Dew

And so, dear readers, our eventful year continues.  I tell myself that I should keep my counsel as the arsonists, statue-topplers, building-defacers, and looters articulate their deeply-held convictions about how the rest of us ought to think, feel, and live.  Their actions speak for themselves.  No gloss is necessary.  Yet I will say that two words have been in my mind over the past week or so:  "emptiness" and "vacuity."  As well as this:  "They have inquired and considered little, and do not always feel their own ignorance.  They are not much accustomed to be interrogated by others; and seem never to have thought upon interrogating themselves."  Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), page 272.

The evil and lack of human decency on display are nothing new, alas. They are part of human nature -- always have been, always will be. One chooses one's path.

                                The Nightjar

We loved our Nightjar, but she would not stay with us.

We had found her lying as dead, but soft and warm,

Under the apple tree beside the old thatched wall.

Two days we kept her in a basket by the fire,

Fed her, and thought she well might live -- till suddenly

In the very moment of most confiding hope

She raised herself all tense, quivered and drooped and died.

Tears sprang into my eyes -- why not? the heart of man

Soon sets itself to love a living companion,

The more so if by chance it asks some care of him.

And this one had the kind of loveliness that goes

Far deeper than the optic nerve -- full fathom five

To the soul's ocean cave, where Wonder and Reason

Tell their alternate dreams of how the world was made.

So wonderful she was -- her wings the wings of night

But powdered here and there with tiny golden clouds

And wave-line markings like sea-ripples on the sand.

O how I wish I might never forget that bird --

Never!

                    But even now, like all beauty of earth,

She is fading from me into the dusk of Time.

Henry Newbolt (1862-1938), A Perpetual Memory and Other Poems (John Murray 1939).

Herbert Hughes-Stanton (1870-1937)

"The Mill in the Valley" (1892)

No Escape, Part Thirteen: "Switch Love, Move House -- You Will Soon Be Back Where You Started"

I am intimately familiar with both the dream of Escape and its companion, the Siren song of the Ideal Place.  A long-time reader of this blog recently commented that he had spent his holiday in the Lincolnshire Wolds. Being unfamiliar with the area, I did some Internet research.  Upon seeing how lovely the area is, I soon began dreaming of spending my remaining years in a secluded vale amid the Wolds, "and a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made."  With occasional treks eastward to the North Sea for a walk along the shingle.  And so it goes . . .

Harry Epworth Allen (1894-1958), "Summer" (1940)

The theme of this "No Escape" series of posts is:  "Wherever you go, there you are."  As I have noted before, this notion is not a contemporary pop psychology platitude.

"Ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and lust do not leave us when we change our country . . . Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better by his travels.  'I should think not,' he said, 'he took himself along with him.'"

Michel de Montaigne, "Of Solitude," The Complete Essays of Montaigne (translated by Donald Frame) (Stanford University Press 1958).

Two centuries or so later Samuel Johnson retraced Montaigne's steps:

"The general remedy of those, who are uneasy without knowing the cause, is change of place; they are willing to imagine that their pain is the consequence of some local inconvenience, and endeavour to fly from it, as children from their shadows; always hoping for more satisfactory delight from every new scene, and always returning home with disappointments and complaints. . . . [H]e, who has so little knowledge of human nature, as to seek happiness by changing any thing, but his own dispositions, will waste his life in fruitless efforts, and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove."

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, Number 6 (April 7, 1750).

Yes, yes, well said, sirs.  But easier said than done.

Harry Epworth Allen, "The Caravan"

                         Ideal Home

                                   1

Never would there be lives enough for all
The comely places --
Glimpsed from a car, a train, or loitered past --
That lift their faces
To be admired, murmuring 'Live with me.'

House with a well,
Or a ghost; by a stream; on a hill; in a hollow: breathing
Woodsmoke appeal,
Fresh paint, or simply a prayer to be kept warm,
Each casts her spell.

Life, claims each, will look different from my windows,
Your furniture be
Transformed in these rooms, your chaos sorted out here.
Ask for the key.
Walk in, and take me.  Then you shall live again.

                                   2

. . . Nor lives enough
For all the fair ones, dark ones, chestnut-haired ones
Promising love --
I'll be your roof, your hearth, your paradise orchard
And treasure-trove.
With puritan scents -- rosemary, thyme, verbena,
With midnight musk,
Or the plaintive, memoried sweetness tobacco-plants
Exhale at dusk,
They lure the footloose traveller to dream of
One fixed demesne,
The stay-at-home to look for his true self elsewhere.
I will remain
Your real, your ideal property.  Possess me.
Be born again.

                                   3

If only there could be lives enough, you're wishing? . . .
For one or two
Of all the possible loves a dozen lifetimes
Would hardly do:
Oak learns to be oak through a rooted discipline.

Such desirableness
Of place or person is chiefly a glamour cast by
Your unsuccess
In growing your self.  Rebirth needs more than a change of
Flesh or address.

Switch love, move house -- you will soon be back where you started,
On the same ground,
With a replica of the old romantic phantom
That will confound
Your need for roots with a craving to be unrooted.

C. Day Lewis, The Gate and Other Poems (1962).

Harry Epworth Allen, "A Derbyshire Farmstead"

"Isles Of Paradise"

Yearning is one of the defining characteristics of the poems written by the Decadent poets of the 1890s.  I will state at the outset that I find nothing wrong with yearning per se.  It is the twin of hope (albeit with more of an edge of desire and longing), which Samuel Johnson was wont to identify as an essential feature of what it means to be human.

For me, at least, the yearning of the Nineties poets is yearning at its best. Resigned, yes; melancholy, yes; but, for the most part, not querulous.  This is in contrast to our modern world, in which the yearning is whiny, and all about things.  The Decadent poets were not materialists.  Their yearning was romantic and spiritual and aesthetic.  I cannot fault them for this.  Did they sometimes take their yearning too far?  Perhaps.  But better that than, say, placing one's faith in Science and Progress and Politics.  We can all see where that has gotten us.

Harald Sohlberg, "Midsummer Night" (c. 1910)

                 Vanitas

Beyond the need of weeping,
     Beyond the reach of hands,
May she be quietly sleeping,
     In what dim nebulous lands?
Ah, she who understands!

The long, long winter weather,
     These many years and days,
Since she, and Death, together,
     Left me the wearier ways:
And now, these tardy bays!

The crown and victor's token:
     How are they worth to-day?
The one word left unspoken,
     It were late now to say:
But cast the palm away!

For once, ah once, to meet her,
     Drop laurel from tired hands:
Her cypress were the sweeter,
     In her oblivious lands:
Haply she understands!

Yet, crossed that weary river,
     In some ulterior land,
Or anywhere, or ever,
     Will she stretch out a hand?
And will she understand?

Ernest Dowson, Verses (1896).

Yes, it all seems -- to use Dowson's own words -- "dim" and "nebulous," doesn't it?  Who is "she"?  I haven't a clue.  The practical-minded among us will say "bosh!" or "humbug!"  Not I.

Harald Sohlberg, "Night" (1904)

On the other hand, we mustn't think that the late-19th century was all of a piece.  Consider, for instance, this:

I have trod the upward and the downward slope;
I have endured and done in days before;
I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope;
And I have lived and loved, and closed the door.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Songs of Travel and Other Verses (1896).

One is not likely to think of Stevenson as a dreamy Nineties aesthete. There is a note of fortitude sounded here which one seldom finds in the Decadent poets.  Bear in mind that Stevenson, given his poor health, was always staring Death in the face.  He is certainly entitled to invoke some Decadent fatalism and melancholy.  And perhaps he does, just a bit:  "I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope."  But overall the tone is resolute -- similar to that of his "Requiem" (which has appeared here previously):  "Glad did I live and gladly die,/And I laid me down with a will."

Moreover, Stevenson was willing to allow for the attainment, however brief, of Paradise on Earth.

Fair Isle at Sea -- thy lovely name
Soft in my ear like music came.
That sea I loved, and once or twice
I touched at isles of Paradise.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Poems (1916).  The "fair Isle at Sea" is Samoa.

A small poem, a slight poem some might say, but I can never get over its loveliness.

Harald Sohlberg, "Flower Meadow in the North" (1905)

How To Live, Part Nineteen: The New Year

I am not one for making New Year's resolutions.  But I am willing to listen to advice.  Perhaps the best-known piece of advice on How to Live was given by Horace:  carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.  In The Oxford Dictionary of Latin Words and Phrases (1998) the phrase is translated as follows:  "seize the day, trusting as little as possible to the morrow."  Yes, of course:  carpe diem.  We've all heard it before.  Like most well-meaning advice, easier said than done.

The phrase appears in Ode 11 of Book One of Horace's Odes.  As one might expect, the poem has been translated into English numerous times, with varying degrees of fidelity to the original.  The following version is by Derek Mahon.

                              How to Live

Don't waste your time, Leuconoe, living in fear and hope
of the imprevisible future; forget the horoscope.
Accept whatever happens.  Whether the gods allow
us fifty winters more or drop us at this one now
which flings the high Tyrrhenian waves on the stone piers,
decant your wine.  The days are more fun than the years
which pass us by while we discuss them.  Act with zest
one day at a time, and never mind the rest.

Derek Mahon, Selected Poems (Viking/The Gallery Press 1991).

          Osmund Caine, "Wedding at Twickenham Parish Church" (1948)

Louis MacNeice also tried his hand at it:

Do not, Leuconoe, seek to inquire what is forbidden, what
End the gods have assigned to you or to me; nor do you meddle with
Astrological numbers.  What shall arise count to your balance if
God marks down to you more winters -- or perhaps this very one is the
Last which now on the rocks wears out the fierce Mediterranean
Sea; but be wise and have wine, wine on the board, prune to a minimum
Long-drawn hopes.  While we chat, envious time threatens to give us the
Slip; so gather the day, never an inch trusting futurity.

E. R. Dodds (editor), Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice (Faber and Faber 1966).

                            Osmund Caine, "Washing at No. 25, Kingston"

I have a soft spot for the following version by Sir Thomas Hawkins (from 1625):

Strive not, Leuconoe, to know what end
The gods above to me or thee will send;
Nor with astrologers consult at all,
That thou mayst better know what can befall;
Whether thou liv'st more winters, or thy last
Be this, which Tyrrhen waves 'gainst rocks do cast.
Be wise!  drink free, and in so short a space
Do not protracted hopes of life embrace,
Whilst we are talking, envious time doth slide:
This day's thine own; the next may be denied.

Horace, The Odes, Epodes, Satires, and Epistles, Translated by the Most Eminent English Scholars and Poets (1889).

The Elizabethans, though oftentimes flowery, were pretty good at getting to the heart of the matter in a pithy, lovely fashion when they wanted to.  I am put in mind of, for instance, Robert Devereux's "Happy were he could finish forth his fate/In some unhaunted desert," which I have posted here previously.

There was something about the intrigue and the danger of the time which, I think, tended to concentrate the mind (to borrow from Samuel Johnson in another context).  I am reminded of, say, Walter Raleigh and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, writing poetry in their dungeons as they awaited their beheadings.  (A fate shared by Devereux as well.)

                      Osmund Caine, "The Hoby Effigies, Bisham Church"

"Condemn'd To Hope's Delusive Mine"

The role that hope plays in our lives is a subject to which Samuel Johnson often recurred.  For instance, his poem "On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet" begins:

Condemn'd to hope's delusive mine,
   As on we toil from day to day,
By sudden blasts, or slow decline,
   Our social comforts drop away.

On July 20, 1767, he wrote to Hester Thrale:  "I suppose it is the condition of humanity to design what never will be done, and to hope what never will be obtained."  Boswell reports the following remarks made by Johnson in April of 1775:  "He asserted, that the present was never a happy state to any human being; but that, as every part of life, of which we are conscious, was at some point of time a period yet to come, in which felicity was expected, there was some happiness produced by hope."

The following poem by James Henry (1798-1876) reminds me of Johnson's thoughts on hope.  The idea of an ever-longed for, but ever-receding, dream landscape is one we may all be familiar with (a different landscape for each of us, of course).

                           Old Man

At six years old I had before mine eyes
A picture painted, like the rainbow, bright,
But far, far off in th' unapproachable distance.
With all my childish heart I longed to reach it,
And strove and strove the livelong day in vain,
Advancing with slow step some few short yards
But not perceptibly the distance lessening.
At threescore years old, when almost within
Grasp of my outstretched arms the selfsame picture
With all its beauteous colors painted bright,
I'm backward from it further borne each day
By an invisible, compulsive force,
Gradual but yet so steady, sure, and rapid,
That at threescore and ten I'll from the picture
Be even more distant than I was at six.

James Henry, Poems Chiefly Philosophical (1856).

                   Adrian Paul Allinson (1890-1959), "The Cornish April"

"The Absurdity Of Stretching Out Our Arms Incessantly To Grasp That Which We Cannot Keep"

A few posts back, I quoted the following line of verse by Ryokan:  "If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things."  This bit of advice has been around in all ages and in all places.  Acting upon it in one's own life is, of course, another matter entirely.

The line kept bouncing around my head.  I seemed to recall that Samuel Johnson had said something along the same lines.  (As Walter Jackson Bate writes in his biography of Johnson:  "Whatever we experience, we find Johnson has been there before us, and is meeting and returning home with us.")  I eventually found what I was looking for in one of my journals:  I had recorded Johnson's thoughts for future reference. 

"Every man has experienced, how much of this ardour has been remitted, when a sharp or tedious sickness has set death before his eyes.  The extensive influence of greatness, the glitter of wealth, the praises of admirers, and the attendance of supplicants, have appeared vain and empty things, when the last hour seemed to be approaching; and the same appearance they would always have, if the same thought was always predominant.  We should then find the absurdity of stretching out our arms incessantly to grasp that which we cannot keep, and wearing out our lives in endeavours to add new turrets to the fabrick of ambition, when the foundation itself is shaking, and the ground on which it stands is mouldering away."

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, Number 17 (May 15, 1750).

The Chinese poet Su Tung-P'o (also known as Su Shih) (1037-1101) beautifully expresses the same thought in a more oblique fashion:

Misty rain on Mount Ro, the incoming tide at Sekko --
Before you have been there, you have many regrets;
When you have been there and come back,
It is just simply misty rain on Mount Ro, the incoming tide at Sekko.

Su Tung-P'o (translated by R. H. Blyth), in Haiku, Volume One: Eastern Culture (1949).  I think that perhaps Blyth should have omitted the phrase "it is just simply" from the final line.

                                  Gilbert Spencer, "Bedroom Window"

"Humbug Still Walks Our Land On Stilts"

When it comes to politics, I try to keep my mouth shut.  I will simply say that, although I am an American, I trace my political principles (such as they are) back to Edmund Burke.  Samuel Johnson said of Burke:

If a man were to go by chance at the same time with Burke under a shed to shun a shower, he would say, "this is an extraordinary man."  If Burke should go into a stable to see his horse dressed, the ostler would say, "we have had an extraordinary man here."

James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson (conversation between Johnson and Boswell on May 15, 1784).  Johnson was not usually given to such praise.  He seems to have had a great fondness for Burke.  (They did disagree about the unruly American colonies, however.)   

As for contemporary politicians (including all current presidents, prime ministers, premiers, and potentates), the following poem by W. R. Rodgers suffices:

                    The Pier

Only a placid sea, and
A pier where no boat comes,
But people stand at the end
And spit into the water,
Dimpling it, and watch a dog
That chins and churns back to land.

I had come here to see
Humbug embark, deported,
Protected from the crowd.
But he has not come today.
And anyway there is no boat
To take him.  And no one cares.
So Humbug still walks our land
On stilts, is still looked up to.

W. R. Rodgers, Awake! and Other Poems (1941).

                                Edward Bawden, "Newhaven" (1935)

On Happiness: Saul Bellow, Samuel Johnson, And Ludwig Wittgenstein

As I recently mentioned, Saul Bellow's Letters (Viking 2010) have just been published.  While browsing through them, I came across this in a brief letter written by Bellow on April 11, 1970:  "As for Life -- even at best one feels deprived of something."

A day or so later, I was idly thumbing through Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and happened upon this:  "Mr. Johnson observed that it seemed certain that happiness could not be found in this life, because so many had tried to find it in such a variety of ways, and had not found it."

                                                Vilhelm Hammershoi
                                        "Sunbeams or Sunshine" (1900)

On the other hand, Ludwig Wittgenstein -- who one might expect to have a sceptical view of the prospect of happiness in life -- offers us hope (albeit in his usual enigmatic fashion):

"The way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear.

The fact that life is problematic shows that the shape of your life does not fit into life's mould.  So you must change the way you live and, once your life does fit the mould, what is problematic will disappear."

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (translated by Peter Winch) (1984). 

Wittgenstein said something similar (and equally enigmatic) in Proposition 6.521 of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:

"The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. 

(Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?)"

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness) (1922). 

(I have long felt -- and I am certainly not the first to make this observation -- that Wittgenstein was a Buddhist or a Taoist without knowing it.  It is remarkable how many of his gnomic, aphoristic statements echo Chinese and Japanese Buddhist and Taoist writings, both philosophical and poetic.  When I read him I often feel that I have stumbled into something written by, for instance, Lao-Tzu, Han Shan, Wang Wei, Saigyo, or Ryokan.)

                           Vilhelm Hammershoi, "White Doors" (1905)

Samuel Johnson Climbs A Tree

I have previously noted Samuel Johnson's antic side, suggesting that we should not forget this often-neglected aspect of his personality.  Thus far, we have seen that Johnson was a runner of foot-races, as well as a man who was wont to roll sideways down a tempting hill.  ("Samuel Johnson Runs A Foot-Race": June 10, 2010; "Ludwig Wittgenstein Pretends To Be The Moon. Samuel Johnson Rolls Down A Hill": May 8, 2010.)  But Johnson did not confine himself to those two activities: 

One day, as he was walking in Gunisbury Park (or Paddock) with some gentlemen and ladies, who were admiring the extraordinary size of some of the trees, one of the gentlemen said that, when he was a boy, he made nothing of climbing (swarming, I think, was the phrase) the largest there.  'Why, I can swarm it now,' replied Dr. Johnson, which excited a hearty laugh -- (he was then, I believe, between fifty and sixty); on which he ran to the tree, clung round the trunk, and ascended to the branches, and, I believe, would have gone in amongst them, had he not been very earnestly entreated to descend; and down he came with a triumphant air, seeming to make nothing of it.

"Recollections of Dr. Johnson by Miss Reynolds," Johnsonian Miscellanies, Volume II (edited by George Birkbeck Hill) (1897).

              Harry Epworth Allen (1894-1958), "Linlithgow, Sheffield"

"Stationary Clouds": John Ruskin And Homer

John Ruskin could be a bit obsessive, as well as a bit prickly.  Take, for instance, the subject of "stationary clouds":

When, in the close of my lecture on landscape last year at Oxford, I spoke of stationary clouds as distinguished from passing ones, some blockheads wrote to the papers to say that clouds never were stationary. . . . Those foolish letters were so far useful in causing a friend to write me the pretty one I am about to read to you, quoting a passage about clouds in Homer which I had myself never noticed, though perhaps the most beautiful of its kind in the Iliad.  In the fifth book, after the truce is broken, and the aggressor Trojans are rushing to the onset in a tumult of clamour and charge, Homer says that the Greeks, abiding them, "stood like clouds."

The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, The Works of John Ruskin: Library Edition, Volume XXXIV, pages 11 and 12.

                    Aelbert Cuyp, "The Maas at Dordrecht" (c. 1650)

Ruskin then silences his critics by quoting his friend's letter:

"Sir, -- Last winter when I was at Ajaccio, I was one day reading Homer by the open window, and came upon the lines -- 'But they stood, like the clouds which the Son of Kronos establishes in calm upon the mountains, motionless, when the rage of the North and of all the fiery winds is asleep.'  As I finished these lines, I raised my eyes, and looking across the gulf, saw a long line of clouds resting on the top of its hills.  The day was windless, and there they stayed, hour after hour, without any stir or motion.  I remember how I was delighted at the time, and have often since that day thought on the beauty and the truthfulness of Homer's simile.  Perhaps this little fact may interest you, at a time when you are attacked for your description of clouds.  I am, sir, yours faithfully, G. B. Hill."

Ibid, page 12.  Thus ends the dispute over whether clouds can indeed be stationary!  (An aside: "G. B. Hill," the letter-writer, is none other than George Birkbeck Hill, the Samuel Johnson scholar who edited numerous excellent editions of Johnson's works during the 19th century.)

                     Aelbert Cuyp, "The Valkhof at Nijmegen" (c. 1650)

Samuel Johnson Runs A Foot-Race

In a previous post, we saw Samuel Johnson suddenly decide to roll sideways down a hill at the country house of Bennet Langton.  ("Ludwig Wittgenstein Pretends To Be The Moon. Samuel Johnson Rolls Down A Hill": May 8, 2010.)  That Johnson could be so playful and exuberant is something that we should remember, so that we do not accept uncritically the caricature of him as the harrumphing, orotund Great Cham.

"At a gentleman's seat in Devonshire, as he and some company were sitting in a saloon, before which was a spacious lawn, it was remarked as a very proper place for running a race.  A young lady present boasted that she could outrun any person; on which Dr. Johnson rose up and said, 'Madam, you cannot outrun me'; and, going out on the lawn, they started.  The lady at first had the advantage; but Dr. Johnson happening to have slippers on much too small for his feet, kick'd them off up into the air, and ran a great length without them, leaving the lady far behind him, and, having won the victory, he returned, leading her by the hand, with looks of high exultation and delight."

"Recollections of Dr. Johnson by Miss Reynolds," Johnsonian Miscellanies (edited by George Birkbeck Hill), Volume II (1897), page 278.

                       Joshua Reynolds, "Samuel Johnson" (c. 1769)

Samuel Johnson: "But All These Things, David, Make Death Very Terrible"

As the world lurches from one "financial crisis" to the next, who better to turn to than Samuel Johnson in order to put money and wealth into perspective?  Although it is a fool's errand to try to identify one's "favorite" Johnsonian anecdotes, I have long been fond of the one that follows.  (Or, perhaps, it is simply one that remains in my rapidly failing memory.)

The anecdote arises out of a visit made by Johnson to the new villa of David Garrick (1717-1779) at Hampton Court.  Garrick started out as a student of Johnson's in Lichfield.  The two then became friends, and they left Lichfield together for London in 1737.  Garrick eventually became the most celebrated actor in England, and made a fortune. 

"Soon after Garrick's purchase at Hampton Court he was showing Dr. Johnson the grounds, the house, Shakespeare's temple, etc.; and concluded by asking him, 'Well, Doctor, how do you like all this?'  'Why, it is pleasant enough,' growled the Doctor, 'for the present; but all these things, David, make death very terrible.'"

William Cooke, Life of Samuel Foote, quoted in George Birkbeck Hill (editor), Johnsonian Miscellanies, Volume II (1897), page 394. 

                                            Garrick's Villa  

Ludwig Wittgenstein Pretends To Be The Moon. Samuel Johnson Rolls Down A Hill.

I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that Ludwig Wittgenstein admired Samuel Johnson.  Perhaps I should not have been surprised:  both of them sought -- to use one of Wittgenstein's characteristic words -- "clarity," and both of them abhorred -- to use one of Johnson's characteristic words -- "cant."

But I digress.  The purpose of this post is simply to share two wonderful anecdotes that I came across.  They have nothing to do -- on the face of it -- with clarity or cant.  No interpretations or elucidations or theories are necessary.

"Sometimes he came to my house in Searle Street for supper.  Once, after supper, Wittgenstein, my wife, and I went for a walk on Midsummer Common.  We talked about the movements of the bodies of the solar system.  It occurred to Wittgenstein that the three of us should represent the movements of the sun, earth, and moon, relative to one another.  My wife was the sun and maintained a steady pace across the meadow; I was the earth and circled her at a trot.  Wittgenstein took the most strenuous part of all, the moon, and ran around me while I circled my wife.  Wittgenstein entered into this game with great enthusiasm and seriousness, shouting instructions at us as he ran.  He became quite breathless and dizzy with exhaustion."

Norman Malcolm, "A Memoir," in Portraits of Wittgenstein (edited by F. A. Flowers), Volume 3 (1999), page 78.

H. D. Best's account of his visit to the country house of Bennet Langton contains this anecdote relating to a visit that Johnson made to the house in 1764 (when Johnson was 55):

"After breakfast we walked to the top of a very steep hill behind the house.  When we arrived at the summit, Mr. Langton said, 'Poor, dear Dr. Johnson, when he came to this spot, turned to look down the hill, and said he was determined "to take a roll down."  When we understood what he meant to do, we endeavoured to dissuade him; but he was resolute, saying, he had not had a roll for a long time; and taking out of his lesser pockets whatever might be in them -- keys, pencil, purse, or pen-knife, and laying himself parallel with the edge of the hill, he actually descended, turning himself over and over till he came to the bottom.'"

Johnsonian Miscellanies (edited by George Birkbeck Hill), Volume II (1897), page 391.

Wittgenstein and "Progress"

I admire Ludwig Wittgenstein.  I do not admire the pack of academic philosophers, theorists, and other hyenas who have systematically misunderstood and misrepresented what he actually said.  Wittgenstein noticed the initial stages of this phenomenon, and he was angered and appalled.

Given the intellectual temper of our times, things have only gotten worse.  However -- have no fear! -- I do not intend to wade into that particular morass.  For a succinct discussion of the subject, I recommend Bryan Magee's Confessions of a Philosopher (1998), which contains a chapter recounting Magee's dismay and shock at the manner in which supposedly intelligent people ignored what was staring them in the face.

All that I wish to do is to suggest that we read Wittgenstein -- and listen to what he says.  Ignore the intermediaries.  And, as background, bear in mind stray facts like these: Tolstoy and Samuel Johnson (particularly the Prayers and Meditations) were important to him; he loved to watch American movies; he avidly read American detective stories.

This passage is from a draft of Wittgenstein's foreword to Philosophical Remarks (1930):

"This book is written for those who are in sympathy with the spirit in which it is written.  This is not, I believe, the spirit of the main current of European and American civilization.  The spirit of this civilization makes itself manifest in the industry, architecture and music of our time, in its fascism and socialism, and it is alien and uncongenial to the author.  This is not a value judgment.  It is not, it is true, as though he accepted what nowadays passes for architecture as architecture, or did not approach what is called modern music with the greatest suspicion (though without understanding its language), but still, the disappearance of the arts does not justify judging disparagingly the human beings who make up this civilization.
. . . . .
I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current of European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any.  So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe.

It is all one to me whether or not the typical western scientist understands or appreciates my work, since he will not in any case understand the spirit in which I write.  Our civilization is characterized by the word 'progress'.  Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features.  Typically it constructs.  It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure.  And even clarity is sought only as a means to this end, not as an end in itself.  For me on the contrary clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves.

I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.

So, I am not aiming at the same target as the scientists and my way of thinking is different from theirs."


Again, my hope is that we read Wittgenstein, and forget about his interpreters.  And, always remember: clarity and perspicuity are very important words in his thought and writing.

In Praise Of "Blockhead"

There was a time -- a time more dignified than our own -- when commonly-used epithets were not invariably vulgar.  And thus I come in praise of "blockhead."

As is the case with most things under the sun, one can do no better than to start with Samuel Johnson.  And, sure enough, he is (in my humble opinion) the place to start when it comes to the use of "blockhead" as an insult.  First, The Great Cham's definition:  "A stupid fellow; a dolt; a man without parts."  "Part" is in turn defined by him as follows:  "[In the plural.]  Qualities; powers; faculties; or accomplishments."  Clear enough.

Now, let us (briefly) see Johnson in action.  In Boswell's Life, he is reported to have said of the poet Charles Churchill:  "No, Sir, I called the fellow a blockhead at first, and I will call him a blockhead still."  (Boswell, Life of Johnson (edited by George Birkbeck Hill), Volume I, page 35.)  In an amusing footnote to Johnson's comment, Birkbeck Hill states:  "See post, ii, 173, where Johnson called Fielding a blockhead."  (It is at times like this when one realizes what a treasure George Birkbeck Hill is: did anything about Johnson escape his notice?)

