An American children’s book published in 1908 reminded me of a metaphysical figment conjured by Jean-Paul Sartre. The book is The Hole Book, written and illustrated by Peter Newell. A friend who collects vintage children’s books told me about it. The verse is serviceable doggerel, rhythmically regular enough to be memorized and recited by kids. The premise is simple and clever and the book would never be published today. Here are the opening verses:  “Tom Potts was fooling with a gun (Such follies should not be), When—bang! the pesky thing went off Most unexpectedly!   “Tom didn’t know ’twas loaded, and It scared him ’most to death— He tumbled flat upon the floor And fairly gasped for breath.   “The bullet smashed a fine French clock (The clock had just struck three), Then made a hole clean through the wall, As you can plainly see.”   We follow the path of the bullet through the remainder of the book as it passes through a boiler, a rope holding a swing, an aquarium, a Dutchman’s pipe, a sack of grain and a watermelon, among other things. Not a soul is wounded by the stray bullet. Newell is no poet but he’s a marvelous illustrator. My sons would have loved this book.   The professor who taught the eighteenth-century English novel and introduced me to Smollett and Sterne had a sense of humor that once would have been described as “bawdy.” She was enormously funny and insisted that literature is written to be enjoyed. It’s a lesson that has stuck with me for more than half a century. Something that came up in class reminded Donna of Sartre’s concept of “the hole.” She giggled through her brief explanation drawn from To Freedom Condemned: A Guide to His Philosophy (trans. Justus Streller, 1960):   “The hole is something which longs to be filled. The small child is drawn as if by magic to holes. He can not restrain himself from putting in his finger or his whole arm. He makes a symbolic sacrifice of his body to cause the void to disappear and a plenitude of being to exist. The fundamental tendency of human beings to stop up holes persists throughout life, symbolically and in reality,” and so forth in unapologetically Gallic silliness.

Ceramics came into my life the way the bird divinations had a year earlier — suddenly, mysteriously, as a coping mechanism for the confusions and cataclysms of living. I was reeling from a shattering collision with one of life’s most banal and brutal truths — that broken people break people — and I needed to make, to do the work of unbreaking, in order to feel whole again; I needed something to anchor me to the ongoingness of being alive, to the plasticity of being necessary for turning trauma into self-transcendence. A daily creative practice is a consecration of the… read article

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In its Summer 1965 issue, the editors of The American Scholar asked forty-two writers and critics the following question: “To what book published in the past ten years do you find yourself going back--or thinking back--most often?” I take the question personally because I turned thirteen that year and was already discovering contemporary literature, especially American fiction. If it’s possible to characterize the general sense of most of the responses, I would call them trendy, topical, pre-approved, fashion-conscious and largely, after sixty years, ephemeral. A similar pattern would be seen today. John Barth is honest and audaciously self-serving, naming his own early novels but graciously citing Pale Fire and Jorge Luis Borges’ stories (two of my own unsolicited votes from that era). Anthony Burgess likewise names Nabokov’s novel.  Too many responses are ridiculous – E.B. White’s essays, for instance, and Joseph Heller’s cartoon-novel, Catch-22. Some are merely boring – two votes for John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society. Teilhard de Chardin gets two votes. I’m reminded of the late D.G. Myers’ ten-year rule – not reviewing books until at least a decade has passed after publication. Otherwise, we risk errant idiocy.   Not all the responses are silly. Poet William Meredith names Auden’s prose collection The Dyer’s Hand. Walter Allen picks The Less Deceived (1955) by Philip Larkin, a rare choice endorsed by the subsequent six decades. Allen writes:   “[I]t is poetry of a remarkably pure kind, rooted in the actual and the unexceptional, although the unexceptional in this sense is very rare in poetry. I can think of no poet since Hardy in whom there is a more resolute honesty, a stronger determination to be himself, warts and all; and in a number of poems in The Less Deceived--in ‘Church Going’ most clearly perhaps--Larkin seems to me not inferior to Hardy.”