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.
The figure at the window
Allows the light to come and go,
Describing with curtains a house’s share:
The common cause of tenderness,
The record of living that dissolves to mess,
The lazy courtesies all houses wear
To dress anxiety in homely weeds.
Such duplicity defines our needs:
What’s outside must be kept out there.
But graces gather about the portal
That makes an altar in the wall;
They fix an otherwordly stare
On the broken knowledge the world contains.
At rest, through a serenity of panes,
Our worship is holy and debonair,
A thoughtless caption at the windowsill
Blessing quietly a dwelling’s will,
The savage history of our simplest care:
A bed, a table, some love, a prayer.
“In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide—sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.”
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Madame de Staël, On Germany:
“Nothing is less applicable to the conduct of life than a mathematical reasoning: a proposition in figures is decidedly either false or true; in all other relations the true mixes itself with the false in such a manner that often instinct alone can make us decide between different motives which are sometimes equally powerful on either side.”
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Cliff Kuang with Robert Fabricant, User-Friendly:
“Call it the user-friendly paradox: As gadgets get easier to use, they become more mysterious; they make us more capable of doing what we want, while also making us more feeble in deciding whether what we seem to want is actually worth doing.”
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Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind: A Novel:
“His posture eased, his lips moved to the faintest of smiles, and someone pleasant appeared in his expression, the boy his mother must have once loved. I wondered what had softened him. . . . How unknowable men are, full of corners.”
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Edith Templeton, The Surprise of Cremona:
“He who does not take the time to conquer the artichoke by stages does not deserve to penetrate to its heart. There are no shortcuts in life to anything: least of all to the artichoke.”
A few weeks back, under The Next 1,000 rubric in Newsletter No. 28, I wrote about As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto. The reader who’d added it to the ever-growing list of titles at the website was my wife, Margot, and her persuasive case for the book led me to conclude the squib in my email by saying, ”If we can find the book around the house, I’m reading this next.”
As it turns out, our original copy was nowhere to be found, having likely made its way into the tottering piles my mother maintains at her house. Fortunately, however, Margot, taking me at my word, had ordered a second copy as soon as she was finished proofreading the newsletter, which is why it was close at hand over the long President’s Day weekend, when I was under the weather but clearheaded enough to enjoy the therapeutic regimen assigned me: sit in bed and read.
I couldn’t have asked for better company in this circumstance than Child and DeVoto. The conversation that unfolds in the long letters between them, Julia writing from France (at the start, at least) and Avis from Cambridge, Mass, where her husband, Bernard, an acclaimed journalist and historian, was an instructor at Harvard, is sheer joy, spiced with culinary insight and gossip social, cultural, and political. As Margot pointed out, it’s suffused with the pleasure of friendship in formation and, ultimately, in full flower.
Assembled, edited, and nicely annotated by Joan Reardon, As Always, Julia was published in 2010 with the apt subtitle, “Food, Friendship and the Making of a Masterpiece.” The correspondence began in 1952, when Child sent Bernard DeVoto a paring knife from Paris. Child had never met DeVoto, but nonetheless was compelled to address his pining for a good carbon steel utensil after she’d read an installment of his Harper’s magazine column, “The Easy Chair,” in which he decried American stainless steel because it couldn’t hold a proper edge.
The thank you note that came to Child in Paris started like this:
Dear Mrs. Child: I hope you won’t mind hearing from me instead of from my husband. He is trying to clear the decks before leaving on a five weeks trip to the Coast and is swamped with work, though I assure you most appreciative of your delightful letter and the fine little knife. Everything I say you may take as coming straight from him—on the subject of cutlery we are in entire agreement.
She goes on for eight substantial paragraphs—two full, well-packed book pages—about the “cutlery question” and other coincidental matters:
An aside on eating—I am green with envy at your chance to study French cooking. There are two dishes served at Bossu on the Quai Bourbon that I remember in my dreams, and if by any chance you know how to make them I would be forever in your debt if you would let me know.
Julia, of course, takes up this challenge, responding with her recipes for scrambled eggs in the French style and veal with cream and tarragon. The women’s immediate bond, forged by a kitchen knife and fostered by common interests and intelligence, was soon anchored to a project—the masterpiece of Reardon’s subtitle—getting underway: the manuscript that would ultimately become one of the most important American cookbooks of all time, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which Child created in collaboration with two French women, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, but which might never have seen the light of day without the editorial attention and publishing midwifery of Avis DeVoto.
The conception, writing, styling, recipe testing, and various reconfigurings of Mastering the Art of French Cooking—to say nothing of its wayward journey to bookshop shelves, an obstacle course through various hurdles and assorted publishers—provides an intriguing narrative framework to the first, large portion of the correspondence. It’s fascinating in itself and doubly so refracted through the wit and worry of two wise women whose respect and affection for one another was marvelous for this reader to share. I felt like I was making new friends, too.