But please note this interesting observation by "Miss Reynolds":  "his dislike of any one seldom prompted him to say much more than that the fellow is a blockhead, a poor creature, or some such epithet."  (Birkbeck Hill, Johnsonian Miscellanies, Volume II, page 270, footnote 6, emphases in original text.)   This suggests that Johnson did not often resort to vulgar insults.

As a worthy successor to Johnson in the nineteenth century, I give you John Ruskin:  "When, in the close of my lecture on landscape last year at Oxford, I spoke of stationary clouds as distinguished from passing ones, some blockheads wrote to the papers to say that clouds never were stationary."  The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, The Works of John Ruskin: Library Edition, Volume XXXIV, page 11.  Needless to say, Ruskin then went on to prove those "blockheads" wrong.  (I will save that story for another time.  Interestingly, George Birkbeck Hill and a passage from Homer figure in Ruskin's successful rebuttal of the "blockheads.")

So, the next time that you are provoked by someone, may I respectfully suggest that you consider the use of "blockhead."  You shall be in good company.

No Escape, Part Four: A. S. J. Tessimond

We have previously heard from Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, and Cavafy on the "wherever you go, there you are" problem.  A. S.  J. Tessimond (1902-1962) (who I intend to write about as a neglected poet) has spoken on this subject as well.  That Tessimond at times worked in the advertising business (and wrote at least three poems on the business -- "Advertising," "The Ad-Man," and "Defence of the Ad-Man") may (or may not) be something to bear in mind as you think about the poem. 

                  Where?

You are in love with a country
Where people laugh in the sun
And the people are warm as the sunshine and live and move easily
And women with honey-coloured skins and men with no frowns on
     their faces
Sit on white terraces drinking red wine
While the sea spreads peacock feathers on cinnamon sands
And palms weave sunlight into sheaves of gold
And at night the shadows are indigo velvet
And there is dancing to soft, soft, soft guitars
Played by copper fingers under a froth of stars.

Perhaps your country is where you think you will find it.
Or perhaps it has not yet come or perhaps it has gone.
Perhaps it is east of the sun and west of the moon.
Perhaps it is a country called the Hesperides
And Avalon and Atlantis and Eldorado:
A country which Gaugin looked for in Tahiti and Lawrence in Mexico,
And whether they found it only they can say, and they not now.
Perhaps you will find it where you alone can see it,
But if you see it, though no one else can, it will be there,
It will be yours.

                 Caspar David Friedrich, "The Life Stages" (1835)

No Escape, Part Two: Samuel Johnson

When it comes to obtaining wise, no-nonsense, eloquent, and entertaining counsel on Life and/or How to Live, I am more than willing to rely solely upon Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.  As far as the quiddities of human nature and human behavior are concerned, one can be fairly certain that the two of them have been there before we have.

Hence, we should not be astonished that Samuel Johnson has visited the "wherever you go, there you are" territory and has reached the same conclusions as Montaigne (but in his own delightful fashion, of course):

     The general remedy of those, who are uneasy without knowing the cause, is change of place; they are willing to imagine that their pain is the consequence of some local inconvenience, and endeavour to fly from it, as children from their shadows; always hoping for more satisfactory delight from every new scene, and always returning home with disappointments and complaints. 

     [Johnson then describes Abraham Cowley's plan - as expressed by Cowley in the preface to his poems - to abandon England for America in order to gain peace of mind.]  Surely no stronger instance can be given of a persuasion that content was the inhabitant of particular regions, and that a man might set sail with a fair wind, and leave behind him all his cares, incumbrances, and calamities. . . .

     [Cowley] never suspected that the cause of his unhappiness was within, that his own passions were not sufficiently regulated, and that he was harrassed by his own impatience, which could never be without something to awaken it, would accompany him over the sea, and find its way to his American elysium.  He would, upon the trial, have been soon convinced, that the fountain of content must spring up in the mind; and that he, who has so little knowledge of human nature, as to seek happiness by changing any thing, but his own dispositions, will waste his life in fruitless efforts, and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove.

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, Number 6 (April 7, 1750).   
 

      Claude Lorrain, "Imaginary View of Delphi, with a Procession"