Is there a watching in the world—a wakefulness—attentive to our thoughts and deeds? All of us, at one time or another, have intuited such intent to some vague presence outside ourselves. The feeling can be provoked—quite readily, in fact—by a landscape (a sylvan setting might provide it, or any spring or fall of water), for there are places that seem alive with apprehensions, as if things gone are still waiting there. Often we can sense such strange advertence to our being in the suspended animation of a fully-moonlit night, or in the eerie surround of profound quiet. Silence can seem so alert. We could assign our sensitivity to mere anxiety, but there are times, I’m certain, when our anxiety is summoned by an unseen audience. In the shadow of its vigilance (whatever its meaning, intention, or intelligence), the very idea of the holy takes root, as the world urges us to repay its watchfulness in kind.
If there were an archaeology of consciousness, fieldworkers would sooner or later discover that prayer lies at the deepest layer of our urge to language. Before we knew we had selves to talk to, I’m sure our fears and longings found their expression in the supplication of unknown powers, as strange and various, and as ever-present, as the weather. To raise one’s own voice in prayer, or even to consider the invocations of others, is to strip the paint of irony from the soul’s abode: the effect can be startling, frightening, purifying—if only for a moment.
A clutch of daffodils stopped my eye
As Wordsworth whispered verses to my ear —
Its yellow now in memory as bright
As in that glancing moment two days past —
Of recollections flowering and clear
That poetry could summon to make last
In extended moments of rhyme and sight.
The color lingers like a consolation
No destiny can ever quite deny,
A resurrection of a passing hour:
Here, where eternity admits its longing
In love for the comings and goings of time.
“In order to live quietly” in Elena Ferrante’sMy Brilliant Friend.
Reading E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime a while back, I came upon a passage that crystallized some thoughts about Lenù and Lila, the Neapolitan girls whose friendship is portrayed with fierce fidelity in Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. The sentences from Ragtime appear in a section describing Father’s experience as part of the Peary polar expedition:
Father kept himself under control by writing in his journal. This was a system too, the system of language and conceptualization. It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.
These words returned my attention to what strikes me as a key chapter in the Ferrante novel, in which the scholarly Lenù is led by the no-longer-schooled Lila into thickets of English vocabulary and Greek declensions, as well as into the emotional tangle of Virgil’s story of Dido and Aeneas, the latter girl hungry for the learning and articulation—the systems of language and conceptualization—that the former, given the chance to continue her education, takes somewhat for granted as homework. At the crux of My Brilliant Friend, and central to the rest of Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, is the power of reading, writing, books: how the narrator (Lenù) alights on them for transport beyond the borders of the girls’ brutally familiar neighborhood, while her brilliant friend (Lila) abandons them for more practical, opportunistic, graspable realities.
Reading acknowledges a past, just as writing invokes a future, and those timelines provide the only path beyond the relentless here-and-now the neighborhood vividly embodies and enacts. Lila realizes this first, and expresses it—exhibiting the brilliance the title endows her with—right after the girls’ discussion of the lovelorn Dido, interrupting Lenù’s catalogue of local boys she insists are infatuated with every move Lila makes.
She said that we didn’t know anything, either as children or now, that we were therefore not in a position to understand anything, that everything in the neighborhood, every stone or piece of wood, everything, anything you could name, was already there before us, but we had grown up without realizing it, without ever even thinking about it. Not just us. Her father pretended that there had been nothing before. Her mother did the same, my mother, my father, even Rino. And yet Stefano’s grocery store before had been the carpenter shop of Alfredo Peluso, Pasquale’s father. And yet Don Achille’s money had been made before. And the Solara’s money as well. She had tested this out on her father and mother. They didn’t know anything, they wouldn’t talk about anything. Not Fascism, not the king. No injustice, no oppression, no exploitation. They hated Don Achille and were afraid of the Solaras. But they overlooked it and went to spend their money both at Don Achille’s son’s and at the Solaras’, and sent us, too. And they voted for the Fascists, for the monarchists, as the Solaras wanted them to. And they thought that what happened before was past and, in order to live quietly, they place a stone on top of it, and so, without knowing it, they continued it, they were immersed in the things of before, and we kept them inside us, too.
What Lila is describing are the thousand and one nights of neighborhood life, the long enchantment of unquestioned—unquestionable—arrangements that one submits to “in order to live quietly,” to pursue love, and laughter, and labor, hoping to lull misfortune into a daze of works and days without engaging the legacies of the past or the freedoms—the invigorating liberty, but also the terrifying, uncertain, unnegotiated independence—of a future, any future across the borders of the known and well-circumscribed world. The fatalistic poverty of the constant present is what Lenù longs to escape, and what Lila, in the wedding that ends My Brilliant Friend, will marry into.
