Scratchings

I’ve been reading more of the selected prose in the back of my Penguin A.E. Housman: Collected Poems and Selected Prose. Among the selections are an amazing number of wittily savage takedowns of rival scholars, and after I stop laughing, I can’t help thinking that if I’d actually known the guy I would have found him to be a horribly pissy old queen.

On an edition of Aeschylus:

When Mr Tucker’s conjectures are not palaeographically improbable they are apt to be causeless and even detrimental. Among the axioms assumed in the preface are the following: ‘”the reading in the text must hold its place until such cause to the contrary can be shewn as will satisfy a rigidly impartial tribunal. The onus probandi lies entirely with the impugner of the text.” “The conditions of dispossession are these. It must either be proved that the reading is an impossibility, or else that in point of grammar it is so abnormal, or in point of relevance so manifestly inappropriate, as to produce a thorough conviction that the MS is in error.” I for my part should call this much too strict; but these are Mr Tucker’s principles. His practice is something quite different: in practice no word, however good, is safe if Mr Tucker can think of a similar word which is not much worse.

On somebody’s introduction to an edition of a play by Euripides (nowhere in the excerpt quoted does it say which play, but the following refers to the play’s deus ex machina ending, which might be enough to narrow it down if only remembered my Euripides better, though more probably it wouldn’t):

And when Mr Flagg says that “the modern reader cannot adequately reproduce the feelings stirred by this final scene in the Athenian spectator’s breast,” this is to arraign Euripides, not to defend him. It means that he wrote for an age and not for all time: he defaced his drama that he might gladden the eyes of the vulgar with the resplendent stage-properties of their beloved goddess: a trap to catch applause which does not differ in kind from the traditional sentiment, always welcome to the gallery of our own theatres, that the man who lays his hand upon a woman, save in the way of kindness, is unworthy of the name of a British sailor.

Nice job, Mr. Housman, reaching out from your ivory tower to slap down Mr Flagg and Euripides with the same swat. And no matter if your own words here are not written for all time, either, but merely for an age, and not even your own age but that of Euripides, who alas did not live quite long enough to revise and improve his plays in line with your counsel, to the great loss of posterity. No one, no one, writes for all time; writing well for one’s own age is the best one can do, and that is plenty difficult enough as it is.

On a disputed line in Aeschylus:

But to say that a thing is not yet begun but is still going on is such nonsense as not one of us can conceive himself uttering in the loosest negligence of conversation; only when centuries of transcription by barbarians have imputed it to an incomparable poet, then we accept it as a matter of course.

This one is a truly beautiful line, though:

His opinions, not being his own, were not permanently held, but picked up and dropped again, and he lived from hand to mouth on the borrowed beliefs of the moment.

I’ve had the urge to reread some Salinger lately. What I really wanted to reread was Franny and Zooey, but the only Salinger book I seem to have in the house is the other collection of two long stories, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction. The rest of the books are, I assume, still in God only knows which box in the garage.

Franny and Zooey was the first Salinger I ever read, back in high school. I don’t remember why I read it, other than that I read a huge amount when I was young. It wasn’t assigned reading — they would never have assigned such a book at my high school. I can’t remember whether I bought it or got it from the library or came across it on my parents’ bookshelves; can’t remember what caused me to be curious about it. But I read it. I liked the Franny part all right, but the ending of Zooey just floored me. I’ve reread it several times since and I still consider it one of my all-time favorite books.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters is a terrific story. Seymour: an Introduction, on the other hand, is a rambling mess, and yet as I read it, it all came back to me how important some of the passages were to me and how their meaning had stuck with me even though I’d forgotten the source.

