One of my friends is reliably cheerful. We should all have friends like him. His emails and telephone calls are never annoyingly cloying, in the sense that they knock me out of whatever self-centered snit I’m nursing. Without ever saying so, he reminds me that I have it pretty good, certainly better than most of the human race. He’s not obnoxious about his gregarious nature and never tries to impose it. That’s part of his charm. His good nature is contagious and has been for more than fifty years, since I first met him. I thought of him while again reading Montaigne’s “On Some Verses of Virgil”: “My judgment keeps me indeed from kicking and grumbling against the discomforts that nature orders me to suffer, but not from feeling them. I, who have no other aim but to live and be merry, would run from one end of the world to the other to seek out one good year of pleasant and cheerful tranquillity. A somber, dull tranquillity is easy enough to find for me, but it puts me to sleep and stupefies me; I am not content with it. If there are any persons, any good company, in country or city, in France or elsewhere, residing or traveling, who like my humors and whose humors I like, they have only to whistle in their palm and I will go furnish them with essays in flesh and bone.” That describes my friend more than me. I think of it as an aspiration, a sort of moral, emotional ideal. For him, it’s a gift. I need perpetual reminding. My favorite among all of Theodore Dalrymple’s thousands of essays and columns remains “Reasons to Be Cheerful,” published in the December 13, 2003, edition of The Spectator: “I’m never bored. I’m appalled, horrified, angered, but never bored. The world appears to me so infinite in its variety that many lifetimes could not exhaust its interest. So long as you can still be surprised, you have something to be thankful for (that is one of the reasons why the false knowingness of street credibility is so destructive of true happiness).”

In comparison to the late D.G. Myers, I’m a quietist, waiting for something to happen rather than stepping on the accelerator myself. He supplied me with more ideas and inspirations than I was ever able to offer him. A longtime reader reminds me of “The Function of Book Blogging at the Present Time,” a project David started and together we  organized almost sixteen years ago. That’s sufficiently remote in time to make it feel like a pottery shard dug up from a kitchen midden. David and I and eleven other writers/bloggers responded to a list of nine questions or prompts we had formulated, plus a summing up written by David. The resulting symposium is at once familiar and eerily alien. In 2009, I see I was already thinking of book blogging retrospectively, as a done deal. Here is one of the questions I formulated and my response:  “Some say the golden age of blogging has already passed, that blogging has failed to fulfill its early promise; and the evidence which is given is that no one becomes famous from blogging any longer. Do you agree?”:   “There are no golden ages, only golden moments. I once worked with a newspaper editor who said something like this: ‘You pay your dollar and read the paper. If you find one story that amuses you or teaches you something new, you got your money’s worth.’ To read a blog costs nothing. Peruse the blog roll at Anecdotal Evidence. If you can’t find something there that moves or enlightens you, or drives you pleasingly irate, go check your pulse.”   Glib but true. Here is the late Terry Teachout’s reply to the same question:   “Er, who are all those ‘famous’ book bloggers? Blogging is no longer a novelty, but artblogging of all sorts, including literate commentary on literature, has always been a minority pursuit and always will be.”   Go to David’s blog, A Commonplace Blog, and scroll down to the bottom of the left column to read the entire symposium.

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?”

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.

Most of us are born with a brain but without a user’s manual. This soggy organ weighs on average about three pounds and contains 86 billion neurons. That’s our birthright, and we did nothing to earn it. We tend to operate our brains passively, ignoring most available perceptions. We “tune them out” – the electronics metaphor is nowadays almost inevitable. It’s easy to be lazy, coast through the ocean of data we dwell in and go on living. Paying too much attention to the world can be madness, as is paying too little. I become aware of this only when I’m looking for something lost or misplaced, whether it be a word or the car keys. It’s like adjusting a camera lens – looking at what’s there, not what we have already assumed is there. The Indiana poet Jared Carter describes in the title poem to his 1993 collection After the Rain the hunt for arrowheads in a farmer’s field once the rain has stopped:  “They seem, like hail, dropped from an empty sky, Yet for an hour or two, after the rain has washed away the dusty afterbirth of their return, a few will show up plain on the reopened earth. Still, even these are hard to see – at first they look like any other stone.”   I’ve often gone hunting for arrowheads, pottery shards and other Indian debris, but Carter’s poem reminds me of a visit to a dairy farm near Belfast, N.Y., run by one of my mother’s cousins and her husband. This was sixty years ago. The pastures were dotted with limestone rich in trilobites and other fossils. My brother and I filled a milk crate with chunks of stone and brought them back to Ohio. There we fantasized about the future paleontologists baffled by their appearance so far from their native range. Carter continues:   “The trick to finding them is not to be too sure about what’s known; Conviction’s liable to say straight off this one’s a leaf, or that one’s merely clay, and miss the point: after the rain, soft furrows show one way Across the field, but what is hidden here Lrequires a different view – the glance of one not looking straight ahead, who in the clear light of the morning sun Simply keeps wandering across the rows, letting his own perspective change.”   Impatience sabotages perception. Carter concludes his poem with these lines: “After the rain, perhaps, something will show, / glittering and strange.” I’ve learned to stop looking, especially for a word I know is out there – or in there somewhere – in order to find it. “Finding” is an essay by Guy Davenport published in Antaeus in 1978 and later collected in The Geography of the Imagination (North Point Press, 1981). It may be the finest thing Davenport ever wrote, and it recounts the weekend expeditions his family took “to look for Indian arrows.” Davenport was born in 1926 in Anderson, S.C. His essay is a delicate balance of memoir and meditation on many things – family, lost time, the importance of attentiveness and the formation of sensibility. The essayist says he hopes the meaning of those childhood expeditions “elude[s] me forever,” that he will never find the meaning of finding but he can’t help speculating:   “Its importance has, in maturity, become more and more apparent—an education that shaped me with a surer and finer hand than any classroom, an experience that gave me a sense of the earth, of autumn afternoons, of all the seasons, a connoisseur’s sense of things for their own sake.”   We learn best by doing and by watching others do. Learning one thing (finding arrowheads) later may teach us another (reading texts, writing others). Davenport writes:   “I know that my sense of place, of occasion, even of doing anything at all, was shaped by those afternoons. It took a while for me to realize that people can grow up without being taught to see, to search surfaces for all the details, to check out a whole landscape for what it has to offer.”   As A.E. Stallings says in her poem “Arrowhead Hunting” (Hapax, 2006): “The land is full of what was lost.”