I first encountered the word palimpsest more than half a century ago in Flann O’Brien’s 1939 novel At Swim-Two-Birds and found it immediately useful. Here’s the OED’s strict, non-figurative definition:  “A parchment or other writing surface on which the original text has been effaced or partially erased, and then overwritten by another; a manuscript in which later writing has been superimposed on earlier (effaced) writing.”   In other words, a much-edited text with revisions superimposed on earlier versions – a text layered like an archaeological dig. I think of Marcel Proust’s manuscripts. More central to my thinking is the figurative use of palimpsest as a metaphor for memory. In a literal sense, I carry around mental maps of every place in five states where I have lived. The earliest date from my childhood in suburban Cleveland. In that immediate turf I can get around just fine but in subsequent decades, freeways have been constructed and buildings and other landmarks have been torn down. Trees have sprouted and others cut down. I know from previous visits that Cleveland is half-charted territory, and I can’t always trust my memory of the geography.  When I visit next week for my fifty-fifth high-school reunion, I’ll rely on my niece and nephew as navigators.   I haven’t lived in Cleveland and environs since 1977 and not in Ohio since 1983. I'm flying there Wednesday. It’s prudent to recall that memory is a function of the imagination. Cops know this when they interview witnesses to crimes. The mind fills in the blanks, consciously or otherwise. It pays to be skeptical of our memories, no matter how fond we are of them. Also, the unconscious is timeless. It’s still 1961 in there, and 1998. Thomas De Quincey understood. He first published in Blackwood’s Magazine an essay that became part of Suspiria de Profundis, a collection left unfinished at the time of his death in 1859 but intended as a sequel to his Confessions of an English Opium Eater.   “What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, oh reader, is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished. And if, in the vellum palimpsest, lying among the other diplomata of human archives or libraries, there is anything fantastic or which moves to laughter, as oftentimes there is in the grotesque collisions of those successive themes, having no natural connection, which by pure accident have consecutively occupied the roll, yet, in our own heaven-created palimpsest, the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain, there are not and cannot be such incoherencies.”

Sometimes all it takes for me to pull a book off the shelf is a provocative or otherwise interesting title. While retrieving a collection of William H. Pritchard’s reviews in the university library I noticed a nearby slender volume titled In Praise of the Half-Forgotten and Other Ruminations. My first thought: what a fine epitaph could be made of that, and I too am one of nature’s ruminators. The author is George Brandon Saul (1901-86). The book was published by Bucknell University Press in 1976. I know little about Saul except that he taught English for many years at the University of Connecticut and often wrote about Yeats and other Irish writers.  The book title attracts me because “half-forgotten” books attract me. Of course, most books today are on the way to being fully forgotten. A writer’s reputation, a nebulous thing at best, is often manufactured by marketers, publicists and malleable critics; not the true critics, the only ones who matter, serious readers. Saul says he hopes his books “may help plug a few holes in literary history.” His title essay consists of brief reviews – he calls them “critical brevities” – of six poets, only one of whom I’ve ever heard of – Dubose Hayward (author of the 1925 novel Porgy, the source of Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess).   Saul devotes essays to the criticism of James Stephens, the poetry of A.E, Coppard, English metrics, the poems of Walter de la Mare, Edwin Arlington Robinson, A.E. Housman, and Stevenson and Henley as lyricists. Many fine writers but none critically or academically fashionable, except perhaps Housman for extra-literary reasons. I’m especially pleased that Saul includes “Autumn Nights: The Prose of Alexander Smith.” If remembered at all, Smith (1830-67), a Scot, is remembered as a poet but he excels as an essayist. The book to find is Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country (1863). Like his mentors Montaigne and Charles Lamb, Smith may be an egotist, yes, but a benign egotist, as contradictory as that sounds. His work starts with self but extends outward to absorb the bigger, more interesting world. Egotism is not the same as narcissism. Among Smith’s essays is “On the Writing of Essays,” with observations readily applicable to blogs:   “The essay, as a literary form, resembles the lyric, in so far as it is moulded by some central mood—whimsical, serious, or satirical. Give the mood, and the essay, from the first sentence to the last, grows around it as the cocoon grows around the silkworm. The essay-writer is a chartered libertine, and a law unto himself. A quick ear and eye, an ability to discern the infinite suggestiveness of common things, a brooding meditative spirit, are all that the essayist requires to start business with.”   For further confirmation of Smith’s naturalness and literary sophistication as an essayist, read this from “A Shelf in My Bookcase” on the virtues of Boswell’s Life of Johnson: “It is quite impossible to over-state its worth. You lift it, and immediately the intervening years disappear, and you are in the presence of the Doctor. You are made free of the last century, as you are free of the present. You double your existence.”   Saul tells about half the story when he describes Smith as “a lover of simplicity and quiet, of gentleness and village gossip, of books and meditation in still gardens.”

