3313. “Money is a kind of poetry”
Wallace Stevens
Yesterday, after my annual visit, I left my accountant’s office with tears in my eyes. I don’t think I’ve ever left my accountant’s office actually weeping. Maybe I have and just forgotten. I cry a lot, and I have a terrible memory.
Once a year, I see him about my taxes. My brother thinks I’m wasting my money. I think I’m saving my soul. Also, a lot of time and peace of mind: I’m terrible with numbers.
Especially numbers that are symbols for money. Or maybe those numbers are bad with me—hell, either way, it’s an ugly relationship, and I’ve basically given up on it. (Don’t tell them that—the numbers, I mean: they know exactly where I live, and they’ll come after me six ways to Sunday.)
On the other hand, like you, I hope, I’m involved in a lot of relationships—close encounters, lifelong romances, or something simpler (like a good neighbor)—that just get better every year. With each passing year, for example, my appreciation for the kinds of words that help people get through a dark night or a long day just grows and grows. With each passing year, the kinds of words that help people get brave or loving, or help them know that they can become so—their interest compounds like nobody’s business.
Appreciating words like that, and helping others do so, too: well, that’s the better part of my business. Of course, I lack the instruments to quantify the rescuing resonances of the kinds of words that are the stock in trade for retail outfits like mine—like I say, unlike my accountant, I’m not a numbers man. But let me tell you something: every year, I leave his office a little less worried than I was when I walked in, and numbers or no numbers, I have to figure that the better part of both our businesses is pretty much the same.
Note: “All these forms, familiar to all the arts, place us at a distance from the substance of things; they speak to us ‘as from afar’; reality is touched not with direct confidence but with fingertips that are immediately withdrawn” (Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money).
3314. We Apologize for the Allusions
The quotations, direct or indirect, that figure so
prominently … Some readers … regard their presence
as an affectation, even a pedantry. A sympathetic view
might take them as additional “voices” that haunt the
poem, or the poet’s mind in his making of the poem.
Lionel Trilling on “The Waste Land,” The Experience
of Literature: A Reader with Commentaries
Sometimes I think maybe it’s just because poets, like people in general, get lonely now and then, and want to have as many friends as possible around them, as they make their way through whatever fear or favor they happen to be facing any given day or night. You lose so many friends as the years go on (a loss of life; a failure of love; a misplaced address)—it’s hard to keep in mind that those you have left don’t necessarily all know each other; so that the unannounced return of an old one from twilight sleep or fervid youth gets you so excited—an abstract idea, a painting, stippled Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare (Nabokov, Lolita)—that you forget your manners and neglect to present him properly to the others in the room. Maybe you think they already know each other. (They often do: when I was in college, I was forever introducing people to one another who had known each other well before they had known me—how embarrassing.)
Sometimes I think all those quotations, direct or indirect, that figure so prominently are just so many well-meaning networkers, working really late—long past the due date—like the exercise of a phantom limb that would if it could (but it can’t) rescue a failed cry for help:
“Don’t let him cut my hand off—
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!”
So. But the hand was gone already.
(Robert Frost, “Out, Out—”)
(I always wished I’d done more to help out my brother and sister during their Hard Times.)
Anyway, it’s about old friends (When Harry Met Sally).
Note: “The author and annotator of the ‘piece that passeth understanding’ was not insensitive to the resulting climate of jest. Six years later he capped a comparison between Crashaw and Shelley by calling for elucidation of the ‘Keen as are the arrows’ stanza of ‘To a Skylark’: ‘There may be some clue for persons more learned than I; but Shelley should have provided notes’ ” (Hugh Kenner, T. S. Eliot: The Invisible Poet).
3317. “a preponderance of loving affections”
In re-reading my manuscript, I am almost appalled
at the amount of emotionality which I find in it.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Really? Now see, re-reading my manuscript, I would have felt that I had failed its subject (the subject being you and me, and all that we’ve been through together … or, if not together, still near enough one another, and surely never, quite, without each other), if the emotional amount had been any less.
Note: “God only knows what I’d be without you” (Beach Boys, “God Only Knows”).
