Spring VI. Actuary & the seasons

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Poverty, bad back, and fate

How many more springs can I hope to see? A sanguine temper would say ten or twelve; let me dare to hope humbly for five or six. That is a great many. Five or six spring-times, welcomed joyously, lovingly watched from the first celandine to the budding of the rose; who shall dare to call it a stinted boon? Five or six times the miracle of earth reclad, the vision of splendour and loveliness which tongue has never yet described, set before my gazing. To think of it is to fear that I ask too much.

Alpha.

And so he did -- ask for too much -- as Gissing was dead within a year of finishing this book. But how rare it is to truly appreciate the turn of the seasons as Ryecroft does here. When I think of the people in literature who have been in a position to do this, I don’t come up with many examples. Austen’s heroines were doomed to study the seasons, as strolling about the countryside was one of their chief occupations, in their otherwise constricted lives. Annie Dillard, in Pilgrim At Tinker Creek is an excellent modern example, but her situation was very unusual. Wendell Berry is a farmer and poet so is all but required to note such things.

Mostly this makes me think of Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain -- my obsession. There, as here, the careful observation of flowers and trees is used to emphasize the passage of seasons and of time. Hans, a young engineer-to-be from Hamburg, discovers the wonders of nature in the Swiss Alps as part of his "Taking Stock" as he lives the life of a well-off tuberculosis patient. Like Henry, he studies botany books and even collects samples to preserve and study. More, this study is a part of his scientific-humanistic life, which balances his mystical-spiritual life, and so is part of the dialectic he represents.

On rare occasions I will buy a few flowers from a corner stand. But I then keep the flowers for months as I find their dried out form (sometimes) as appealing as their original form. Not sure what either Mann or Gissing would make of this.

Next: Spring VII. Roots of philosophy?

Spring XIII. Books continued

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: XII. Books

There must be several men of spirit and experiences akin to mine who remember that little book-shop opposite Portland Road Station. It had a peculiar character; the books were of a solid kind -- chiefly theology and classics -- and for the most part those old editions which are called worthless, which have no bibiopolic value, and have been supplanted for practical use by modern issues. The bookseller was very much a gentleman, and this singular fact, together with the extremely low prices at which his volumes were marked, sometimes inclined me to think that he kept the shop for mere love of letters. Things in my eyes inestimable I have purchased there for a few pence, and I don’t think I ever gave more than a shilling for any volume... The zeal of learning is never out of date... In what modern editor shall I find such love and enthusiasm as glows in the annotations of old scholars?

Even the best editions of our day have so much of the mere schoolbook; you feel so often that the man does not regard his author as literature, but simply as text. Pedant for pedant, the old is better than the new.

Alpha.

Yes and no. I’m thinking of Henri Pirenne -- even though, from Gissing’s point of view he must have represented the new, or even the future. I doubt he is much mentioned these days when it comes to the scholarship of Medieval Europe, yet he wrote an amazing book on Medieval History, that he never even bothered to finish, while a prisoner of the Germans during the Great War. He wrote A History of Europe from memory without access to notes or books. (I see that he is credited with being an influence on the founders of the Annales School of French historians.)

Yet I also often find antique scholarship, even into the 20th century, very limited in its perspectives -- especially when it comes to gender. Even when you get the best minds of the 19th century together on a page it often turns into a sausage fest that cries out for a female perspective. And the Annales historians (I have in mind Braudel and Ladurie), if they don’t bore you into a stupor, provide fresh ways of looking at history that make you re-evaluate everything you thought you knew. (Quoting Braudel is harder than quoting Proust. I’ve tried in the past to find something I vaguely recalled and finally gave up finding any kind of needle in his endless haystacks.) Even the Marxists, when they aren’t in an ideological frenzy, often bring a worthwhile perspective to subjects even if you don’t agree with them.

But the main thing this section reminds me of is a quote from Wendell Berry that I’ve always loved.

My point, anyhow, is that we could not consider teaching the Bible “as literature” if we were not already teaching literature “as literature” -- as if we do not care, as if it does not matter, whether or not it is true.

-Wendell Berry - Home Economics

Next: Spring XIV. The Racing Life.