Nostalgia for the old neighborhood, a staple of so many ex-urban lives, but wholly lacking from My Brilliant Friend, is not just a love for the old days, but more truly a longing for days in which old and new had no meaning, for a more or less unruffled now. That now, as the precocious Lila intuits and as Lenù will surely discover as she writes her way into a time to come, is unlettered and, ultimately, unlucky, if not tragic, in its lack of witness to any meaning beyond the pressures imposed by the insistent present tense.
“That conversation about ‘before’,” Lenù tells us, “made a stronger impression than the vague conversations she had drawn me into during the summer.” An impression strong enough, one suspects, to require a lifetime to unravel—or four novels at least.
In the first stanza of his lovely lyric “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” William Wordsworth recounts his vision of
. . . a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
It’s a clear vision, clearly expressed, available not only to other poets but to any walker lucky enough to stumble upon a flourishing field of flowers. Only in the fourth and final stanza of the poem does Wordsworth’s true genius raise its head, immortalizing the poem and its daffodils by the poet’s remembering their glory:
For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude . . .
In poem after poem—from his lyrical ballads and eloquent sonnets to his magnificent longer poems, such as “Tintern Abbey” and “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”— Wordsworth enriches his experience by reflecting upon it in solitude. Retrospect is Wordsworth’s medium, and he may well be said to have invented it, and perhaps solitude itself, as a dimension of the literary imagination. His achievement is so large, so pervasive in its influence, that we are in danger of barely noticing it today. But much of the most inventive literature created in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, aptly enough, looks back to him.
Although “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” may be the most beautiful expression of the poet’s ethos (and no reading life is complete without a dive into its deep, bracing, and soothing waters), Wordsworth paints his most complete picture in The Prelude, a book-length autobiographical poem on the “growth of a poet’s mind.” It follows him from early childhood and school through studies at Cambridge and residence in London to France during the Revolution. Whether describing the looming, numinous presence of nature he feels while skating as a boy on a lake, or the pageant of passing faces on a London street, or the passions with which he and other enthusiasts greeted the early days of France’s rebellion (“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!”), Wordsworth writes with an eager, earnest energy that integrates experience into the stream of consciousness that is the true, emergent medium of all our lives. In The Prelude’s thousands of pentameters, Wordsworth charts the fears and fabrications, the habits and the intuitions, the shaping processes and private emanations of the self, in a way that no seer had previously envisioned; in his pages the human imagination comes to life as a natural resource worth the work and wonder of cultivation. The vast poem is dense and lyrical and at times slow-going, but it need not be read all at once; it remains a rich reading landscape to wander in, and wandering is the best way to navigate its riches, for serendipity will bring you face to face, again and again, with qualities of your own solitude that you have forgotten or never paused before to recognize.
More thoughts on reading Wordsworth, and “Intimations of Immortality” in particular, here: Telling Time: A Family Album.
The older gods Had endless powers Divorced from prayer And solid flesh, Publicly haunting Endless hours From poised and precious Altitude.
But all alone This Christ desires A physical And private pain That is our own: Thus he requires New faith in bloody Solitude.
Now Pilate, with Great savoir faire, Delivers Christ Into our hands. Such intimacy This God demands. It is His human Attitude.
Jesus is condemned to death
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II: Division of Labor
Christ finds a spider And prays His cross Will be intricate As the spider’s web: In the delicate weave He insinuates grace, Imagining heaven Heavy with lace, Intricate as The spider’s web.
Christ covets Arachne’s curse, To rehearse forever Instinctive tasks Far from redemption’s Unique indenture, Serving the pleasure Of extinct gods Whose commands are all A spider asks.
In laborious glory, This Christ descends To shoulder the story Of the living god. Distending eros Across His back, He essays heaven, Bones in a sack, Dreaming of spiders, Their works and days.
Jesus takes up His cross
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III: Physics
Untried muscles Across Christ’s back Deny His mind Its reverie
Compelling His being, Its bodily force, Toward the rugged embrace Of Calvary.
Surprised to have fallen, Heaven to earth, Christ makes no effort To arise
But considers His birth, Its gravity, Two worlds attracted To one demise.
Jesus falls the first time
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IV: Hoc Est Enim Corpus Meum
O what a child Time conceives, Miracle of Effect and cause,
Steeped in a love Heaven cleaves, Not reconciled To physical laws.
Still, the magnet Of maternal care Corrects the sure Pragmatic path
Toward crucified Eternity. (To Roost in the meshes Of an instant’ s womb
Christ interrupts His destiny: Thus flesh corrupts With sympathy.)
Christ feels a wan, Condign despair Caress God’s plan With human limb;
The imagination Bodies share Impress on Him The ways of man.
Jesus meets His afflicted mother
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V: Chance
A stranger steps in To pick up the story, Impressed into service By circumstance
When Christ lurches into A private dance, Avoiding each crevice In His blesséd path.
