Montaigne devotes a brief essay to a pair of pre-Socratic Greek thinkers, “Of Democritus and Heraclitus.” The former is reputed to have been a misanthrope, perhaps a melancholic. The latter was known as “the laughing philosopher.”  The essayist begins by weighing the importance of judgment in life generally and in the composition of his essays: “If it is a subject I do not understand at all, even on that I essay my judgment, sounding the ford from a good distance; and then, finding it too deep for my height, I stick to the bank.” That’s an admirable custom, one too few of us practice. Typically, Montaigne proceeds by association, not rigorous, thesis-like adherence to logic. He describes his method for writing an essay, and sounds very much like a blogger:   “I take the first subject that chance offers. They are all equally good to me. And I never plan to develop them completely. For I do not see the whole of anything; nor do those who promise to show it to us. Of a hundred members and faces that each thing has, I take one, sometimes only to lick it, sometimes to brush the surface, sometimes to pinch it to the bone. I give it a stab, not as wide but as deep as I know how. And most often I like to take them from some unaccustomed point of view. I would venture to treat some matter thoroughly, if I knew myself less well.”   As usual, Montaigne sounds remarkably like one of our contemporaries. There’s nothing stuffy or cautious about the way he proceeds. He’s good at producing vivid metaphors drawn from real life (“sometimes only to lick it”). He handles serious subjects almost casually, sometime humorously. Two-thirds of the way through his essay he finally introduces the philosophers of his title. Democritus, he writes, “finding the condition of man vain and ridiculous, never went out in public but with a mocking and laughing face; whereas Heraclitus, having pity and compassion on this same condition of ours, wore a face perpetually sad, and eyes filled with tears.”   You may think you know where he’s going with this but Montaigne is no Renaissance version of a virtue signaler. He endorses Democritus’ manner, “not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it is more disdainful, and condemns us more than the other; and it seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve. Pity and commiseration are mingled with some esteem for the thing we pity; the things we laugh at we consider worthless. I do not think there is as much unhappiness in us as vanity, nor as much malice as stupidity. We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not as wretched as we are worthless.”   Robert Burton attributes his preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy to his persona/pseudonym “Democritus Junior,” who writes of his Greek forebear:   “After a wandering life, he settled at Abdera, a town in Thrace, and was sent for thither to be their lawmaker, recorder, or town-clerk, as some will; or as others, he was there bred and born. Howsoever it was, there he lived at last in a garden in the suburbs, wholly betaking himself to his studies and a private life, ‘saving that sometimes he would walk down to the haven and laugh heartily at such variety of ridiculous objects, which there he saw.’ Such a one was Democritus.”   [The Montaigne passages are from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, 1957).]

Here I encounter yet again the bothersome issue of major vs. minor writers. When “minor” is used as a purely dismissive judgment, beware. There are minor writers who write beautifully and earn our respect and even love – Max Beerbohm is the first who comes to mind – and others who never transcend their triviality. Say, Carl Sandburg. No serious reader reads Shakespeare exclusively, and consider the poor soul who consumes a steady diet of Sandburg.  I was surprised in 2023 when The European Conservative, of all journals, published an essay titled “A.E. Housman, Poet and Pessimist” by the American writer Thomas Banks. He makes his judgment clear in the first sentence: “[I]t is not likely that either the critic or the lay reader would represent him as a major poet.” To substantiate his conclusion, Banks cites the relatively small quantity of poems Housman produced and continues: “Additionally, the verse he wrote, though for quality it is one of the most even bodies of composition in the English language, is as slender in its themes as it is slight in its volume.”   Does “slender in its themes” mean Housman’s themes are small in number or trivial in substance? There’s no law obligating poets to address some phantom number of subjects, and it’s surely not the latter. Consider XL from A Shropshire Lad, a poem that has mysteriously charmed me since I was a teenager:   “Into my heart an air that kills    From yon far country blows:  What are those blue remembered hills,    What spires, what farms are those?    “That is the land of lost content,   I see it shining plain,  The happy highways where I went    And cannot come again.”   I’ve been reading Landor lately and was pleased to see Banks liken him to Housman:   “Housman was not a dry man, and he cast less peaceful and somber a shadow on the page than he probably thought. Something like Walter Savage Landor’s ‘I strove with none, for none was worth my strife’ does not really get at the heart of the man, for in truth, Housman was professionally combative and none to suffer fools gladly. The same, ironically, could be said for the Romanesque Landor himself, whose notoriously acrimonious nature gives the lie to ‘The Dying Speech of the Old Philosopher.’”   