More from The Marginalian
In praise of "the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light."
"The day steeps everything in golden liquid... A sidewalk cafe in the evening, with a wonderful amber light flooding through the doors and windows: huge, mad stars in an indigo sky. For this, you have to be great, crazy, or wildly in love."
“I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me,” Oscar Wilde wrote from prison. “There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul.” The cruel kindness of life is that our sturdiest fulcrum of transformation is the devastation of our hopes and wishes — the losses, the heartbreaks, the diagnoses that shatter the template of the self, leaving us to reconstitute a new way of being from the rubble. In those moments, brutal and inevitable, we come to realize that no prayer… read article
Growing up immersed in theorems and equations, I took great comfort in the pristine clarity of mathematics, the way numbers, symbols, and figures each mean one thing only, with no room for interpretation — a little unit of truth, unhaunted by the chimera of meaning. I felt like I was speaking the language of the universe itself, precise and impartial, safe from the subjectivities that I already knew made human beings gravely misunderstand and then mistreat one another. And yet, in steps too unconscious and incremental even for me to perceive, I became a writer and not a mathematician. Words,… read article
On September 11, 1943, E.B. White (July 11, 1899–October 1, 1985) reported on the pages of The New Yorker that Clarence Buddhington Kelland — a writer prolific and popular in his lifetime, now forgotten, onetime executive director of the Republican National Committee, described by Time Magazine as “pugnacious”, “vitriolic”, “peppery”, and “gaunt-faced” — had proposed a plan for America’s participation in the postwar world based on such unbridled imperialism that “the Pacific Ocean must become an American Lake.” White — who authored some of the most incisive editorials in the history of journalism in between nursing generations of children on… read article
More in literature
I have encountered the neologism “egowriting” used to describe -- with approval -- such genres as memoirs, diaries, journals, letters, blog posts, commonplace books, notebooks and essays--almost anything. In other words, a broad collection of forms in which the author and his self are often the focus. It’s a cloyingly repellant name and a complicated literary category that might even be stretched to include some forms of fiction and poetry. I have an ambiguous relationship with the first-person singular. When I started Anecdotal Evidence nineteen years ago, I intended it to be more like literary criticism but soon discovered I’m not a critic nor does most criticism interest me. Thus, the motto: “A blog about the intersection of books and life.” My model more closely resembled the classic English essay, à la Hazlitt, Lamb and Beerbohm, a mingling of the bookish and the familiar. Books are life for a dedicated reader, or at least a big chunk of it, not a segregated category. I have no interest in John Berryman-like confession, the minutia of self-display. Often, I still feel a tingle of uncertainty when I deploy an “I,” and sometimes while revising prune them away. Lately, I have come to look forward to the essays of Peter Hitchens in The Lamp magazine. He does what I strive to do. His latest is “All Shall Wax Old,” subtitled “On the Past.” He begins with a Chestertonian premise: sorting old clothes. He recalls an anecdote from his schoolboy days and then the task of sorting his father’s possessions after his death: “There is still so much I do not know, which is why I urge everyone to get to know their parents while they can, and to ask, without restraint, about their lives. As it is, I came out of a mystery, and in this life I will never solve it.” One memory unfolds into another. None is lingered over self-regardingly. He reflects on his relationships with his own children. Hitchens’ touch is serious but light. There’s no self-flagellation or self-aggrandizement, no wallowing in guilt or self-congratulation: “How do you recover when you have failed to set a good example, or set a bad one? How much attention was I paying during those crucial times? Who wants power over others? Not I. The only power worth having in the world is the power to stop those others from interfering too much in your life.” Hear, hear. In the U.S., the most important of rights is not included in our precious Bill of Rights. It is, of course, the right to be left alone, not to be controlled or manipulated. Hitchens cites a novel by Michael Frayn I have not read and concludes his essay – which began with sorting old clothes – like this: “Heavens, how sad it is to contemplate all those days of mighty trivia. If I think about it too much, I can hardly breathe.” Starting with the mundane, Hitchens finishes gracefully with the profound.
An interview with Frederick Freundlich about working at Mondragon, participating in a cooperative, and building social companies.
Erica Light takes after her mother, the late poet Helen Pinkerton, in her thoughtfulness and generosity. She has sent me a box of books, including four collections of poems by R.L. Barth: Looking for Peace (1981), Simonides in Vietnam (1990), Small Arms Fire (1994) and Reading The Iliad (1995). None of these had I seen before, though many of the poems are familiar from other editions. Some of the non-Vietnam-related verse in the first volume is surprising. I could hear J.V. Cunningham talking in the next room, especially in the epigrams. Here is “A Brief History of Reason,” subtitled “Aquinas to the Moderns”: “Evil is nothing. Then, by their finesse, Nothing is evil, and men errorless.” And this is “The Jeweler,” “for the memory of Yvor Winters”: “Each facet, sharp and bright, Despite the turning hand Immersed in the pure light, Divides light, band from band.” What treasure Erica has given me. Along with the Barth came the Melville House reissue of Chekhov’s novella My Life in the Constance Garnett translation, a brief monograph on Paul Klee by Joseph-Émile Muller, and a mint-condition first edition of Joseph Epstein's 1991 essay collection A Line Out for a Walk (a title he takes from Klee). Erica left a slip of paper in the Epstein collection at Page 268, in the middle of “Waiter, There’s a Paragraph in My Soup!” Here he writes: “Anyone reading an interesting passage in a book asks, if often only subconsciously, Is what I have just read formally correct? Is it beautiful? What does it mean? Do I believe it? Along with these questions, a writer asks two others: How technically, did the author bring it off? and Is there anything here I can appropriate (why bring in a word like steal when it isn’t absolutely required) for my own writing?” Erica’s gift reminds me of her mother's poem “The Gift”: “I had a gift once that I then refused. Now, when I take it, though I be accused Of softness, cant, self-weariness at best, Of failure, fear, neurosis, and the rest. Still, I am here and I shall not remove. I know my need. And this reluctant love, This little that I have, is something true, Sign of the unrevealed that lies in you. Grace is the gift. To take it my concern— Itself the only possible return.” Helen’s poem can be found in Taken in Faith, (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2002) and A Journey of the Mind: Collected Poems of Helen Pinkerton 1945-2016 (Wiseblood Books, 2016).
David Levering Lewis digs into his own origin story The post Family/History appeared first on The American Scholar.