older friend who redirected his life
into bookselling about the same time I did; right next to that, don’t ask me
why, but in a juxtaposition that the man who gave me the Brodkey would appreciate,
Saint Augustine’s City of God. And across the room, Leonard Cottrell’s The
Bull of Minos, about the romance of archaeology and unearthing of the
remote civilizations that matured into classical Greece. A few spines down the
shelf from that, Other People’s Letters, a memoir by Mina Curtiss,
translator of Proust’s correspondence, calls to mind the occasion on which I
found it, in the dusty labyrinth of the Isaac Mendoza Book Company on Ann
Street in lower Manhattan, opened in 1894 and closed in 1990, when our
firstborn, Emma, was an infant, a little younger than her son, Charlie, our
first grandchild, is now. I remember how old Emma was because of something I
wrote at the time—a crown of sonnets, in fact; I was still ambitious in those
days—addressed to a friend who’d frequented the bookshop with me. Here’s the
first of the seven sonnets the crown comprises;
Over a shoulder, through the humming cloud, A newspaper focuses my attention Upon a quiet headline with its mention Of City’s Oldest Bookstore, Shutting Down.
Imagining a map, I scour the town But the damned store eludes my apprehension — Aloft in our Florida-bound suspension I wish my fellow passenger would read aloud.
No such luck. The baby squirms as I crane My neck, hoping to catch a clearer word From the faint gray column of the Times’s prose.
Then letters squint louder to make it plain And at once I’m wondering if you’ve heard: Mendoza’s bookshop is about to close.
I could go on for a long time happily cherry-picking and
caressing in sentences volumes on display before me, but I’ll bring this
indulgent reverie to an end, at least for now, with two brief excerpts from an elegant
hardcover I’ve pulled from the shelf just below Mina Curtiss’s memoir. Its
title is A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries, and Recluses,
and its author is Isabel Colegate, a writer better known for her novels,
particularly The Shooting Party. The first quotation from Colegate’s
book is one I’ll throw far out into the future for Charlie to catch when he’s
ready to make his way out into the world on his own two feet, from this moment
in the troubled year of 2020 when we eagerly await his first steps:
One can carry one’s solitude with one, as many experienced
hermits who have contact with the outside world know very well, and as most
poets I would suppose know too, but in the modern Western world solitude is
undervalued, and the need for it forgotten. To wish to be alone is thought odd,
a sign of failure or neurosis; but it is in solitude that the self meets
itself, or, if you like, its God, and from there that it goes out to join the
communal dance. No amount of group therapy, study of interpersonal
relationships, self-improvement exercises, personal training in the gym, can
assuage the loneliness of those who cannot bear to be alone.
The second I set down for me, in acknowledgement of the thin but
uninterrupted thread that runs through years, marked by a trail of books that,
from this sanctum in my basement, I salute:
What one might call the hermit tendency constitutes a thin but uninterrupted thread through history, a pull of the tide towards some other moon, a nostalgia for paradise or a hope of heaven. Whether for a poet or a misanthrope, a mystic or a seeker for a moment’s silence, there has always been a need for a hermitage.
As I sit here in the early morning quiet, occupying a seat assigned by circumstance in this den of my past selves, it strikes me that volumes, when one reaches a certain age, are anchors rather than vessels for voyages: they hold us in whatever harbor we’ve managed to make our way to, securing, if we’ve been lucky in our journeying, our still buoyant spirits.
In
the glass she wore an expression of tense melancholy, for she had come to the
depressing conclusion, since the arrival of the Dalloways, that her face was
not the face she wanted, and in all probability never would be.
However, punctuality has been impressed upon her, and whatever face she had, she must go into dinner with it.
— Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
“At
50,” George Orwell wrote with some finality (indeed, these were the last words
written in the manuscript notebook he kept in the last year of his life),
“everyone has the face he deserves.” Looking in the mirror myself now, well
over a decade past my own half-century, I’m a little worried about the verdict
my features have handed down. Vanished with barely a trace is the lean and
hungry look which I wore through my first three decades, the aspect, alas, that
I still incorrectly imagine I present to the world. Weight and worry pull down
my vanity, rounding the flesh of my cheeks and wearying the skin around my
eyes. My hairline recedes in an inexorable march up a bald mountain, and a
sagging solemnity suggests a sorrow I have no right—given all the blessings
I’ve known—to wear. Perhaps I’ve grown my beard to disguise from myself my just
deserts.
On
reflection, I’m not sure I like my looks as an emblem of my fate. Is character
nothing more than the maturation of genetic traits (that nose, those lips) and
the accretion of circumstance (the childhood scar, for instance, that dwells in
the cleft of my chin)? Well, no, I suppose, it’s not: between inheritance and
experience, our faces, be they profoundly metaphorical or merely superficial,
make themselves up to meet the day.
But
destiny is too large a word to fall within such a limited range of reference,
and, like the high-schooler hiding his awkwardness behind a mask of attitude,
we persist in believing, if only in the quiet confessional of our solitude,
that we are meant for bigger, more beautiful things. This faith confounds both
sense and senses, and we gaze through the looking-glass of life in hope of
spying our true substance; it’s an immemorial rite that we engage in, the very
ritual of consciousness, and ancients of every persuasion who engaged in the
same speculation discovered, by lore and by logic, the core of being we still
seek: a soul.
From
its earliest alertness, the mind maps the world, sending out scouts to survey
its surroundings, probing every problem with instruments of love and language,
fashioning landscapes from elements of instinct, learning, and surmise,
building its own cities of idleness or energy, purpose or pleasure, all in the
service of apprehending an abiding destination, a privacy rich enough to
animate the character with which we face the world. The pursuit is tricky, the
prey elusive, immaterial, prone to take mysterious vacations. Will we ever
catch up with it, reside within its ken? At what age do we recognize the soul
that we deserve?
“Everything flows; nothing remains,” is how Guy Davenport
rendered the most famous maxim of Heraclitus, immediately annotating his
translation with bracketed alternatives—“[Everything moves; nothing is still.
Everything passes away; nothing lasts.]”—and following these with a formulation
nearly as well known: “One cannot step twice into the same river, for the water
into which you first stepped has flowed on.”
Heraclitus came to mind as I came upon, in War and Peace,
a passage about Prince Andrei Bolkonsky’s ennui in the aftermath of his
ill-fated engagement with Natasha Rostov:
Before, too, there had been the same conditions of life, but
before they had all cohered, while now everything had fallen apart. Nothing but
meaningless phenomena, without any connection with each other, presented
themselves to Prince Andrei one after the other.
“The
most beautiful order of the world is still a random gathering of things
insignificant in themselves,” Heraclitus also wrote (again, the translation is
Davenport’s), and I thought of it immediately when I read Tolstoy’s description
of Andrei’s state, and then couldn’t help but also think of the ancient
philosopher’s assertion of the primal truth of flow and motion, each of which
supply life with not only change but with coherence: time, if nothing else,
connects random phenomena into an order that supplies connection, if only by
coincidence, and significance insofar as our personal narrative makes sense to
us and coheres around action, love, or purpose. Once that narrative current
flags, or fails to connect one day to the next along some impulse that
transcends time, or seems to, even as it is carried along with it, then things
fall apart, and the world’s eternal flux is nothing more than a machine for
dissipating meaning. Our only defense against randomness, or against the tide
in which things pass away and leave no trace, is our own story, whether we
inscribe it in memory or feeling; when that story is interrupted, or we lose
our own faith in it, a caustic fatalism holds us hostage, just as it grips
Andrei: “I’m going to the army—why? I don’t know myself, and I wish to meet a
man whom I despise, in order to give him an occasion to kill me and laugh at
me!”
Which is to say things cohere only by our efforts to give them a
fictive—but by no means false—energy. What Prince Andrei Bolkonsky needs is the
prescription given to a protégé by the character Eliza in Neal Stephenson’s
novel, The Confusion:
Pay attention, that’s all…. Notice things. Connect what
you’ve noticed. Connect it into a picture. Think of how the picture might be
changed; and act to change it. Some of your acts may turn out to have been
foolish, others will reward you in surprising ways; and in the meantime, simply
be being active instead of passive, you have a kind of immunity that’s hard to
explain—
We
are familiar with the state of grace (or at least with the idea of it), but
that other states—of despair, for instance, or melancholy, or bewilderment and
anxiety or even gladness—might be conditions of the soul, a possession by
divine or cosmological promise of our inmost intelligence, seldom occurs to us.