I read Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters in a hot bath (appropriately enough, given the ending of Zooey) several days ago after waking up at 3:00 a.m. with a headache and not being able to get back to sleep. Then yesterday, after working an excruciating number of hours the last week and a half (including both Saturday and Sunday) to get a very thick book ready for the printer on schedule, and with the book done and with another headache starting, I took the afternoon off and went home and sat in another hot bath and read most of Seymour: an Introduction. I stopped about 20 pages from the end because I found my concentration flagging — I was getting sleepy, and like I said that story wanders terribly. It’s also too precious by half, which I know a lot of people say is true of Salinger in general; I don’t agree in general, but I do about that story. There are long passages in that story that give me enormous pleasure and joy to read, but it meanders terribly and self-consciously in a way that Raise High doesn’t. I plan to finish it on the train home tonight.

So Dave and I were chatting about Salinger, and about one story I’ve never read, “Hapworth 16, 1924″, that was published in the New Yorker but hasn’t been collected or republished anywhere else; and Dave pointed out that I must have it on my set of the complete New Yorker on DVDs, which I bought four or five years ago and never got around to looking at. So I put the installation DVD in my Mac and got it started (the software is amazingly clunky and slow), and found the article. I’ve saved it, page by page (and it spreads out over fifty pages! fifty!) in PDF form to read on my laptop later. It looks if anything even more meandering than Seymour.

The fact that I have the New Yorker set also means I also have Franny and Zooey and the other stories at hand after all.

Bunch Of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger

After five chapters, I took a break from Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God — terrific but dense with information and ideas, and not a book to try to absorb quickly, I think — and picked up David L. Dungan’s Constantine’s Bible: Politics and the Making of the New Testament. I found it both interesting and disappointing. Interesting because it clarified a lot for me about the political situation in the Roman Empire in the first few centuries, especially as to why the early Christians were so hostile toward the Jews who didn’t follow Jesus, and why the Christians wanted so strongly to distance themselves from them.

Disappointed because after four terrific chapters about the history leading up to the canonization of the New Testament, including the influence of Greek philosophy on early Christian thought, when we finally get to chapters five and six, about Eusebius and Constantine, Mr. Dungan suddenly reveals his agenda and becomes an apologist and cheerleader for the perfect scholarly correctness of Eusebius’s judgments about which books were worthy of inclusion and which were not. A whole lot of church politics, then, is being glossed over. For that matter, even by Mr. Dungan’s own account, Eusebius took the books that he knew were of dubious authorship at best, and he divided them into two groups, the ones that his branch of Christianity approved of and used (which made it into the New Testament), and the ones that only other branches of Christianity approved of and used (which didn’t). This is presented as being good scholarship rather than politics, and give me a break.

So after a long buildup, full of interesting political information, when we finally get to the actual making of the New Testament, there really isn’t much about the politics involved in it, despite the book’s subtitle.

I’m into chapter three of Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God, which is about the classical Greek philosophers. It’s a somewhat different take on them than I got from my college courses in philosophy, so very interesting.

So she brings up Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, which I haven’t thought much about since college, which was 25 years ago. I didn’t really know what to make of it back then and haven’t thought much about it since. To refresh all our memories, here’s what Wikipedia says about it:

Plato imagines a group of people who have lived chained in a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to seeing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not constitutive of reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.

So far, so good. What most of us think we see is not reality, I can get behind Plato on this part of it. It’s the next part I now find, in my current middle-aged state, that I don’t buy so much.

The Allegory is related to Plato’s Theory of Forms, wherein Plato asserts that “Forms” (or “Ideas”), and not the material world of change known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. Only knowledge of the Forms constitutes real knowledge.

If I understand Plato right here, he’s saying that you’ve got this oak and that oak and that other oak, and all these oaks are not real, they are only “shadows” of what is real, which is the Ideal Form of an Oak. I can sort of see that point of view. There are all these things in the world, but running through them all are patterns that we can try to discover, by means of observation, scientific experiments, intuition, and so on. Understanding those patterns is what enables us to understand and manipulate our world.

