4405. “an endlesse moniment”
for short time an endlesse moniment
Edmund Spenser, “Epithalamion”
Sometimes I get discouraged when I realize that most of what I write will never see much light of day. But then I remember how some of the best practices aren’t aimed to reach past the ages, but rather just to get us through the night.
Note: “All he wanted to do was get him and his sister safely home” (Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird).
4409. “for poetry was all written before time was”
Emerson, “The Poet”
I think that’s why it can be such a good friend when you’re unhappy, and every cause you can come up with for being so seems like so many settings after some lost fact, before all the clocks (some Temple destroyed, some Terror unleashed).
As long as you don’t get hung up on too many questions about who, when, where, and why, the best poems will open a dedicated line to some place past all the time zones, a dedicated line, just for you.
Then all you have to do is be a little open, too.
Note: “surrounding ourselves with the original circumstances” (Emerson, “History”).
4410. “What they made of his lectures is not known”
In addition to the more usual subjects, he taught the schoolboys
philosophy. What they made of his lectures is not known.
Peter Singer on Hegel’s years as a high school
teacher, in Hegel: A Very Short Introduction
I wonder if any of those boys made of the lectures given to them by that prominent purveyor of dialectical thought anything like what a girl made of my lectures on American literature at the posh high school in a posh part of Los Angeles where I briefly taught many years ago.
The girl was poor and didn’t live anywhere near the school. I sometimes wondered how she got there.
She must have caught the bus.
What she was learning from our class she told me one day was that people both in literature and in life strengthened the sense of who they were by discovering who they were not. She was grateful to the school where we met. She understood that the scholarship it gave her to go there was her ticket to a better life, both for herself personally and, by extension, for the people she loved.
But she was grateful for another reason as well. By showing her who she wasn’t, the school was also showing her who she was.
I used to worry a bit about her. She was doing well enough in the class, but she seemed a little lonely.
After that conversation, though, I never worried about her again.
Note: “the suffering … and the labor of the negative” (Hegel).
4411. “And in short, I was afraid”
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Sometimes the “long story short” version is the only one you can bear to tell. Other times, it’s the only one you can’t.
Note: “it is not easy to foresee a natural end” (Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”).
4413. “the pleasure of giving respect”
He did not remember the pleasure of giving respect.
Tobias Wolff, “Bullet in the Brain”
—which can only mean that he didn’t remember the pleasure of receiving it, either.
Oh, and how about those times—the best times of all—when giving and receiving respect are so welded together that there’s really no telling them apart?
Note: “There remains yet something of honor and pride, of life” (William Faulkner, Light in August).
