I’ve always been a hoarder not of objects but words. I may be the least acquisitive person you’ll ever meet outside of a monastery, but how I accumulate language. As a teenager I read that a fellow Ohioan, the poet Hart Crane, kept lists of words he liked for future use in poems. That seemed like an inspired idea and I did the same – not for poems, which I will never be able to write, but to savor and use on other appropriate occasions. A fellow reporter and I while working for a newspaper in Indiana used to challenge each other to work arcane words into our copy. Once I described a county commissioner as “freaming” a comment. The OED defines the verb “fream” as “to roar, rage, growl: spec. of a boar.” A frightened copy editor changed it to an anemic “said.”  Later, without having ever heard of a commonplace book, I started saving whole passages from books, magazines and newspapers that amused me, were memorably well written or somehow suggested wisdom. All of this copying for years was strictly analog, transcribed into notebooks, until I and the rest of the world turned digital. Often, I realize, this salvage work is an end in itself. I have no index and rely on a slowly fraying memory. Preservation has become second nature. Howard Moss writes in “From a Notebook” (Whatever Is Moving, 1981):   “A commonplace book is a book in which someone keeps a record of whatever intrigues him – a passage found in a novel, a chance remark, a story snipped from a paper or a magazine. The entries can range from a recipe to an explanation of the universe. Being random and personal, a commonplace book has two major interests: the material itself, and a revelation of the person who selects it.”   Moss is writing about W.H. Auden’s A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (1970), which is more of an anthology of passages the poet prized and arranged alphabetically by subject. It doesn’t feel like a source book for Auden’s poetry and prose. Moss calls it “a very good small anthology of prose style.” I’m a linguistic magpie, gathering shiny bits of language because they please me, aurally or intellectually.

The techno-utopian poem by Richard Brautigan.

We squabble and seethe about it but our tastes in literature – and other realms, like food and music -- ultimately remain mysterious. It has taken me a lifetime to accept this realization. You are not a cretin for enjoying the work of Norman Mailer or Toni Morrison, though I find both writers repellant. Nor am I among the enlightened for loving Proust. Most attempts to analyze and defend our tastes quickly turn into snobbery and self-justification. So much online bookchat amounts to playground-style bickering.  We’ve all endured the sort of book-bully who, when encountering a reader he decides holds unacceptable opinions, banishes him to the bookish Gulag instead of ignoring him. Literary spats are too often Manichean in nature and mirror contemporary politics. Reading and writing are important – in fact, central to my life and that of many others – but hardly worthy of threats of violence and other condemnations. Not long ago I wrote that I judged V.S. Pritchett the finest literary critic of the twentieth century – hardly an eccentric judgment. A reader told me I was stupid, probably illiterate and ought to be “slapped around” for uttering such a judgment. He was at least half-serious.   The American poet Howard Moss (1922-87) in “Notes on Fiction” (Minor Monuments, 1986) identifies an important and rarely recognized relation between writers and serious readers. Across a lifetime of reading, a handful of writers become trusted companions whose company we depend on. We give their books second and third readings. We confide in them and feel no need to defend them. Moss writes:   “Certain writers inspire affection in their readers that cannot be explained either by their work or by the facts of their lives. It proceeds from some temperamental undercurrent, some invisible connection between the writer and the reader that is more available to the senses and the emotions than to the mind. Bookish affections of this kind are deceptive and irrelevant, yet they truly exist. For me, Colette, Keats, and Chekhov inspire affection. Faulkner, Shelley, and Ibsen do not.”   Moss was poetry editor at The New Yorker for almost forty years. His examples, pro and con, match my own. I find his prose, mostly essays and reviews, superior even to his poetry. If we can generalize from his examples, his literary preferences suggest a fondness for a quieter, more subtle, less rabble-rousing voice, little Sturm und Drang. Faulkner, whom I lionized when young, now seems too loud, too insistent, too stylistically attention-seeking. Can I explain and defend this reaction? I won’t even try. Moss writes elsewhere in “Notes on Fiction”: “Chekhov’s stories tread the finest line between a newspaper account and a fairy tale. Inferior writers step over the line one way or the other.”

In the world of jigsaws, there can be a fine line between productivity and pleasure The post Puzzled appeared first on The American Scholar.

Born in Iran and raised in Zimbabwe, Doris Lessing (October 22, 1919–November 17, 2013) was fourteen when she dropped out of school and eighty-eight when she won the Nobel Prize for smelting language into keys to “the prisons we choose to live inside.” Having lived in writing for nearly a century, through the rise and fall of dictatorships, the ferment and fizzle of movements, the flickering of moral fashions, she understood uniquely both the power of the written word and its limitations, the way books should be read “for illumination, to enlarge one’s perception of life” and not for indoctrination,… read article