He who resists not at all will never surrender.
~ Thoreau, from the Journal
We can forgive Thoreau for this one since he was still in his twenties when he wrote it. It’s something like that impish bit of advice according to which the best way to escape temptation is to give in right away. Duh. For all their pleasures, aphorisms make unreliable philosophy, and their temptations are most alluring to those least recommended to utter them - that is, the young.
No animal, according to the rules of animal-etiquette, is ever expected to do anything strenuous, or heroic, or even moderately active during the off-season of winter.
~ Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
For weeks now my children and I have been arguing whether humans are animals. I insist that they are. They disagree, and disagree. And strongly disagree. They raise their voices, get red in the face and slam their little fists on the table. I explain that humans are, after all, classified as mammals, among the primates, and that even though we are (I admit) animals of a special sort and not like the others in some very important ways, we’re still animals. “People are NOT animals!” my son will say. “Monkeys think it’s okay to fling poo around but people know better!” As if that proves anything. People fling poo of one sort or another too, of course, but I don’t want to disabuse him of the notion of human decency just yet. Sister is squarely in brother’s court. Even if she sometimes thinks me “so very wise” (as she put it the other night), she seethes with righteous fury: “No, Papa!” (she’s actually yelling) “PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE, AND ANIMALS ARE ANIMALS!” Faced with such violent dogmatism I almost want to relent, if only to keep the peace. But then who wouldn’t really rather be an animal? If it meant, just now, that so much less would be expected of me, nothing strenuous or heroic, that I could curl up by the fire with a book and sleep late every morning, then I say - Sign me up.
Masterpieces of Etching, selected by Laurence Binyon; Gowans & Gray Ltd., London – Glasgow (1914). I’ve lauded the large, but the smallness of small books is praiseworthy too. While not the littlest volume in our library, this one is a near-miniature. Why anyone would produce an art book on such a scale is a good question. The images are only a few inches tall. Still, there are some lovely pictures.
Take, for example, the etching on the right by Wenceslaus Hollar, a Bohemian artist and illustrator who lived in London before and after the English Civil War. It reads: “The Winter habit of an English gentlewoman.” The oversized muff consuming her left arm and the mask over her eyes I find strange and strangely appealing. I imagine Samuel Pepys stepping over beggars in the lane to make her acquaintance. Hollar was so poor at the end that he supposedly had to plead with creditors not to seize his deathbed before he was finished with it.
Here are two portraits by Anthony Van Dyck, after whom the famous style of goatee is named. “Van Noort” is on the left, and that’s “Vorsterman” leering at him from the right. All the men in Van Dyck’s portraits wear Van Dykes, which, if it was really so common, makes you wonder why the style was named after him alone. But maybe it wasn’t popular at all and Van Dyck only added it to his portraits the way a ten-year-old draws moustaches on the faces of people in magazine advertisements.
Here is a man in need of no introduction: Charles Mingus! …Thanks to his generous narcissism, Rembrandt left us with an awful lot of self-portraits. He looks something between Socrates and Falstaff, I think (plus a little Mingus). But if I had a mug like his and could paint like he did, posterity might find itself with a surplus of my self-portraits too.
The Turkish Emperour odious for other crueltie was herin a remarkable master of mercy; killing his favourite in his sleepe, and sending him from the shade into the house of darkness. He that had been destroyed, would hardly have bled at the presence of his destroyer, where men are already dead by metaphor, and passe but from one sleepe unto another.
~ Sir Thomas Browne, from the Notebooks
“Dead by metaphor” is very nice. Nice too is the whimsical spelling. Why do we always correct Shakespeare and Milton but never Browne? The folkloric notion that murdered corpses bleed in the presence of their murderer is echoed in Lady Anne’s words to Gloucester in Richard III: “See, see dead Henry’s wounds / Open their congealed mouths and bleed afresh / For ‘tis thy presence that exhales this blood / From cold and empty veins where no blood dwells.” Criminal forensics must have been a simpler science when the killer could be identified by wheeling the victim round town for a game of Hotter/Colder.