What god isn’t lucky, Simon scoffs, as he’s Handed the hard, Right-angled load;
Christ tiptoes, weightless, Up the road, Crossing His fingers Against His stars.
Simon the Cyrenian helps Jesus carry His cross
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VI: Memory
Evolution’s outline — The skeleton of toil — Is traced by Veronica From His passing face, Etching experience And its chronic waste Into the fabric Of memory.
Weeping, the woman Promises to keep The soiled remnant Of their bloody kiss. Christ lauds her loyalty And wonders if Sweat spoils relics Like it tries the heart.
Veronica wipes the face of Jesus
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VII: Traffic
Should a god Not fall upward? Christ asks Himself As He interrupts The business Of the ants, Lumbering toward The insect world.
Carry many times Their weight, The ants continue With their tasks: Learnéd in the means Of chance They gather meat For long winters.
Lingering On hands and knees Christ admires The earth-bound creatures; Ear to the ground He hears a voice whisper Watch their ways And get wisdom.
Jesus falls the second time
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VIII: Incarnation
A warning child, This uttering Christ Silences mothers With His mourning tongue, A mortal language Affixed to flesh, Eye gripping eye, Limb licking limb, Heart stopping mouth With life’s bloody sigh.
Jesus speaks to the women of Jerusalem
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IX: Prayer
A third time falling Christ charms the day And hovers a moment In divine mid-air; He covets the easy Play of flight, The faith of the gay And wordless birds.
A third time falling, Christ floats away But loses His balance In freedom; He crashes to Calvary And hugs the clay, On the knees of the gods He lies bleeding.
Jesus falls the third time
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X: Introspection
Stripped of His garments, Christ loses face, Embarrassed by the crimson sores Which open outward To dress His fate With the jewels and excrement The flesh contains.
Into His body Christ retreats To view His bruises inside out And wander the distances That house desire; He broods down Every bloody alley The inner life demands.
The skeleton beneath His skin, Quiet as a holy ghost, Invokes the anguish Of buried bones Remembering forgotten dead: This is our body, How it haunts the soul.
Jesus is stripped of His garments
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XI: The Night Sky
Fixed on the cross, Christ prays for night And pictures Himself A constellation, Marking time Through endless tides Set in the rhyme And gaze of heaven.
He shuts His eyes: Three points of light Define in darkness His body’s pain, Figured in The drift of stars But left alone In earth’s demesne.
Jesus is nailed to the cross
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XII: The Seasons
Christ marks a calendar Upon His back And numbers it With common weals
Forsaking the powers The sky reveals To score time in His blood and flesh.
Celestial hours Determinedly mesh, Turning eternity Through night and day;
Their heavenly light Christ throws away To observe the solstice Of the staggering heart,
Whose erratic seasons Stop and start, Told not by stars But by sorrows.
Jesus dies on the cross
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XIII: Vespers
The hours seeping From Christ’s wounds Taunt His disciples With work to do;
In fear they free The haunted weight That tumbles through Their trembling hands;
With ritual They shut His eyes And kiss to bless His breathless lips;
A wind from dead To living slips, Through the dim joints Of twilight, weeping.
Jesus is taken down from the cross
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XIV: Sleep and Wake
The impatient body, Perfumed with life, Imagines glory But is made to wait, Uncertain in Its certain tomb.
Beneath death’s stone Dreams concentrate; Far underworld The soul is borne, Worrying every Inhumed bone.
Christ is restless To rehearse His fate, But the shadows looming At the ivory gate Obscure His passage Through the gate of horn.
Albert Camus,The Plague: “All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.”
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Sinéad Gleeson,Constellations: “The body is an afterthought. We don’t stop to think of how the heart beats its steady rhythm; or watch our metatarsals fan out with every step. Unless it’s involved in pleasure or pain, we pay this moving mass of vessel, blood and bone no mind. The lungs inflate, muscles contract, and there is no reason to assume they won’t keep on doing so. Until one day, something changes: a corporeal blip.”
“When I think of it, even now, I feel it like a shove, her loneliness.”
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Fernando Pessoa,The Book of Disquiet: “Today, during one of those periods of daydreaming which, though devoid of purpose, still constitute the greater part of the spiritual substance of my life . . . ’’
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Thomas Traherne,Centuries of Meditation: “There are invisible ways of conveyance by which some great thing doth touch our souls, and by which we tend to it.”
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Simone Weil: “At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being.”
They seemed insignificant in that busy week When dreams were sent spinning in the vivid air: To creation’s commotion, what dead could compare? No hour lingered to hear them speak The invocation of time’s elegy.
Second sight of first things, death hovered, a mirage, In the wilderness distancing earth from heaven. While the Lord proclaimed birthdays from one to seven The dead, in ghostly camouflage, Scudded like clouds across the new sky.