3871. Conversion for Dummies
Much like my mother, Edward Gibbon sharply disapproves of “opulent nobles” who “resign … their leisure to the business and amusements of private life” (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) rather than joining the PTA, a political cause, or “the pursuit of military glory.” Not least amongst the downsides of what both deem so much selfish self-indulgence is its vitiating effect on the body and mind of those so indulgent:
Should a fly presume to settle on the silken folds of their gilded umbrellas, should a sunbeam penetrate through some unguarded and imperceptible chink, they deplore their intolerable hardships, and lament in affected language that they were not born in the land of the Cimmerians, the regions of eternal darkness. (Gibbon, Decline and Fall)
The pattern of decadence that Gibbon sets forth here strikes a little too close for comfort, para mí. While I have little concern for the perfected imperviousness of silken folds or gilded umbrellas, I decline and fall to the Dark Side at the very prospect that I might be deprived, for an epoch or an hour, of the less ostentatious, but surely no more admirable, armoring ornaments of argument by which I make my way through this world.
What happens when the sheltering, glittering certitudes that make me feel safe and Proud turn into so many bare, ruined choirs, repeating the same old slogans, like so many veterans of the Boer, and other, wars?
I guess then it’s time for keener-sounding adventure; a newer course of study.
Note: “The anxiety in teaching, in serious communication, is that I myself require education. And for grownups this is not natural growth, but change. Conversion is a turning of our natural reactions; so it is symbolized as rebirth” (Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy).
4004. “a love stronger than any impulse that could have marred it”
She never repented that she had given up position and fortune
to marry Will Ladislaw. … They were bound to each other by a
love stronger than any impulse which could have marred it.
George Eliot, Middlemarch
My mother likes to remind me regularly of her aversion to fiction and, in particular, the kind of “fancy” fiction I have spent a good portion of my life studying and teaching. I was thus surprised this morning, in my semi-annual survey of her strange library—manuals for Hikers, Self-Helpers, and Chinese Communists; a celebratory biography of Andrew Jackson; memoirs of Native American Warriors and dictionaries of Ancient Hawaiian Chants; histories of the Middle East and the Wild West; old (very old) field guides to flora and fauna, near and far; textbooks on Organic Chemistry and the like—to discover, nearly hidden in the thickets of this old curiosity shop, one of “my” books—a novel I am not alone in regarding as one of the greatest stories ever told. More surprising, still: the volume is, throughout, underlined and annotated by what could only be her hand.
I was less surprised to discover that amongst the passages she has marked for note are the lines that begin this report. Decades after their divorce, my parents remain bound together by an unfaded, though now hardly mentioned, belief that risking anything short of everything to marry each other (they are of different races; that was a different time) would have been a cowardice they would have both repented till the day they died. I like to think that my mother took some satisfaction when she came across a bare statement of the fact of the faith that determined the direction of her life—“a feeling that,
Note: in gaining the man she loved, she would gain something for the whole world” (E. M. Forster, A Room with a View).
4010. “a piece of classical debris which insists on being noticed”
Maurice Natanson, Edmund Husserl:
Philosopher of Infinite Tasks
God, what isn’t? I mean, what isn’t a piece of classical debris which insists on being noticed? What is the first worry in the morning but a fragment of the oldest fear (fear itself) in the book—that book, as drowned now as any secret of the deep? What is the feeling of defeat, before the infinite tasks of the day have even begun, but a torn passage from a poem of a being at a loss, written in sentences too old and cold now for anyone to parse? What is the sense that you’re past all help (giving or getting), but the repeating story of exile whose hidden foundation evades all excavation?
What is the push to love past all our woe but the renewal of vows voiced, for the first time, before all our first times? What is the reaching and being reached that starts the movement of any calmness and kindness but offspring of the first mothered gesture of every better nature? What is the starting transmission that tells you you’ve got this, but a sending as old as a sword from a stone, an easing that comes from a classic you love?
Note: “Many of their ideas are merely a matter of historical curiosity, but some of them contain a nucleus of permanent truth and might thus become a message and an inspiration … to the rest of mankind” (Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains).