Autumn II. Tristram Shandy

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Autumn I. Hawkweed

How the mood for a book sometimes rushes upon one, either one knows not why, or in consequence, perhaps, of some most trifling suggestion. Yesterday I was walking at dusk. I came to an old farmhouse; at the garden gate a vehicle stood waiting, and I saw it was our doctor’s gig. Having passed, I turned to look back. There was a faint afterglow in the sky beyond the chimneys; a light twinkled at one of the upper windows. I said to myself, “Tristram Shandy,” and hurried home to plunge into a book which I have not opened for I dare say twenty years.

Not long ago, I awoke one morning and suddenly thought of the Correspondence between Goethe and Schiller; and so impatient did I become to open the book that I got up an hour earlier than usual. A book worth rising for... A book which helps one to forget the idle or venomous chatter going on everywhere about us, and bids us cherish hope for a world “which has such people in’t.”

These volumes I had at hand; I could reach them down from my shelves at the moment when I hungered for them. But it often happens that the book which comes into my mind could only be procured with trouble and delay; I breathe regretfully and put aside the thought. Ah! the books that one will never read again. They gave delight, perchance something more; they left a perfume in the memory; but life has passed them by for ever. I have but to muse, and one after another they rise before me. Books gentle and quieting, books noble and inspiring; books that well merit to be pored over, not once but many a time. Yet never again shall I hold them in my hand; the years fly too quickly, and are too few. Perhaps when I lie waiting for the end, some of those lost books will come into my wandering thoughts, and I shall remember them as friends to whom I owed a kindness -- friends passed upon the way. What regret in that last farewell!

Alpha.

Ha! My constant references to Uncle Toby and Tristram Shandy pay off. Like Ryecroft, it has probably been at least 20 years since I last read Laurence Sterne, and all I can imagine, from his opening, that would remind him of the book is the arrival of the doctor at the beginning of the novel to oversee the perpetually delayed birth of young Tristram. Here's a great quote from the book that always reminds me of Emmanuel Kant,

I hate set dissertations, -- and above all things in the world, 'tis one of the silliest things in one of them, to darken your hypothesis by placing a number of tall, opake words, one before another, in a right line, betwixt your own and your readers conception...

And as has happened every time I’ve referred to the book myself, this reference makes me want to jump back in and read it again. The problem -- the curse -- of loving books like this is that it is so hard to find sympathetic ears when you feel the urge to praise the cunning debate about the "squirt" (Can you save the soul of the not-quite-infant by squirting it with Holy Water before it clears the birth canal and actually enters the world?) or to sympathize with Toby’s war injury (groin) or to marvel at The Marbled Pages. 

(And speaking of the Marbled Pages, here's something I didn't know about the early editions of the book: 

It encapsulates the spirit of the pioneering book as a whole, and gets at the good old—or, in Sterne's case, not yet invented—theme of the reader's personal subjectivity. In the words of Sterne scholar Peter de Voogd, "Each marbling is unique, as is each reading of Tristram Shandy. It is fitting that your copy of Tristram Shandy is different from mine, since your subjective experience of the book is different." The Marbled Pages

Pretty amazing for a book first published in 1759.

Today an electronic version of The Marbled Pages could do the original one better by including an algorithm that alters the graphic each time the file is displayed. This would represent how the book changes with each re-reading.)

Thanks to the miracle of email, I at least have the option of sending out a quick message to the college professor who first assigned me the task of reading this odd book. I have also pestered her with questions about Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. This is perhaps extending the definition of “continuing education” past the breaking point, considering that these reading assignments are now 40 years in the past. But I feel those first readings were mostly wasted (though also necessary, of course), now I would get so much more our of the study of literature and philosophy than I did in my late teens and early 20s. Perhaps college degrees should be given out provisionally pending your completing your studies 40 or 50 years on?

The Other Cafe.

Besides the Bank Cafe, I also frequent another cafe that is slightly more convenient -- being on my hill -- and that is in almost every way the opposite of the Bank Cafe. The Other Cafe occupies a space in a Victorian apartment building that previously housed a corner market. Aside from a couple seismic retrofit steel beams, it is all of wood and probably a hundred years old. There is a narrow mezzanine reached by a tight little staircase that I am amazed meets codes. The fit-out is, if anything, more trendy, but much less corporate, than the Bank Cafe. The tables and counters downstairs are of a plywood I particularly like the edges of. The coffee beans arrive by bicycle.

The food here is better but also more expensive. The WiFi is usually much better -- though not today. The music is much less predictable. Often there is good jazz but the staff chooses what to play and some of them have peculiar taste. Overall it makes for a nice change of pace. I was skeptical that the place would draw enough business when it first opened, but it is almost always packed. Not infrequently I have to move on to my third favorite cafe because I can’t find a seat here. Today I lucked out and got a seat at one of the window counters. The light here is great for reading but a bit bright for the computer. As at the Bank Cafe, I’m not sure what everyone else is doing here for such long periods of time. Like me, they are probably all working after a fashion, or so I imagine.

Walking over here just now I saw something strange that I’m noticed several times before: It seems that there is a curious sub-set of crazy street people who can’t (for some mysterious reason) walk on the sidewalk -- they are always walking in the street regardless of traffic. The only place I tend to walk in the street is in Chinatown because the sidewalks are often so crowded as to be impassable. Perhaps, for some people, a normal sidewalk is subjectively just as overcrowded? Perhaps cars and trucks are not perceived as being quite as invasive? Really, I have no idea.

Next: Autumn III. Time regained again.

Summer VII. International politics + war, revisited

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: VI. Peace and war + Internet & good at TV

I have been reading one of those prognostic articles on international politics which every now and then appears in the reviews. Why I should so waste my time it would be hard to say; I suppose the fascination of disgust and fear gets the better of me in a moment’s idleness. This writer, who is horribly perspicacious and vigorous, demonstrates the certainty of a great European war, and regards it with the peculiar satisfaction excited by such things in a certain order of mind. His phrases about “dire calamity” and so on mean nothing; the whole tenor of his writing proves that he represents, and consciously, one of the forces which go to bring war about; his part in the business is a fluent irresponsibility, which  casts scorn on all who reluct at the “inevitable.” Persistent prophecy is a familiar way of assuring the event.

But I will read no more such writing. This resolution I make and shall keep. Why set my nerves quivering with rage, and spoil the calm of a whole day, when no good of any sort can come of it? What is it to me if nations fall a-slaughtering each other? Let the fools go to it! Why should they not please themselves? Peace, after all, is the aspiration of the few; so it always was, and ever will be... Let them blast the cornfield and the orchard, fire the home. For all that, there will yet be found some silent few, who go their way amid the still meadows, who bend to the flower and watch the sunset; and these alone are worth a thought.

Alpha.

How lucky he was to have not lived to see the age of “Total War” and the “Doomsday Clock.” From 2nd grade through most of my young adulthood, I lived with the knowledge that I, and everyone around me, could be vaporized in the next hour or so. When there were international crises of the kind Ryecroft here alludes to -- and which did in fact lead to a Great War -- this thought was much more on our minds, but we also knew that it could come out of the blue, either on purpose or as a cosmic accident -- see also Doctor Strangelove.

Today I am even more frightened, in retrospect, by the knowledge that for much of this time I was “protected” by Air National Guardsmen equipped with short range surface to air nuclear missiles. How a bunch of screw ups like George W. Bush failed to accidentally blow-up some American city is perhaps the greatest miracle of the 20th century.

On the other hand, nuclear weapons succeeded in ending the chain reaction of conflict among the most powerful states at any given time. Study history from the Hellenic period to WW2 and you would predict the inevitability of a war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. -- yet this never quite happened. Perhaps the M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction) aspect of nuclear war will not always protect the world from use of these weapons, but so far it has been surprisingly effective. One could almost suggest a policy of giving perpetually warring states nukes to make them finally give it a rest -- India and Pakistan could be the test of this policy.

Beta.

There is really no excuse to write more about the Great War than I already have, but I am writing this in August of 2014 and that now antique war is much on my mind.

Again I’m reminded of Uncle Toby from Tristram Shandy, as we would have got on like a house afire. First he would take the bit between his teeth about the exploits of the first star of the Churchill family, the Duke of Marlborough, and when he finally ran out of gas, I would seize the reins and go off on the multiple generations of campaigns in that same small area of Europe (There are competing equine and also an automotive metaphor in there, but I feel they all work well together.) 

It always amazes me how close together many of the battlefields of the War of the Spanish Succession, Napoleonic, Franco-Prussian and World Wars were. From Ypres on the west to Bastogne on the east, from Sedan at the south to Oudenaarde in the north -- it's such a small portion of Europe yet within it you will also find Waterloo, Wavre, Ramillies, Tournai, Malplaquet, Mons, Ligny/Fleurus. You would think that Belgium was the geographical prize of the planet for all the blood the English, French, Germans and eventually Americans have spent there. 

It is also worth noting that in five of these battles the British, Dutch, and Germans fought the French while in six (including the four Great War battles around Ypres) some combination of British, French, Belgian, and Americans fought against the Germans. In three other battles it was strictly Germans against French.

The military authorities of Europe had largely dismissed the lessons of the American Civil War because the American armies were militias, not professional European armies. That wasn't unreasonable, at least for the first years of the Civil War. By the end, however, the American armies had become well trained by war and even, for the most part, well lead. In particular, General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia (ANV) was as experienced and efficient an army as you will likely find in the 19th (or arguably any other) century. Following the death of Lee’s brilliant wing commander, Jackson, the ANV had become a one trick pony, with the sole trick being the ability to quickly form defenses at any point using almost exclusively infantry with muzzle-loading rifles and artillery very similar to what Napoleon knew. European armies seemed to be less proficient at this trick of defense in the decades of the 19th century that followed, and also during the opening weeks of the Great War -- even though bolt-action rifles and machine guns should have made them even more deadly. In compensation, the rapid technical development of artillery between the 1860s and 1910s -- and that the machine gun was a weapon that cut both ways -- gave the offence again some advantages in the field. But the lessons of the American Civil War remained true and only waited for armies to grow as practiced and efficient as the ANV had been. This is what did in fact happen as the First Battle of the Marne and especially the Race to the Sea came to an end, and this superiority of the defense would remain decisive until new tactics (fire and maneuver) and new technology (armored fighting vehicles) again changed the equation in 1918.

Next: Summer VIII. Heat + light.

Spring XVII. Why we read

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: XVI. No friend of the people

A day of almost continuous rain, yet for me a day of delight. I had breakfasted, and was poring over the map of Devon (how I love a good map!) to trace an expedition that I have in view, when a knock came at my door, and Mrs M. bore in a great brown-paper parcel, which I saw at a glance must contain books. The order was sent to London a few days ago; I had not expected to have my books so soon. With throbbing heart I set the parcel on a clear table; eyed it whilst I mended the fire; then took my pen-knife, and gravely, deliberately, though with hand that trembled, began to unpack.

It is a joy to go through booksellers’ catalogues, ticking here and there a possible purchase. Formerly, when I could seldom spare money, I kept catalogues as much as possible out of sight; now I savour them page by page, and make a pleasant virtue of the discretion I must needs impose upon myself. But greater still is the happiness of unpacking volumes which one has bought without seeing them. I am no hunter of rarities; I care nothing for first editions and for tall copies; what I buy is literature, food for the soul of man. The first glimpse of bindings when the inmost protective wrapper has been folded back! The first scent of books! The first gleam of a gilded title! ...

I had in me the making of a scholar. With leisure and tranquility of mind, I should have amassed learning. Within the walls of a college, I should have lived so happily, so harmlessly, my imagination ever busy with the old world. In the introduction to his History of France, Michelet says: “J'ai passé à côté du monde, et j'ai pris l'histoire pour la vie.” [“I passed by the world on the other side, and I mistook history for life.”] That, as I can see now, was my true ideal; through all my battlings and miseries I have always lived more in the past than in the present...

Scholarship in the high sense was denied me, and now it is too late. Yet here am I gloating over Pausanias, and promising myself to read every word of him. Who that has any tincture of old letters would not like to read Pausanias, instead of mere quotations from him and references to him? ... To the end I shall be reading -- and forgetting. Ah, that’s the worst of it! Had I at command all the knowledge I have at any time possessed, I might call myself a learned man... I cannot preserve more than a few fragments of what I read, yet read I shall, persistently, rejoicingly. Would I gather erudition for a future life? Indeed, it no longer troubles me that I forget. I have the happiness of the passing moment, and what more can mortal ask?

Alpha.

Here is the crux of the matter. This may be both why I love this book and why I’m writing this all in one section. There is very little here I couldn’t have written myself. I’ve read Pausanias, though not in Greek, and I had to find a translation of Michelet’s quote, but I’ve felt all these feels.

If I thought academia was what it should be, I would regret not having spent my life within some institution (ha) doing what I so love to do -- and have mostly done anyway. But there’s the catch: “doing” philosophy or literature or history from within a discipline is a very different thing from doing it independently.

I would love to pick the brains of scholars knowledgeable about books or subjects that interest me, but that’s why I read. I am currently scanning the dizzying variety of literary criticism of Goethe’s Faust. Some of it is inspired, some random, some virtually unreadable. Some of these people draw on considerable scholarship and others seem to be pulling it out of their asses. It’s great fun if you don’t have to take it, or them, seriously. Besides, I’m riding my own hobby-horse in this literary quest and I will only accept criticism from Uncle Toby (Tristram Shandy reference).

I have never looked through publisher's catalogs for myself, but I have done so for bookstores. The buyer (this was an independent bookstore) would pass the catalogs for history and philosophy to me and ask what the store should buy. It wasn't even my money... at first. The books would arrive and I would unpack them with all the rest and shelve them in my sections. I would borrow them and, carefully, read them at home. And when they failed to sell, as they almost always did, I would often buy them rather than sending them back to the publisher as remainders. Today they sit on my shelves

Beta.

And why am I writing this? To help me remember. For the past few years I’ve endeavored to read more slowly. There are light-weight, plot-driven books (fiction or nonfiction) that you can read quickly, but almost all the books that are of interest to me respond to a more careful reading -- 20 pages at a time or less -- and often a quick re-reading helps as well. But the next step is to take notes and the next after that is to write about what you are reading and how it connects to everything else in your intellectual life. This forces you to pay attention. To ask the questions you might overlook, and to do a little more research. And this is why I am really, and happily, the audience for this blog.

Next: Spring XVIII. The literary life.