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.
How many thousands of American adolescents at one time or another felt that way about J.D. Salinger? A college professor of mine was actually expelled from his high school for bringing a copy of Catcher in the Rye to class, if you can believe it. Too bad Salinger never answered the phone.
John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, first American edition, published by John W. Luce & Company, Boston (1911). A beautiful little book of under 100 pages, printed in large type on thick acid-free paper with a soft, quilted texture. Early performances of the play in both Ireland and the U.S. ended in rioting.
A week ago my son asked to see something “a hundred years old” and I handed him this. The Latin grammarian Terentianus Maurus wrote that books have their own destinies. I’ve owned this one for nearly twenty years but never guessed its destiny would include serving as an example of antiquity for a six-year-old boy.
Being constantly devoured by cranes, they have to live in caves in order to escape.
~ Matteo Ricci, from the Impossible Black Tulip map
We prefer to believe outrageous things when possible. A Jesuit missionary to China, Ricci made his annotated map of the world for the Wanli Emperor in 1602. Here he describes a race of dwarfs supposed to live in northern Russia. He tells how, after a season of oppression, they charge from their caves on the backs of goats to destroy the nests of their enemies. Thanks to things like the rise of international trade and satellite imagery, geography as a form of popular fiction has been exiled to distant planets and parallel universes.
Who can say? Who of us so complexly entangled in our common human blah blah blah can plumb the innermost recesses of another’s and so forth and so on?
~ Peter De Vries, Slouching Towards Kalamazoo
What a strange relief it was the first time I read that sentence. My God, I thought, I’m free. George Santayana had claimed that ‘between the laughing and the weeping philosopher there is no opposition,’ but De Vries proves it in a sentence.
It often occurs to me that I am a fool. It happened again yesterday morning. I was wading across a flooded intersection in San Francisco’s SoMa district. My umbrella was tattered, my luggage soaked through but floating nearby. If I can keep a grip on the bag, I thought, then at least I won’t drown.
The rain had beat at the windows all night. Inside my tenth-floor hotel room I heard a loud treble moaning begin about 11pm. A female guest in the grip of carnal enthusiasm, I thought. But just as I began to feel embarrassed for her, I realized it was the wind. In the morning the concierge asked if I wanted a cab. “Don’t be silly – just a little rain,” I said. A defiant whim: I would walk it, like Lear on the heath. Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks, and all that.
From Geary to King: thirty minutes on foot which I’d timed to perfectly coincide with the fiercest blast of the storm. I pass it over without further comment, the trauma still being fresh. I splashed into the office like a sea lion from the surf, out of breath, shedding rainwater in broad, cool puddles over polished wooden floors.
“You didn’t walk all the way from the hotel?” my boss asked, incredulous. “Was it not raining when you left?”
“No,” I said, “I was a fool from the start.”
In the final track of the classic Smiths’ album, The Queen is Dead, Morrissey croons his tardy discovery that “some girls are bigger than others.” The same is true of paperbacks. And size, as they say, matters. There’s a power of attraction in gratuitous endowment. By force of its own mass, and regardless of subject matter, a large paperback generates a kind of gravitational pull. Do laws of physics place any ultimate constraints on size? At what point will glue binding simply fail? And is that fail-point determined by the total number of pages or the total weight of pages? Such are the mysteries of love. But while oversized hardbounds revolve in our eyes like solemn Jupiters of desire, absurdly thick paperbacks draw us in like insatiable black holes, concentrating acquisitional lust in objects deliciously balanced between virginal modesty and button-bursting extravagance.
Note how careful I am not to crease their spines in the act of love. Clarel, Herman Melville (Northwestern University Press): 893 pages; The Bible with Apocrypha (Oxford World’s Classics): 1824 pages; Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton (New York Review of Books): 1382 pages; Tales and Sketches, Nathaniel Hawthorne (Library of America): 1200 pages.