Housman was Kingsley Amis’ favorite poet and Philip Larkin called him, with Larkin-esque authority, “the poet of unhappiness,” though he added provocatively that Housman “seems to have been a very nice man.” In more than his devotion to Juvenal, Housman reminds me of no other writer so much as Dr. Johnson. Consider the hatred of cant they shared, the passionate, sometimes tortured inner lives they led, and their devotion to scholarship. Banks respects Housman enough to take him seriously and not trivialize his poems. Nothing is accomplished by labeling a writer “major” or “minor,” except perhaps discouraging future readers. Banks acknowledges that Housman left us “a few poems of exquisite perfectionism.” He writes well, never raises the subject of Housman’s homosexuality and proves he has a sense of humor:   “Creation was for him pulvis et umbrae [dust and shadows] and no more, in spite of any appearance to the contrary. The vision addresses itself to the reader in nearly everything he wrote, and never is it mitigated by even an occasional coloring of optimism. The narrator of quite a number of the Shropshire poems tenders the eternal consolation of the glum, that at least our lot now is no worse than anyone’s ever was, and the present is no blacker than the past or future. The Valley of the Shadow of Death has no sunny uplands at either end of it, so let us study perseverance at the expense of hope. Of all mature attitudes, this is one of the least enviable. So, concluding, he was not one for causes. An intensely private man, he is a monument to a time, long since lost to us, when not every man or woman of letters felt the urge to pester the editor about the evils of processed food or Big Tobacco.”   Housman was born on this date, March 26, in 1859 and died at age seventy-seven in 1936. Go here and here to read more by Thomas Banks, a first-rate writer.

In 1968, my high-school English teacher loaned me the anthology of short stories she had used at Kent State University just a few years earlier. Included were the usual suspects -- Maupassant, Hemingway, Chekhov, Eudora Welty – but I read them because I knew nothing. Among the unknowns was Flannery O’Connor and her “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a title I knew as a young blues fan from the Bessie Smith song. I stayed up late one school night and read the story in bed. I had never encountered anything so violent and disturbing that came under the heading of “literature” and was defiantly not pulp. It was more shocking than a vicious film noir like “Kiss of Death.” Hugh Kenner would call O’Connor’s story a “nice morbid little shocker.”  To this day I’ve never read anything like O’Connor’s mingling of murderousness and what might be called applied theology – a combination I've seldom encountered outside Dante. As a non-Catholic, my understanding is not profound. At first I read it for the Misfit’s psychotic behavior – and the narcissistic grandmother’s comeuppance. Now it’s a permanent gloss on the human condition.   In her final short story, “Parker’s Back,” O’Connor has O.E. (Obadiah Elihue) Parker, at age fourteen, see a tattooed man at the county fair. The sight transforms his life:   “Parker had never before felt the least motion of wonder in himself. Until he saw the man at the fair, it did not enter his head that there was anything out of the ordinary about the fact that he existed. Even then it did not enter his head, but a peculiar unease settled in him. It was as if a blind boy had been turned so gently in a different direction that he did not know his destination had been changed.”   Self-absorbed and always self-seeking, Parker has never indulged in a self-reflective thought. He moves by instinct, following obscure impulses as they lead him. In his Rambler essay for July 9, 1751, Johnson writes:   "It is common for those who have never accustomed themselves to the labour of inquiry, nor invigorated their confidence by conquests over difficulty, to sleep in the gloomy quiescence of astonishment, without any effort to animate inquiry or dispel obscurity. What they cannot immediately conceive they consider as too high to be reached, or too extensive to be comprehended; they therefore content themselves with the gaze of folly, forbear to attempt what they have no hopes of performing; and resign the pleasure of rational contemplation to more pertinacious study or more active faculties."   Parker sleeps in “the gloomy quiescence of astonishment,” at least until he crashes a tractor into a tree and instinctively yells, “God above!” I’m not describing influence; more an elective affinity. O’Connor admired Johnson’s work, especially his Lives of the Poets. His name shows up five times in her published letters, The Habit of Being (1979), always with approval. We know from Flannery O’Connor’s Library: Resources of Being (ed. Arthur F. Kinney, 1985) that her personal library included Dr. Johnson’s Prayers (ed. Elton Trueblood, 1947) and a two-volume Lives of the Poets, as well as Boswell’s Life of Johnson.   Johnson and O’Connor would have agreed that evil is a mystery to be endured not a problem to be solved, and that self-delusion is endemic among humans. On April 14, 1750, Johnson wrote in The Rambler:   “When a man finds himself led, though by a train of honest sentiments, to wish for that which he has no right, he should start back as from a pitfall covered with flowers. He that fancies he should benefit the public more in a great station than the man that fills it will in time imagine it an act of virtue to supplant him; and as opposition readily kindles into hatred, his eagerness to do that good, to which he is not called, will betray him to crimes, which in his original scheme were never proposed.”   Today is O’Connor’s centenary. She was born on March 25, 1925, and died in 1964 at age thirty-nine from systemic lupus erythematosus.   [Kenner’s quip can be found in Vol. 1, p. 268 of Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner (Counterpoint, 2018).]