The slow passage of time across the lengthy letters, the connection forged in sentences and sentiments without a face-to-face meeting for a few years, is epitomized in the real desire each woman expresses for photographs of the other, a circumstance—a kind of suspension of discovery, a tantalizing anticipation that goes beyond the images themselves—that is hard for us to comprehend in our world of infinite pictures and instant communication.
“Now that I know Paul [Child’s husband] is a photographer,” writes Avis in February 1953, nearly a year after their first exchange, “I have a definite request to make. . . . I want Paul to take a photograph of you at the kitchen stove. With or without decorated fish.”
“Yes,” comes Julia’s response, “we’ll send you some photos, but only on the severe condition that you will send us several of the two of you and the two boys. We visualize you as about 5 and ½ feet (you said once that you weighed 112 when your weight dropped, so imagine you would normally be about 125). With dark hair (I don’t know why) . . .”
Three weeks later, Julia again: “And the photographs arrived in the same mail. At last we know! I love the looks of DeVoto, there is a wonderful gaiety and intensity about that face. Now, how do I know whether you look as I pictured you, now that I’ve seen you. You are dark, anyway. That is a wonderfully worldly expression you have on in the group picture, really superb . . . It is the face I always try to wear when I am in New York, with no success.”
And Avis, shortly afterward: “Pictures just arrived. Hooray! I am enchanted with them, and think I will have the big one of you at Cordon Bleu and the extremely handsome one of Paul framed for my Hall of Fame. . . . I am very, very pleased with your looks, so warm and vigorous and handsome. . . . I am rather astonished that you are such a big girl. Six feet, whoops.”
The excitement about the photographs, the palpable thrill that pulses through these letters as they fashion a long-distance friendship, the enthusiastic immersion in kitchen lore and technique, the energy of the women’s effort at transatlantic translation of local customs—all speak of an art of conjuring that is cheering to discover in these letters, despite that fact that such resourcefulness moves further out of our twenty-first-century reach with every attention-atrophying wonder of our tap-activated, clickable world.
Sunrise, sunset, and J. M. W. Turner’s book of hours.
J. M. W. Turner, Norham Castle, Sunrise
That voice, at the start, could have stopped with the light, left heaven and earth glad in its glow. But so lithe was light’s beauty, so playful its touch, that the voice quickly conjured the rest of creation, indulging light’s longing for things to caress.
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The years we make, through breath and memory, but what we are given is the day. And, as the minister who narrates Marilynne Robinson’s luminescent novel Gilead sees, our days are not as various as the years make them appear: “. . . it has all been one day, that first day. Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning.”
The medieval monastics who created the Divine Office celebrated this gift, dividing the day into the canonical hours, defining each hour by prayer. Through their devotions, it was light that led them, and not time. Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline—each hour encompassed a band of light, mirroring the perceptible changes of the day’s illumination. In the silence of a cloister, the noise of time was quiet too, its metaphorical ticking washed in the chants that, from Matins through Compline, praised the light and marked our turning in it.
Those thoughts, culled from an essay I wrote some years ago, returned to me after viewing, at the Mystic Seaport Museum, a majestic exhibition of the art of J. M. W. Turner, in which more than four score paintings from Tate Britain were on display, catching light in all its glory.
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“The sun is god” said the artist in his last days, at least as reported by John Ruskin, who may have been mythologizing, but with characteristic imaginative precision. Whatever Turner’s faith, his work reverenced the lingering constancy of creation, illuminated in the hours he sang in his work, from sunrise to sunset and back again.
Oscar Wilde defined public opinion as “an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.” I took special note of that description when I came across it in Adam Phillips’s Unforbidden Pleasures four years ago, figuring it might usefully be applied at some point to the unfolding presidential political debacle (it didn’t take a lot of prescience to imagine that, I admit). But I forgot about it until a few months later, when I came across Madame de Staël’s earlier and more nuanced conception of public opinion as a force that grows to fill the gap between the governed and the governing classes when a common promise loses its power to connect them. This idea was discussed by Robert Darnton in his review of Germaine de Staël: A Political Portrait, by Biancamaria Fontana, in the June 23, 2016 issue of the New York Review of Books. The persistent attachments of the people, Staël suggested in her contemporary rumination on the French Revolution, could become passionate weapons in a pervasive war against the existing political structures, whatever their denomination.
You can imagine why this train of thought from four years ago is barreling down the tracks toward me again, as we head toward what looks to be another electoral calamity. In his essay, Darnton smartly invokes the work of Walter Lippmann, who wrote more than a century after Staël:
When Walter Lippmann tried to characterize public opinion, he, like Staël, emphasized the tenuous link between the governed and the governors. Public affairs are enormously complex, he insisted. The public can know them only imperfectly, at a great distance, and through the haze of collective views, which he described as a “pseudo-environment.” Intermediaries, especially in the press, intervene in this environment by translating the decisions made by public figures into stories that the public can consume as news. But this process is more a matter of manipulating symbols than of diffusing ideas . . .