“In those days when Bedlam was open to the cruel curiosity of holyday ramblers, I have been a visitor there. Though a boy, I was not altogether insensible of the misery of the poor captives, nor destitute of feeling for them.”  The English poet William Cowper, a veteran of multiple suicide attempts and confinements in asylums, describes a common eighteenth-century recreation: viewing the “antics” of the insane for entertainment in Bedlam. He’s writing to his friend the Rev. William Newton on July 19, 1784:   “But the madness of some of them had such a humorous air, and displayed itself in so many whimsical freaks, that it was impossible not to be entertained, at the same time that I was angry with myself for being so.”   I’m skeptical of any claims of moral progress, though by the late twentieth century touring the nut house seems to have been curtailed  as an entertainment option. Of course, today we have “reality television,” professional sports and the drug-addled and schizophrenic homeless on the street. A man could earn a respectable living by corralling such people in an updated version of the carnival sideshow.   As a kid, the closest I came to such spectacle was the Cuyahoga County Fair in Berea, Ohio. Some time in the early sixties my brother and I were seduced into viewing the Giant Rat of Sumatra, behind walls of painted canvas. The barker’s pitch I still remember: “Live, livin’ and breathin'.” All I recall seeing is a fat rat in a pit filled with saw dust. As a bonus we viewed an enormously tall, skinny man dressed in cowboy duds and a tiny woman seated beside him. I think of her when I reread Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget. I recall an overwhelming sense of sadness – people living narrow, blighted lives.  The sadness has its origin in the understanding that in the future I might join them.

As a boy I was often told I spoke too loudly. It makes sense, as I came from a family of yellers. It’s an annoying habit, usually inappropriate, one I associate with self-centeredness. I made a conscious effort to lower the volume, a rare instance of successfully stifling an obnoxious personal habit. As a reporter I learned the value of modulating speech -- when to keep it soft and intimate, when to speak louder and more forcefully, depending on your audience. The latter usually applied to people holding public office. I tried to follow Teddy Roosevelt’s advice.  I’ve heard from several readers about the dearth of good, intelligent conversation in their lives. One woman complains of “every conversation turning into a scolding or shouting match.” I’ve seen the same thing, of course. I’ve always associated hollering and hair-trigger anger with what used to be called “poor breeding.” That is, people without elders to teach them basic etiquette. I’m not sure that’s the case any longer.      Back in 2011, Commentary asked forty-one people this question: “Are you optimistic or pessimistic about America’s future?” Among the respondents was one of my favorite poets and critics, Eric Ormsby. He chooses an appropriate passage from Whitman’s Democratic Vistas, and writes:   “But it isn’t the obvious dangers that America faces—terrorist attack, fiscal collapse—that most get me down but something humbler, less catastrophic, and yet more insidious. I think of it as the death of discourse. Nowadays, even among friends, a dissenting opinion is met not with rebuttal or debate but with stony silence or Whitman’s ‘melodramatic screamings.’ The purpose of conversation on any serious topic is no longer a ‘mass of badinage’ but an occasion for sniffing out ‘deviant’ views and affixing labels.”   Ormsby recounts that even when his family agued, “we were reconciled in mutual affection.” Wise words. A person is not his or her opinions. You don’t have to respect a stupid or offensive opinion but you do have to respect the person speaking it – at least for a little while. Good conversation is one of life's supreme pleasures. Boswell recounts Dr. Johnson saying: “The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered but a general effect of pleasing impression.”

In his critical works, Samuel Johnson respected tradition if not reputation or even physical appearance. He could be eloquently brutish and write of Jonathan Swift:  “The person of Swift had not many recommendations. He had a kind of muddy complexion, which, though he washed himself with Oriental scrupulosity, did not look clear. He had a countenance sour and severe, which he seldom softened by any appearance of gaiety. He stubbornly resisted any tendency to laughter.”   Today we would frown on mocking a writer’s looks. It would be judged “insensitive.” I associate Johnson’s description of Swift with one of the late John Simon’s more amusing assaults on Barbra Streisand: “Miss Streisand looks like a cross between an aardvark and an albino rat surmounted by a platinum-coated horse bun. Though she has good eyes and a nice complexion, the rest of her is a veritable anthology of disaster areas. Her speaking voice seems to have graduated with top honors from the Brooklyn Conservatory of Yentaism.” That Streisand is a mediocre singer/actress endowed with a surfeit of self-esteem eases potential offense. The difference between Johson’s judgment and Simon’s being that the former mingles admiration with distaste:   “It was from the time when [Swift] first began to patronise the Irish, that they may date their riches and prosperity. He taught them first to know their own interest, their weight, and their strength, and gave them spirit to assert that equality with their fellow-subjects to which they have ever since been making vigorous advances, and to claim those rights which they have at last established.”   R.L. Barth has translated Martial’s epigram XI.99. As a satirist, Martial was no respecter of persons:   “Whenever you stand up, I see your gown Treat you indecently, flat let you down. You pluck it with your left hand then your right— You’re positively groaning!—it’s held tight In the Cyanean straits of your huge butt. What’s my advice? Don’t sit. Don’t stand. That’s what.”   Bob wrote to me on his approach to translation: “Translation can be a vexing problem if you let it be--or even if you don’t. For me, all that matters is that the translated poem makes a good English poem (or why bother) and that it stays as close to the original as this or that translator is able to keep it. However, I'm willing to vary, add, substitute, if it works for the poem and doesn’t violate the spirit of the original. I may not be as good a poet as Martial, but I’m pretty much his equal as a smart-ass, which helps my translations.”