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.”

Friends and relatives, people whose judgment I actually trust, have urged me to move Anecdotal Evidence from Blogger to Substack and I don’t understand why. All I need is a place to write, the “platform” is of no importance. I’d do this in a notebook, like in the old days, if nothing else were available. Blogger is temperamental but after almost twenty years I’ve learned her funny little ways. As in a long, mostly happy marriage, one gets comfortable. I think of Michael Oakeshott’s definition of being conservative:  “. . . to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”   I didn’t retire after almost half a century as a newspaper reporter and science writer – a professional -- in order to “monetize.” In 1903, G.K. Chesterton wrote a brief monograph on Robert Browning as part of the English Men of Letters series. In Chapter IV, “Browning in Italy,” Chesterton describes the poet’s devotion to painting, his dedication to “the obstetrics of art,” which enabled him to write poems about painters and their work:   “He was, in other words, what is called an amateur. The word amateur has come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea of tepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. Nor is this peculiarity confined to the mere form of the word; the actual characteristic of these nameless dilettanti is a genuine fire and reality. A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it. Browning was in this strict sense a strenuous amateur. He tried and practised in the course of his life half a hundred things at which he can never have even for a moment expected to succeed.”   Even a professional can be an amateur.

I fight the urge to wallow in nostalgia but it seeps back in like moisture in an unfinished basement. I take that image from my childhood home. The walls and floor were bare concrete. Stacks of newspaper and lumber felt flesh-like with dampness. Down there it was always chilly, even in summer. The poet Jane Greer is seventy-two and lives in North Dakota. For twelve years, she edited the Plains Poetry Journal. She is a poet of domesticity and technical rigor, Midwestern in her good-humored seriousness, a Roman Catholic who reveres the wonder of creation. I’m from Ohio, a semi-Midwestern state, but there’s nothing homogenous about the Midwest and its people. She’s rural, I’m urban/suburban. Most of the stereotypes don’t hold, though Midwesterners indulge them and laugh. I remember being surprised when a buddy and I got lost in Illinois trying to outrun a tornado that never happened. We found ourselves in Lewiston, where Edgar Lee Masters moved with his family at age twelve. It served as his model for Spoon River. And the surrounding fields of corn felt almost claustrophobic.   I read Those Days: An American Album By Richard Critchfield (1931-94) when it was published in 1986. Like Greer, Critchfield was a North Dakota native, and the book recounts his family’s history in that state and Iowa. I remember associating it with Willa Cather and Wright Morris. Greer, I discovered, reviewed the book in the April 1987 issue of Chronicles, and it begins with a passage any writer would be delighted to hear:   “This is a book I wish I’d written, a love story of the largest and best kind. Like most people, I remember my childhood, that eternal summer, in a glow of happy forgetfulness, simply out of pleasure. Richard Critchfield ‘remembers,’ as if he had been there, his parents' lives and society before he was born, and shows why it’s important to remember and to go back even further than our own birth: Because like it or not, we are attached. We are not historyless like Adam, breathed out of nothing; we’re drawn from the narrow end of a real and compelling vortex—history—vivid with blood and bone, passion and fear, as it touches down to make us in the here and now. Part of everything that was and will be, we move up the funnel of history to make room for those whose history we will be.”   I envy Critchfield’s reconstruction of his family’s history, in part because most of mine is a blank. I know almost nothing about my father’s family and only unconnected shards about my mother’s. These people didn’t talk about the past, whether out of guilt or abject indifference, and bequeathed little living memory to their descendants. I’m left with all the questions I didn’t ask.   “This is no vague nostalgic trek back to the nonexistent ‘good old days,’” Greer writes, “or mere homage to a loved mother, but a gifted writer’s careful examination of all available resources, to reconstruct the rhythm and immediacy of the past—its sounds and smells, human passions and disappointments. Critchfield has resuscitated those days, given them breath and pulse, and made their relevance to us, now, evident.”   Here is “The Light As Thick As Clover Honey,” the first poem in Greer’s third collection, The World as We Know It Is Falling Away (Lambing Press, 2022):   ‘Here is the square pink house on the green street. Here is the long back yard sloped to the alley. Here is the rusty swing, and here is the pup-tent bleaching the grass. Here is the happy family like all the others. Here is the sunburnt child on her blue bike whose streamers are the reins of a great stallion; here they gallop the world from home to grandmother’s and home again on odd brick streets, around the painted bandstand, through the gap in in the church’s high trimmed hedge. Here is the small town hugging the river bend, cicadas rasping out their alien urge, the light as thick as clover honey. Here it is always summer, always the golden hour.” “Eternal summer” in the review, “it is always summer” in Greer’s poem.