What Lippmann described as a “pseudo-environment” is now no longer solely the province of the press; thanks to the internet and social media—and, especially, the commercial constructions created by Facebook, Google, and others to exploit those technologies for their profit with a swashbuckling sociopathy—everyone can be an intermediary and, more to the point, determined forces can weaponize symbols and automate their delivery with pernicious precision and effect. The power of the media in translating events into “stories that the public can consume as news” has been compromised, at times corrupted through its own complicity, while new breeds of unmediated insurgents, like fast-mutating viruses, replicate with abandon to infect opinion with gleeful destructiveness. When the “pseudo-environment” comes to encompass all of “reality,” and the symbols begin to manipulate the intermediaries as well as the public, you get the pathology we’re browsing online, reading in the papers, or watching on television every hour these days. And who knows what’s in your neighbors’ newsfeeds.
Considering the continual turmoil that roiled France following the first flash of the Revolution, Darnton quotes Fontana, who is channeling the insight of her subject, the astonishing Madame de Staël: “No one . . . had the ‘capacity to fill the imaginative void left by the legacy of the old monarchy.’” A similar imaginative void engendered the gap between electorate and elected that surprising political forces rushed through in 2016, a gap that only seems to have grown in the past four years to include the reckless manipulation of more than symbols: the long-standing logistics of justice, national interest, and market economics are being both disrupted and corrupted before our eyes. It’s the void created when, like the old monarchy, institutions—legal, political, civic, economic, educational, religious, even scientific—that might steady our course in a climate of intensities lose their moorings but continue to operate as if they haven’t, abdicating their responsibilities under the influence of the glitter of greed, the allure of celebrity culture, the hysteria of the 24-hour news cycle, the stupor of doctrinal absolutes, and the terrorism of technology-fueled disinformation. Longing for an older America may be a fantasy, but it is fueled by a lost promise so clear and present to the fantasists—and so disconnected from the no less wishful narratives of self-anointed reasonable players—that, without the ballast of institutional convictions, our collective phantasms threaten to hold us in their grip for some time to come.
I fell in love with Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) the first time I met her. We were introduced by Richard Holmes, biographer of Shelley and Coleridge and author as well of two of the most marvelous books I know: Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer and The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. I would read Mr. Holmes on any subject, so I was glad to discover his essay on Staël, originally published in the New York Review of Books in 2009 and since revised and collected in his volume This Long Pursuit, of whom I had little previous knowledge.
Holmes begins:
She was the only daughter of a Swiss banker, and one of the richest and cleverest young women of her generation in Europe. She wrote among much else one celebrated novel—Corinne, or Italy (1807)—which invented a new heroine for her times, outsold even the works of Walter Scott, and has never been out of print since. She personally saved at least a dozen people from the French revolutionary guillotine. She reinvented Parisian millinery with her astonishing multicolored turbans. She dramatically dismissed Jane Austen as “vulgaire.” She snubbed Napoleon at a reception. She inspired Byron’s famous chauvinist couplet, “Man’s love is of his life a thing apart, / ‘Tis woman’s whole existence.” And she once completely outtalked the poet Coleridge at a soirée in Mayfair. For these things alone she should be remembered.
Makes you want to read more about her, right? And you should. You’ll be astonished that a woman of such prominence and power in a tumultuous era is largely forgotten today, or remembered only for Corinne (which, in addition to being an excellent novel is also a pioneering scout in the literary territory of the higher travel writing; I included it in 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die). But, while neglected today, her ambitious works of political and cultural analysis (On Germany, for example, and The Influence of the Passions Upon the Happiness of Individuals and Nations) have proven to be trenchant and prophetic. The extent of her influence in her own time is astonishing. “At the height of de Staël’s fame in 1814,” Holmes writes, “the French memoir writer Madame de Chastenay summed up her life in a single epigram. There were, she wrote, three great powers struggling against Napoleon for the soul of Europe: ‘England, Russia, and Madame de Staël.’”
Tolstoy introduced her into the pages of War and Peace (indeed, much of his thinking about the cumulative influence of individual human wills upon history, most clearly articulated in the meditative chapter following his description of the devastating battle of Borodino, seems like an elaboration of Staël’s ideas on public opinion). Often quoted by Ralph Waldo Emerson, she has also been name-checked by Meadow Soprano (season 2, episode 7, Wikipedia reports). So, in addition to extensive travels in her own time, both literal and figurative, she’s also gotten around a bit in ours. But not enough: she deserves to be more widely remembered, and invoked, as I hope to do again in this space as our relationship continues to develop.
Holmes again, rightly:
. . . she was a truly extraordinary woman who courageously created a new role in society, one even larger than that of her irrepressible heroine Corinne. This role was that of the independent, freelance, female intellectual in Europe.