But my immediate reaction to reading about Plato’s Cave the other day was, No, that’s backward. It isn’t the case that most people see the individual oaks and not the Ideal of the Oak. It’s the other way around: Most people look at the individual oaks and they see only the idea of “oaks”. Or more likely just the idea of “trees”. Our minds interpret everything immediately in terms of categories, but in reality the categories don’t exist. There’s no such thing as the Ideal of the Oak, that’s something our minds projected onto the world around us so that we could analyze things and talk about them and manipulate them. There are only really these temporary concentrations of matter, constantly changing into something else, that we’ve drawn circles around and named. And the human condition is that nearly all of us spend nearly all our time in this invented world in our heads. We look at the oak and we think “That’s an oak” and that’s pretty much the extent of our interaction with it.

But in the reality that exists outside our heads, things don’t have names or categories. They just are. Or rather, it just is, because the division of the universe into things is just as much an invention of our minds.

Which is why my reaction to thinking again about the Cave Allegory was that Plato had it backward. He thought the patterns and forms and ideals were what was real and the shapes we actually see are only shadows of those forms projected onto the world around us. I think the great indivisible whatzit of the universe is what’s real, and the patterns and forms and ideals we think we see are shadows that our minds project onto the world around us.

I just started Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God last night. I laughed out loud at the first line of the Introduction:

We are talking far too much about God these days ….

The whole Introduction is brilliant, but I’ll just quote a few more lines from the beginning.

We are talking far too much about God these days, and what we say is often facile. In our democratic society, we think that the concept of God should be easy and that religion ought to be accessible to anybody. “That book was really hard!” readers have told me reproachfully, shaking their heads in faint reproof. “Of course it was!” I want to reply. “It was about God.”

Ms. Armstrong makes a point in the Introduction that seems important to me: that religion used to be a matter not of what you believed but of what you did. Not in the sense of good deeds, either, but in the sense of what you practiced in order to improve your connection with and understanding of God, or the Tao, or the Kingdom of Heaven or whatever you called it. Faith wasn’t about belief, but about devotion to your practice.

I finished Figures of Earth over the weekend. I have to say that I find Cabell’s view of women less perceptive than it might have been, to put it mildly. And the episodic story is maybe one or two episodes longer than it needs to be. I suspect I’d be happier with the structure if the four main women in Manuel’s life — Alianora, Freydis, Niafer, and Suskind — were somehow trimmed to three, though I don’t know which of them Cabell could have eliminated. Still, in spite of some faults, it’s a great book, and with a real kick in the last few paragraphs.

A favorite passage of mine, in which Manuel asks about the words on the coat of arms of the land he has just been given:

“Mundus decipit, Count,” they told him, “is the old pious motto of Poictesme: it signifies that the affairs of this world are a vain fleeting show, and that terrestrial appearances are nowhere of any particular importance.”

“Then your motto is green inexperience,” said Manuel, “and for me to bear it would be black ingratitude.”

So the writing had been changed in accordance with his instructions, and it now read Mundus vult decipi.

Rereading Cabell’s Figures of Earth on the way home today. A favorite book of mine, and I noticed it was available on Project Gutenberg, so I downloaded it to my iPhone. I own two beautiful editions, one part of the 19-volume Storisende edition — signed and numbered and very handsome in green cloth with gold stamping — and the other the edition with the brilliant Papé illustrations. But I’d be nervous about carrying either one around in my backpack — I don’t own many books in such nice or scarce editions that I’d feel bad if they got scuffed up in my pack, but both of those I would, and I don’t even want to think about the possibility of losing a volume from the numbered set.

Figures of Earth is sort of a serious parody of a medieval French romance, about the made-up legendary hero Dom Manuel, who rises from obscurity as a poor and none too bright swineherd to eventually become the powerful and reputedly brave and wise lord of a vast estate. His power comes in part through a blessing that was also a curse: He is given the power to obtain anything he wants, but at a terrible price, for on obtaining it he then perceives its true worth.