From a dusty, thoroughly disorganized Houston bookstore I bought a copy of Turnstile One: A Literary Miscellany (Turnstile Press, 1948), edited by V.S. Pritchett. Much of its literary quality shames today's readers and writers. It collects poems, stories, essays and reviews published between 1931 and 1948 in England’s New Statesman and Nation. I browsed in a library copy years ago, mostly drawn by Pritchett’s name, but now I have read all the pieces that looked interestingy. "Our more modest aim," Pritchett writes in his foreword, "is to entertain." Here is a poem by the novelist and non-poet E.M. Forster, “Landor at Sea” (1938):  “I strove with none, for none was worth my strife; Reason I loved, and, next to Reason, Doubt; I warmed both hands before the fire of life; And put it out.”   Some readers will recognize the epigram as a snide attempt to parody Landor’s best-known poem, “Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher”:   “I strove with none, for none was worth my strife: Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art: I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life; It sinks; and I am ready to depart.”   Forster’s poem reflects the then-fashionable Marxist-fading-to-sentimental-Fabian-Leftist blush present in some of the pieces collected in Turnstile One. That same year, Forster wrote in his essay “What I Believe”: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” Forster’s self-congratulatory soft-headedness could have been expressed last week.   Collected in Turnstile One are poems by Auden, MacNeice, Walter de la Mare, Roy Campbell and John Betjeman, as well as Henry Reed’s well-known “Naming of Parts.” There’s a Pritchett short story, “The Invader,” one by Elizabeth Bowen, "Unwelcome Idea,” and stories by Chekhov (“A Fishy Affaire,” translated by the great Irish essayist Hubert Butler) and Mikhail Zoshchenko.   Best of all are the essays and reviews. Here’s a passage from a wrong-headed piece by Rebecca West on Kipling: “Some of his work was gold; and the rest was faery gold,” she writes. West acknowledges the greatness of Kim but adds “[A]ll his life long Kipling was a better poet than he was a prose writer, though an unequal one.”   David Garnett writes of Charles Montague Doughty’s largely unread poetry, as opposed to his masterpiece in prose, Travels in Arabia Deserta. The latter, he writes, is “told in a personal style, with so rich a vocabulary that the book which is difficult at first, gains with every re-reading. . . . The individual word was all-important to Doughty.”   Desmond MacCarthy takes on Chekhov’s work for the stage: “To watch a Chekhov play is to recapture one’s youth, that most uncomfortable yet enviable time when there was intensity even in moments of lassitude, when self-torture did not seem vain, when hope alternately lit up and took the shine out of the present, and when time at once seemed endless and yet impossible to fill worthily.”   There’s also an essay on the wonderful novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, “An Austere Fiction,” by the music critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor: “Though she could never become a best-seller, there must be many people (particularly among those who do not much care for modern novels in general) who, if they knew of her, would cheerfully undertake the continuous intellectual exercise of reading her books for the sake of the continuous intellectual exhilaration—and something more—which is its reward.” Shawe-Taylor adds, emphasizing the role of a book review as a public service: “It is to them, and not to the convinced Compton-Burnett fans, that this review is addressed.”   The copy of Turnstile One I bought is inscribed with a fountain pen on the front end-paper:   “To Dora and Franz with love from Ljuba and Erich. December, 1951”

The American poet Len Krisak asks a question common to all serious readers, one that, if posed privately, serves as an honest way to reveal one’s deeper tastes without the social pressures of fashion and snobbery. Think of it as a variation on the “Desert Island” parlor game. It helps to pare down to essentials what we really value and cull the dross:  “What are the poems one returns to, always taking pleasure? Or to put it slightly differently, what poems would enjoy the place of honor in one's Absolute Anthology (no fair including warhorses, chestnuts, and poems one is supposed to like)?”   Let’s limit this to three English-language poems. My first nomination required no thought: “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (1749), Samuel Johnson’s imitation of Juvenal’s Tenth Satire. There’s a sturdy elegance to Johnson’s lines. His biographer, W. Jackson Bate, describes the poem as “strangely powerful.” The title traces its lineage to Ecclesiastes 1:2, “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity,” a phrase distilling Johnson’s abiding theme.   Next, “A Summer Commentary” (1943) by Yvor Winters. Return to the question posed in the second stanza: “Where is the meaning that I found?” The answer is the poem and the experiences it recalls. “A Summer Commentary,” like any great poem, defies glib paraphrase. It immerses us in sensory detail (auditory, visual, even olfactory and gustatory) while connoting emotional and intellectual maturity. It renders a life’s education in twenty lines.   Finally, “A World Without Objects is a Sensible Emptiness” (Ceremony and Other Poems, 1950) by Richard Wilbur. Selfishness, despair and ingratitude forever tempt us. In this poem, Wilbur embraces the sensory world. His is not the way of the Desert Fathers. The world has worth and should not be scorned. After all, the Incarnation occurred in this world, as Wilbur observes in the poem’s final stanza. His title is adapted from a passage in Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation, called by C.S. Lewis “almost the most beautiful book in English." What, no Larkin? No Shakespeare, Pope, Landor, Dickinson, Housman or Robinson? Wait for a second revised edition of the Absolute Anthology.