Most bores are not aware they are boring. It’s not always their fault and the impulse to tell them they are boring, though understandable, is almost always a waste of time. You can’t make people interesting who value their humorlessness, bad taste and stridency.  I woke the other morning internally singing these words, perhaps left over from a dream: ‘’I saw Eternity the other night, / Like a great ring of pure and endless light, / All calm, as it was bright.” I still thrill at these lines, some fifty years after I first encountered them in Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City (1951). They are the opening to Henry Vaughan’s “The World” (c. 1650). It’s the casualness of “the other night” coupled with Vaughan’s glimpse of eternity that rouses and delights me. Mystics often resort to inarticulate enthusiasm. Their experiences defy language, so they yawp, the linguistic equivalent of the early Shakers writhing on the floor. In contrast, Vaughan might be recounting this morning’s breakfast. His tone is calm, methodical, almost journalistic, the meter regular and yet conversational.   These are lessons lost on most contemporary poets. Their verse is prose and thus defies memorization, unlike Vaughan’s, whose poem I never set out to memorize but did. In a recent review of a volume by Jonathan Chaves, the poet Catharine Savage Brosman writes:   “To say that poetry in America now, though honored by public budgetary support and widely heralded, is largely superficial and ephemeral is not unfair. . . . Like other rhetorical performances, a poetic flash in the pan, a pleasing act of verbal prestidigitation, a strident accusation of injustice, a cry on the rooftops for change may attract admiration and assent; they are not in themselves good poetry. Poetry is an art.”   To intentionally write badly and impose it on others is the definition of artistic narcissism and, incidentally, tedium. Many have convinced themselves they are writing poetry. Trying to argue them out of their delusion is a waste of time. The effort would require them to rehabilitate their sensibilities, and that’s a lot of work. They want the leftover Romantic “prestige” associated with being a poet without the learning, discipline and dedication required. Brosman again:   “Nearly empty of sense, solipsistic, without appealing use of language, much contemporary writing called poetry is imitative, facile, accusatory. Of course, bad poetry has always been around. But new means of disseminating it, wealth to underwrite and popularize it, and the general degradation of culture have made a difference.”   In another recent essay, “Poetry and Western Civilization,” Brosman writes: “Poetry belongs to those enterprises which examine and preserve the past, while sifting and shaping facts to create understanding, so that human beings may know themselves and comprehend their destiny better.”

At age ten I attended the grand opening of the new public library in Parma Heights, Ohio, within easy walking distance of our house. Next door was Yorktown Lanes, the bowling alley dedicated two years earlier. Across the road was the municipal swimming pool where my mother had been giving swimming lessons since 1957, and next to it was the miniature golf course (“putt-putt”) that I would manage for three summers beginning in 1970. Nearby were the municipal tennis courts. This concentration of recreation today strikes me as remarkable. No wonder my generation was spoiled rotten.  Now the city is demolishing the old library and building a new one nearby, where the ice rink and indoor soccer field once stood. Some good-natured dissenters have protested the razing but top-down progress is tough to reverse. The old library’s design is notably ugly. We knew that even in 1963, but it was the “Space Age” and the building was said to resemble a flying saucer. Inside, none of the rooms were quadrilaterals. All were shaped roughly like slices of pie. At the center were the circulation desk and shelves of periodicals. That’s where I first read Martin Gardner’s “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American.   Within the next few years I would, without guidance or much of a critical sense, discover literature in that library. I borrowed Kafka’s The Castle, John Updike’s Pigeon Feathers, Tom Disch’s Camp Concentration, Mark Twain’s Autobiography, Steve Allen’s The Funny Men, T.S. Eliot’s Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950, Kipling’s Kim and Fletcher Pratt’s The Civil War. I permit myself to get nostalgic about those self-guided literary explorations. They started a way of life that remains in place today. I still wander among library shelves, trusting in intuition. The old building was tacky and is probably better off knocked down and hauled away. Of course, most contemporary architecture is a scandal and I have little trust in the aesthetic qualities of the new library. The unfairly forgotten George Crabbe writes in The Library (1781):   “But what strange art, what magic can dispose The troubled mind to change its native woes? Or lead us willing from ourselves, to see Others more wretched, more undone than we? This, Books can do; — nor this alone; they give New views to life, and teach us how to live; They soothe the grieved, the stubborn they chastise, Fools they admonish, and confirm the wise: Their aid they yield to all: they never shun The man of sorrow, nor the wretch undone: Unlike the hard, the selfish, and the proud, They fly not sullen from the suppliant crowd; Nor tell to various people various things, But show to subjects, what they show to kings.”   The tone is elevated and the iambic pentameter a little plodding but Crabbe is on to something: “Their aid they yield to all . . .”

There’s a tidy part of me that wants things resolved, whether a lawsuit or a differential equation. No sloppy inconsistencies, no denouements hanging by a thread. I used to love IRS Form 1040EZ: subtract one number from another, sign your name and wait for the refund. I had a logic professor who told us, “Don’t confuse philosophy with real life.” Adam Zagajewski concludes his poem “An Ode to Plurality” with these words: “a poem grows / on contradiction but it can’t cover it.” That may be true for poems, but humans are infinitely more complicated. Some of us can thrive on the tension; others are paralyzed or broken.  A reader asks for my thoughts on Keats’ notion of “negativity capability.” I’ve often thought his renowned letter to his brothers on December 21, 1817 expresses less a literary theory than a reflection on his sensibility and perhaps ours:   “[I]t struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”   The passage is customarily read as embracing poetic openness and rejecting closed systems of thought. The writer, in a sense, is all potential, at least while writing. He projects himself into the sensibilities of others. His imagination is sympathetic. He is not theory-driven. Not for him the “egotistic sublime.”   Keats suggests we keep our minds elastic and limber. Don’t assume the first thought or the twenty-seventh is best, though it may be. In his 1978 essay “Spare Time,” V.S. Pritchett refers in passing to negative capability. For a writer, any thought or experience, any book read, may come in handy, even those we’ve forgotten. “A writer,” says Pritchett, “must have the capacity to become passive and lost in doubt in order to be open to new suggestions. He must alternate between clocking in and clocking out.” In his final paragraph, Pritchett writes:   “I find that reading Russian novelists, mainly of the nineteenth century, is good for my ‘negative capability’ – a state, incidentally, that means a state of vagary, doubt and indecision as well as self-annulment.”   I think of Louise MacNeice’s “Snow,” its reminder that “World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural.” The poem suggests we accept “The drunkenness of things being various.”

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.