They shadowed creation until the seventh day When their remains demanded to be set at rest. Then the magic of making, at the rain’s behest, Stopped a moment, out of life’s way, To endow oases of memory.
In pools of reflection the dead came together Recollecting on water the world’s mortal features, The face a wind startled on the first day of weather Summoning the courage of creatures To haunt the dim future none could foresee.
Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain: “The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else’s imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!”
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Blaise Pascal, Pensées: “I have discovered that all the trouble in the world stems from one fact, man’s inability to sit still in a room.”
“The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.”
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Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks: “Few minds are spacious; few even have an empty place in them or can offer some vacant point. Almost all have narrow capacities and are filled by some knowledge that blocks them up. What a torture to talk to filled heads, that allow nothing from the outside to enter them! A good mind, in order to enjoy itself and allow itself to enjoy others, always keeps itself larger than its own thoughts. And in order to do this, these thoughts must be given a pliant form, must be easily folded and unfolded, so that they are capable, finally, of maintaining a natural flexibility.”
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Dorothy Day: “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.”
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Hugh Kenner, “The Making of the Modernist Canon”: “Having no reputation whatever, I had nothing to lose. I was naive enough not to guess that I was mortgaging my future; it is sometimes liberating not to know how the world works.”
We were away from home for a wedding. With some hours to kill before the convivial festivities began, I found a bookstore in which to spend some quality time with myself, browsing. I thought I’d pick up a slim volume—poetry, perhaps—for intermittent reading through the next few days without adding much heft to the luggage.
What I walked out with instead was Neal Stephenson’s latest bulky opus, Fall, or Dodge in Hell, billed by its publisher as “Paradise Lost by way of Philip K. Dick.” Standing in the store, I’d read the first few pages, and was—as usual with Stephenson—lured into a current of story, eager to be carried forward.
Back at the hotel, I read the first sixty-odd pages, wading into a narrative river fed by the technological, scientific, historical, conceptual, and imaginative tributaries that Stephenson’s mind travels; sometimes the flow carries the reader straight out to sea for a transporting voyage and sometimes it diffuses itself into a fecund, mysterious estuary it’s hard for either writer or reader to get out of, and which has its own rewards: There’s lots to occupy one’s attention in that delta.
In 2008, I spent most of the summer neck-deep in Stephenson’s work. I’d been led to it courtesy of a collaborator whose taste I respected enormously. At the time, we were editing an online book review, and I was interviewing authors as time and opportunity allowed. When my colleague noted Stephenson had a new novel coming out that autumn, he suggested I try to schedule an interview for the week of publication, thereby committing myself to diving into a body of work he’d been recommending all along.
As I would soon find out, the forthcoming novel, Anathem, running to more than 900 pages, demanded quite a commitment all by itself, especially for a reader not especially familiar with the landscape, or perhaps better, atmosphere of contemporary speculative fiction. Set on a planet called Arbre, Anathem is narrated by Erasmus, a young man who has lived much of his life as a member of an ancient (as in 3,400 years old) monastic community comprised not of religious believers but of philosophers and mathematicians.
Inventing a political and intellectual history, as well as an ingenious vocabulary, for his imagined world, Stephenson composed a work of large speculative dimensions, animated with both ideas and adventure. As the plot unfolds, Erasmus and his confreres are called out of their cloister and into the service of the unlearned, fearsome, technology-infested “Saecular” world to help defend Arbre from the threat posed by the mysterious forces of an alien power.
Once I’d acclimatized myself to its rarefied air (the orientation took me about 100 pages; “That’s a remarkably universal remark,” Stephenson told me when we spoke that September, “almost everyone says, ‘The first hundred pages were heavy sledding, and then it started happening for me’”), I found the world of Anathem so absorbing I tore through the book, and then plunged into more of Stephenson’s fiction: Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, and the Baroque Cycle, which comprises three volumes: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World, two of which I completed over the summer. I even read a short nonfiction book called In the Beginning … Was the Command Line.
By the time the hour of the interview rolled around, a week after Anathem’s publication in early September, I was able to tell the author as we sat down for a chat that I had never read a word of his until a few months ago, but had traversed well over 4,000 pages of it since then, with delight and intellectual profit in equal measure. Completing The System of the World post interview brought my 2008 Neal Stephenson page total closer to 6,000. I hadn’t had so much fun reading in years.
So I fell into Fall with a sense of familiarity, caught up by Stephenson’s ingenious manner and the baroque abundance of his narrative artifice, its inventive assimilation and repurposing of ideas from several realms of thought. Of course, I want to know what happens next as I turn the pages, but the plot is not as rich a reward for the time I’m applying as the ambience. Deep in the folds of one of his books, I struck by a simple thought: “I like being here.”
All of which brings me to Henry James. In a subsequent post, I’ll try to explain why.