Perhaps
they’re our instinctual way of paying respect to the otherworldly without ever
leaving the familiar world, of acknowledging that past, present, and future
cannot be the only order of our lives, for time’s marking is not magnanimous
enough to comprehend the beauty and cruelty of the love that animates us or the
death that is our destiny.
The
order that encompasses such a joyful and sorrowful creation surely passeth all
understanding, but it is undeniably present in the weather of our days, a
summoning of power and loveliness that is endless in its invention, something
like the Spirit of God that moved upon the face of the first waters, before
light and darkness were charged with their labors and set to work.
Near the midpoint of War and Peace,
Tolstoy offers a key to the book’s concerns: the significance of its “war”
belongs not to campaigns against Napoleon nor to the battles of Austerlitz and
Borodino, so vividly sketched in its chapters; neither does the meaning of its
“peace” reside in the sumptuous balls or several romances so irresistibly
depicted. One might say, rather, that Tolstoy’s real interest is in the “and”,
the spaces between peak experiences—those zeniths we seldom recognize as such
until we are far enough away from them to realize their eminence—that represent
the moment-by-moment presence and portent of our loves, fears, uncertainties.
Sometimes Pierre remembered stories he had
heard about how soldiers at war, taking cover under enemy fire, when there is
nothing to do, try to find some occupation for themselves so as to endure the
danger more easily. And to Pierre all people seemed to be such soldiers, saving
themselves from life: some with ambition, some with cards, some with drafting
laws, some with women, some with playthings, some with horses, some with
politics, some with hunting, some with wine, some with affairs of state.
“Nothing is either trivial or important, it’s all the same; only save yourself
from it as best you can!” thought Pierre. “Only not to see it, that dreadful it.”
Reading this passage called to mind some
thoughts on courage penned by the philosopher A. C. Grayling, which I was lucky
enough to find just now in his book, Meditations for the Humanist:
Most people tend to think of courage as a
warrior virtue, as belonging typically to battle; and therefore, by analogy, to
endeavour on the upper slopes of Everest, in the deeps of the sea, and even on
the sports field—in other words, wherever endurance, grit and determination in
the face of physical challenges are required. That is true enough. But courage
is often demonstrated, because it is often needed, in greater quantities in
daily life; and there are even times when ‘merely to live’, as Seneca put it in
a letter to Lucilius, “is itself an act of courage.”
Ordinary life evokes more extraordinary
courage than combat or adventure because both the chances and the
inevitabilities of life—grief, illness, disappointment, pain, struggle,
poverty, loss, terror, heartache: all of them common features of the human condition,
and all of them experienced by hundreds of thousands of people every day—demand
kinds of endurance and bravery that make clambering up Everest seem an easier
alternative. Whereas mountaineering and deep-sea diving are self-contained
activities that last a certain length of time with—if all goes well—a return to
a status quo ante
when they are over, facing (say) grief or disappointment is quite different.
They are open-ended, new, different dispensations with unforeseeables deeply
embedded in them, promising only that much will have to be borne before relief
comes. To lie sleepless with pain at night, or to wake every morning and feel
the return of grief, yet to get up and carry on as best one can, is courage
itself.
The bravery required to face “different
dispensations with unforeseeables deeply embedded in them”: that’s as good a
summation of what Tolstoy’s masterpiece is about as one is likely to find, for
it captures the unfolding experiences of the characters—Natasha and Nikolai,
Prince Andrei and Princess Marya, Sonya and Julie and Pierre and all the
rest—in the everydayness that the author, through his art, has made so enduring.
“Courage,” Plato wrote (as Grayling shares in
his epigraph to the essay I’ve quoted), “is a kind of salvation.” What it saves
us not only from, but for, as Pierre will learn, is life.