I often speak or exchange texts with my nephew. Soon he’ll turn thirty-six, but he lives in Cleveland, 1,200 miles away, and I seldom see him. Distance warps the sense of duration, so I think of him as frozen in his early twenties. We spoke on Sunday and for the first time since my brother’s death last August, we didn’t even mention his father. When I realized this I felt a pang of guilt, as though I were forgetting him. But attending to the living supersedes our obligations to the dead. They don’t constitute a cult to be worshipped. They live in memory and in that way we weigh their loss and honor them. On February 24, 1854, Walter Savage Land0r's sister Elizabeth died after suffering a stroke. She was seventy-seven. A month later he wrote a poem about her titled “March 24”:  “Sharp crocus wakes the froward year; In their old haunts birds reappear; From yonder elm, yet black with rain, The cushat looks deep down for grain Thrown on the gravel-walk; here comes The redbreast to the sill for crumbs. Fly off! fly off! I can not wait To welcome ye, as she of late. The earliest of my friends is gone. Alas! almost my only one! The few as dear, long wafted o’er, Await me on a sunnier shore.”   Some glosses: “froward,” despite what my spell-check software tells me, is not a typo. Here is the OED definition, which is applicable to Landor himself -- “disposed to go counter to what is demanded or what is reasonable; perverse, difficult to deal with, hard to please; refractory, ungovernable.” "Cushat" is Scottish and northern England dialect for a wood pigeon or ring-dove. In his 1954 biography of Landor, R.H. Super writes of him after Elizabeth's death: "He told [John] Forster [his friend and first biographer] that the loss of his earliest, dearest, and nearly his last friend had deprived him of sleep, appetite, digestion, everything."

On Monday, March 23, [1772], I found him busy, preparing a fourth edition of his folio Dictionary.”  Dr. Johnson published the first edition of his Dictionary on April 15, 1755, two-hundred-seventy years ago. It contained some 42,000 entries and he had worked on it for seven years. It’s great innovation, the reason we still read it, are the 114,00 citations that accompany the entries. The Dictionary can be read as an anthology of English literature (the way Jefferson read it), with Johnson relying most heavily on Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Pope and Dryden. As a young man, Robert Browning read the Dictionary in order to “qualify” as an author. Samuel Beckett found words to recycle into his own work. Boswell continues in his Life:   “Mr. Peyton, one of his original amanuenses, was writing for him. I put him in mind of a meaning of the word side, which he had omitted, viz. relationship; as father’s side, mother’s side [see definition eight]. He inserted it.”   The Dictionary is a substantial volume, built to last. By “folio,” Boswell means the pages measured eighteen inches by twenty inches – larger than most books published today. I enjoy comparing Johnson's entries with those in the Oxford English Dictionary, which often cites Johnson.    “I asked him if humiliating was a good word. He said, he had seen it frequently used, but he did not know it to be legitimate English. [Johnson omitted humiliating.] He would not admit civilization, but only civility [true]. With great deference to him, I thought civilization, from to civilize better in the sense opposed to barbarity, than civility; as it is better to have a distinct word for each sense, than one word with two senses, which civility is, in his way of using it.”   A second edition followed a few weeks after the first. It was published in 165 weekly sections. The third edition followed in 1765. The fourth, which came out in 1773, included heavy revisions of the original work by Johnson, who identified himself as a lexicographer, defined as “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.”