Who remembers the first book he ever “read”? Qualifying quotes because I don’t mean some wordless board-book given to an infant by optimistic relatives. I mean the real thing, with decryptable signs on the page. I can’t remember this pivotal event, though it would change my life and my understanding of the universe forever. A book becomes more than its merely physical nature and carries with it a world of thought and imagination. I must have been four or five, pre-kindergarten, when my mother taught me to read not with books but the newspaper. Think how miraculous it is that in less than two decades we can go from toddler illiteracy to a happy reading of Ulysses. Consider that the person likeliest to remember the first book he read is a recent illiterate who mastered the art while an adult and knows true gratitude.  I know I favored singable poems (Stevenson), field guides to butterflies and wildflowers, and collections of brief biographies of the famous and heroic. I remember juvenile monographs devoted to Marie Curie and Davy Crockett. On the cover of the latter, Crockett is on the wall of the Alamo, swinging his rifle like a baseball bat at the Mexican army.  The first “grown-up” book I remember reading was The Wonderful O (1957) by James Thurber, a fellow Ohioan. If those are the first, what about the last? Robert Richman (1957-2021), former poetry editor of The New Criterion, poses that question in “The Last Book,” published in the Fall 1999 issue of The Paris Review:   “What will be the last book I read? Woolf’s finest work, the only one I shunned? The Turgenev novel everyone disdains? End Game in Poetry, a just-uncovered work by Grandmaster Borges, or Dinesen’s stories, seeking for a fourth time the mercy of my eyes? What will be in my hands the morning they find me? A dog-eared Borzoi, or sassy new Penguin? A pockmarked Pantheon, or pristine Random House? And will the failed-poet coroner claim foul play and confiscate the thing? Will the book then appear in a dealer’s locked case, scarred by marginalia claimed to be authentic, where I propose a brief tying-up-of-ends-type poem? Or will the last book be the one that I wrote and never could abide, but could read that night with kinder eyes, and whom I turned slowly to greet like a long-lost daughter?”   Richman died at age sixty-three – too young but old enough to begin thinking of last things – the last kiss, the last laugh, the last book read.

Lost in the woods, a writer confronts the duality of nature The post A Splendor Wild and Terrifying appeared first on The American Scholar.

Of all the ways this blog have changed my life, the most exciting was in December 2021 when I wrote a post about Ivan Illich that ended up, to my utter astonishment, to get read by almost a hundred people.

Anything you polish with attention will become a mirror. Anything to which you give yourself fully, vest all your strength and risk all your vulnerability, will return you to your life annealed, magnified, both unselved and more deeply yourself. It can be a garden, or a desert, or a hare. It can be, perhaps most readily, a place. “Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,” the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd wrote in her stunning love letter to a mountain long before neuroscience found the seat of personhood in the hippocampus — the… read article

A longtime reader and fellow blogger shares with me a taste for aphoristic writing, prose that is concise, of course, but also dense with meaning and often packing a sting. Aphorisms can be marketed as such but often they appear as a functional part of a larger text. George Eliot is especially good at this, as is Joseph Conrad. Read Daniel Deronda or Nostromo with pithy declarations in mind and you can fill a modest-sized commonplace book. If you don’t like “aphorism,” think maxim, apothegm, proverb, adage, bromide or aperçu.  Careful readers, as we get older, lose tolerance for clumsy, excess verbiage. Time is short. A well-crafted aphorism, a mere handful of words, contains more thought-matter than most novels. I choose “matter” purposely. A good aphorism seems to confirm Einstein’s notion that matter is energy. I think of aphorisms lying on the page, coiled to strike when released by the reader. They are not reasoned arguments.   Some people are offended by the casual stridency and truth-telling associated with aphoristic writing. Aphorisms are often a reproach to self-delusion and reveal a truth without compromise or qualification. An aphorism is the writerly opposite of popular political discourse, which aims to be “inclusive” and say nothing that might displease its intended audience. An aphorism respects the truth, not the reader. In his foreword to The Viking Book of Aphorisms (1962), W.H. Auden (a gifted aphorist himself) says an aphorism must “convince every reader that it is either universally true or true of every member of the class to which it refers, irrespective of the reader’s convictions.” My friend the late D.G. Myers loved the only aphorism I ever intentionally composed: “Politics has destroyed more writers than vodka.”   Elias Canetti (1905-94) is a deft coiner of aphorisms, even in his almost five-hundred-page masterwork, Crowds and Power (1960; trans. Carol Stewart, 1962). Last year, Fitscarraldo Editions published Canetti’s The Book Against Death (trans. Peter Filkins), a collection of short prose pieces, including aphorisms, addressing mortality. It’s a writer’s notebook, not an organized thesis. Canetti tends to favor the cryptic over the strictly moralistic. A few samples:   “The Earth as the Titanic. The last musician.”   “All of the dying are martyrs of a future world religion.”   “Death and love are always set side by side, but they only share one thing: parting.”   “What is more awful than to just go with one’s times? What is deadlier?”   In an earlier book, The Human Province (1972; trans. Joachim Neugroschel, 1978), Canetti makes an observation that will prompt admirers of aphoristic writing to nod their heads: “The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well.”