How do we reconcile the saddest of English writers being at the same time among the wittiest? And when I say “saddest,” I don’t mean depressed or suicidal; rather, wistful, ever aware of human ephemerality, calibrating his words until they attain the precise edge of irony he seeks, which is never cold or savage. It is, rather, sad, and not a psychiatric diagnosis to be treated pharmaceutically.  I’ve heard from a reader who tells me his idea of a great essayist is Susan Sontag. I won’t touch that. He questions why I value the essays of Max Beerbohm. “He’s a lightweight,” my reader writes. “His effects are cheap. He seems to know nothing about the world around him. He’s a minor humorist.” I won’t deny “minor” but “cheap” is way off. I dare you to detect a wrong note anywhere in Beerbohm’s prose, even a single clunker. Consider “No. 2. The Pines” (And Even Now, 1920), written in 1914. Beerbohm is describing his youthful visits with Charles Algernon Swinburne, beginning in 1899. The essay’s title refers to the address of Swinburne’s home in Putney. Beerbohm writes:    “It is odd how little remains to a man of his own past--how few minutes of even his memorable hours are not clean forgotten, and how few seconds in any one of those minutes can be recaptured... I am middle-aged, and have lived a vast number of seconds. Subtract one third of these, for one mustn't count sleep as life. The residual number is still enormous. Not a single one of those seconds was unimportant to me in its passage. Many of them bored me, of course; but even boredom is a positive state: one chafes at it and hates it; strange that one should afterwards forget it! And stranger still that of one’s actual happinesses and unhappinesses so tiny and tattered a remnant clings about one!”    Few writers could sustain that tone of melancholy reflection without resorting to self-pity. It reminds me of Msgr. Ronald Knox beginning his essay “Birmingham Revisited” (Literary Distractions, 1958) like this: “It is alleged by a friend of my family that I used to suffer from insomnia at the age of four; and that when she asked me how I managed to occupy my time at night I answered ‘I lie awake and think of the past.’” Beerbohm might have written that. V.S.  Pritchett writes in “A Dandy” (Complete Collected Essays, 1991):   “Among other things, in the wide-eyed persona he invented, there is sadness. Was it the sadness of not being a genius on the great scale, like his admired Henry James? Possibly. Was it the sadness of knowing that his work must be perfect – as that of minor writers has to be – because fate made him a simulacrum? Or was he simply born sad?”

Prediction is the sharpest tool the human animal has devised — the chisel with which we sculpted survival out of chance, the fulcrum by which we lifted civilization out of survival. Among the greatest gifts of the imagination, that crowning curio of consciousness, is our ability to alchemize hindsight into foresight, to chart the most probable course of the future by drawing on our experience of the past. And yet, like the tragic flaw of the Greek hero, our great strength is also our great vulnerability. It is salutary to remember how often our predictions have been wrong, how again… read article

An old friend has grown uncharacteristically introspective and is finding much to regret. It’s a function of age. A widower in retirement from teaching high school, he seems no longer the buoyant social creature I’ve always known. In fact, I envied his gregariousness when we were young. Still funny, still curious, well-read and attentive to the world, he looks back at missed opportunities, doubts, things he should have done or not done. We all do that, at least the non-sociopaths among us, but I fear my friend is growing obsessive. Such self-scourging worries me. I’m no psychiatrist but I do respect depression, especially when it’s not merely an insidious mutation of self-pity.  Jorge Luis Borges wrote a poem when he was a little older than we are -- “Things That Might Have Been” (trans. Alastair Reid, The History of the Night, 1977). Here we find the musings of a man who was among the great writers of the last century:   “I think of the things that might have been and were not. The treatise on Saxon mythology that Bede did not write. The unimaginable work that Dante glimpsed fleetingly when the last verse of the Commedia was corrected. History without the afternoon of the Cross and the afternoon of the hemlock. History without the face of Helen. Man without the eyes which have shown the moon to us. In the three labored days of Gettysburg, the victory of the South. The love we do not share. The vast empire which the Vikings did not wish to found. The world without the wheel or without the rose. The judgment of John Donne on Shakespeare. The other horn of the unicorn. The fabled bird of Ireland, in two places at once. The son I did not have.”   The tone is objective, almost clinical, a catalog. All of these events are historical, not personal, until the eighth item on his list: “The love we do not share.” Is he speaking as a generic human being or as Borges? It’s left ambiguous, at least in translation. Only in the final line does the first-person singular assert itself: “The son I did not have.” We know Borges had no children. Hoyt Rogers also translated Borges’ poem, first in the March 1999 issue of The New Criterion, then in Selected Poems (ed. Alexandr Coleman, 1999). Some of the differences in word choice are interesting:   “I think about things that might have been and never were. The treatise on Saxon myths that Bede omitted to write. The inconceivable work that Dante may have glimpsed As soon as he corrected the Comedy’s last verse. History without two afternoons: that of the hemlock, that of the Cross. History without Helen’s face. Man without the eyes that have granted us the moon. Over three Gettysburg days, the victory of the South. The love we never shared. The vast empire the Vikings declined to found. The globe without the wheel, or without the rose. John Donne’s judgment of Shakespeare. The Unicorn’s other horn. The fabled Irish bird which alights in two places at once. The child I never had.”   “Child” instead of “son.” Like Borges, my friend has no children.

Jessa Crispin on what the actor’s roles tell us about the crisis of masculinity The post Michael Douglas Explains It All appeared first on The American Scholar.

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