3281. “Add the case that you had loved her”
… and had made her the subject of those poor
dreams which have, at one time or another, been
in the heads of more men than you think likely.
Dickens, Great Expectations
Those poor dreams of a passionate love saving a world or making a marriage; those poor dreams, whose least memory suffices to coax their most seasoned denier to relent long enough to soothe a boy caught still in the mourning mist of them; those poor dreams, whose every defeat (despite all odds and most appearances) can serve to strengthen the decency of the defeated; those poor dreams: perhaps not so poor, after all.
Note: “The evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw the shadow of no parting from her” (Great Expectations—the second ending).
3283. “grief for disappointments of no fatal consequence”
Samuel Johnson, “Rambler, 68”
However differently we may feel while we dwell in their midst, most of our disappointments are of no fatal consequence. We miss a commuter train or a connecting flight: there are more where those came from, and one or another of these will eventually get us where it is we mean to go. The lecture we gave today failed to find the key of clarity we hoped it would: we can right its rail and reckon its resonance when the class next meets. A conversation with an old or new friend that begins with the alluring promise of escalating and unexacting candor ends in a feeling of awkwardness (have we said too much or too little?) that annuls the joy of that promise: next month or next meal, that feeling of awkwardness will give way to the ease of a new intimacy.
Of course, no one remotely dedicated to the practice of honesty will deny that some disappointments are quite indelible, but even these, however much they might depress the spirit, seldom involve the deprivation of a life. Few of the incurable disappointments we feel in ourselves or others bring death into this world, or all the woe pertaining there.
It will nevertheless be admitted, by any feeling mind, that we are likely to grieve, as if for a death, these irreversible cancellations of underwritten hope (typically a promise of happiness contained in a feeling of excitation, tenderness or esteem): A thousand miseries make silent and invisible inroads on mankind, and the heart feels innumerable throbs, which never break into complaint (Johnson, “Rambler, 68”).
And while these silent disappointments might be made to seem larger than they are when those who feel them speak of them too much, they are surely made to seem less so when those who suffer or see them fail to speak of them at all. Even the least sense of being let down and left to fall behind by those we once may well have deemed better than ourselves, or our own better selves, will serve to remind us that we will be obliged soon enough to take our leave altogether from those whose voices, or laughter, or gestures we love—or from those whose voices or laughter or gestures we have loved (even losing you) (Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art”) and already, or all but, taken our leave.
3287. The Human Part of Speech
I knew one that, when he wrote a letter, he would put that which
was most material in a postscript, as if it had been a bye-matter.
Bacon, “Of Cunning”
By the way, he said, slowly circling back round again, after we had made our formal farewells (I wonder if either of us knew then how seldom we would meet after that summer—so long ago—we had spent becoming the best of friends),
Note: meeting you was the high point of …
3299. The Elements of Sympathy
All through The Elements of Style one finds evidences of the
author’s deep sympathy for the reader. Will felt that the reader
was in serious trouble most of the time, a man floundering …
and that it was the duty of anyone attempting to write English to
… get his man up on dry ground or at least throw him a rope.
E. B. White, “Will Strunk”
By the points of my compass, the high and dry place from which I’m supposed to throw the rescuing line dwells smack dab on the grounds of grammatical fiction, a language game which we cannot learn (Wittgenstein). I mean, how would I know that you needed my help if I didn’t know that I needed yours? My father used to warn us that we couldn’t rescue someone from the water unless we ourselves were in no danger of going down. Nowadays, though, I pretty much feel that I’d have no hope of helping to save someone if I weren’t at least a little scared of being lost myself.
Note: “And Gide is surely mistaken when he … say[s] of … characters that they are ‘desperately mundane’ because ‘they never live except in relation to each other.’ It is just in their relations that they live so bravely, and are so little mundane” (F. W. Dupee, Henry James: His Life and Writings).
3302. Tradition and the Individual Eavesdropper
Kafka eavesdropped on tradition. … The main reason
why this eavesdropping demands such effort is that
only the most indistinct sounds reach the listener.
W. Benjamin to G. Scholem, June 12, 1938
—which doesn’t mean that you can’t transmit a little, the Tradition you only half hear, pass it on in bits and pieces—the defense of the truth, and of those who would extend it, even by evading it; the opposition to war and the devotion to peace; the styles of elegance and expertise in art and science; the beauty of the plain and simple (and the cryptic and the complicated); the methods for coping with the unbearable, and caring for that which makes it less so; the ways of loving what is, and laboring to bring about what should be.
My mom likes to tell the story about how once, when she and my dad were first married (this must have been sometime during the second Eisenhower administration), they were out somewhere in the woods with some other newlyweds, staying in some kind of log cabin (somewhere in eastern Washington State, I suppose—I can’t recall the details) without electricity or running water. One morning, my dad came back from the well with an empty bucket. (“Your father didn’t know anything about priming the pump!” my mother reports with gleeful and affectionate condescension.) Well, as little as he knew, I know less, and my ears glaze over whenever my mother seeks to explain with methodical clarity the practice and principle of this hydraulic feat for drawing water where all seems dry. I have never delved to consider the literal ground of what is best known as a popularizing metaphor for a central element of Keynesian economics, and certainly have no interest in disturbing the perfect record of my ignorance.
But I like to think about how much my mother likes to tell me all about it.
Note: “(a sort of theology passed on by whispers dealing with matters discredited and obsolete)” (Benjamin to Scholem).
3303. Notes toward Aphorisms
Above all, Bacon gave him an ideal of style involving a
union of compression and metaphor, of practical wisdom
and imagination. … “Their excellence and value,”
Reynolds quotes him as saying, “consisted in being the
observations of a strong mind operating upon life.”
W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson
I used to think that strength would always be the property of the other party. It was life and its operators that seemed strong, and you and I no more than their prolix and played-upon players. Lately, though, I’ve been feeling pretty strong myself, watching for when to make my move and make my mark. You never know when your call will come to rise and shine (accidents of lucidity and love; surprises of séance and sentence), nor how long (except, not long) your time in the light will last (house rules, and always wins in the end).
Our better oracles say that the strongest speech (as with the sweetest) may be short: though uneasy, you turn to face the music, before it drowns you out.
We poor players know to seek to make our cake-walk better, even by the fast firework, the brief candle, that comes right before the Dark.
Note: “Beauty is as summer fruits, which are easy to corrupt, and cannot last … but yet certainly again, if it light well, it maketh virtue shine, and vices blush” (Bacon, “Of Beauty”).