More from The Marginalian
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,” Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. “If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Given that the deepest measure of intelligence is a plasticity of being that allows us to navigate uncertainty, given that uncertainty is the pulse-beat of our lives, fairy tales are not — as J.R.R. Tolkien so passionately insisted — only for children. They are more than fantasy, more than fiction, shimmering with a surreality so saturated that it becomes a mirror… read article
There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else, no greater salve for sorrow than according gladness to another. What makes life livable despite the cruelties of chance — the accident, the wildfire, the random intracellular mutation — are these little acts of mercy, of tenderness, the small clear voice rising over the cacophony of the quarrelsome, over the complaint choir of the cynics, to insist again and again that the world is beautiful and full of kindness. It makes all the difference in a day, in a life, to hear that voice, all the more to be… read article
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
“True teachers are called into being by the contradictions generated by civilization,” the poet Gary Snyder reflected in his reckoning with the real work of life. “We need them.” We have always needed them because we need each other, because we have always been each other’s teachers. Ever since one human being watched another rub wood and flint into fire, we have taught each other how to use our hands and how to use our minds, how to wield our tools at the world and our theories of living at the predicament of being alive. Social learning — this jungle… read article
More in literature
A partner at the Houston law firm where my youngest son is working as an intern this summer has loaned him two nineteenth-century law books. Both were compiled by John G. Wells (1821-80) and were bestsellers in their day, long before the practice of law was fully professionalized: Every Man His Own Lawyer, and Business Form Book: A Complete Guide in All Matters of Law, and Business Negotiations, for Every State in the Union (H.H. Bancroft & Co. of San Francisco, 1867). Every Man His Own Lawyer; or, the Clerk and Magistrate’s Assistant. This is the “tenth edition, improved,” published by William Wilson of Poughkeepsie in 1844. Both are the size of mass-market paperbacks and bound in leather, which is scuffed and worn. Both are in delicate condition. The front cover of the former has detached from the spine and the pages in both are foxed but legible. Wells writes in his “Introductory” to the former: “This work, prepared some years ago, was received with great favor by the public, attaining a larger sale, it is believed, than any work of this kind ever published. Lapse of time has brought material changes in the statutes of many of the States; the war has not only altered the social conditions of some of them, but has introduced the Internal Revenue system, National Banks, modifications of the Tariff, [13th and 14th] amendments to the Constitution of the United States, emancipation of the slaves, and the General Bankrupt law.” The book is organized by occupation and social role, making it user-friendly. Chapters are devoted to farmers, mechanics, discharged soldiers and sailors (two years after the Civil War), immigrants, and married men and women. Wells includes templates for such documents as “Order of Commissioners to lay out a Highway” and “Deed by a Sheriff of an Equity of Redemption sold at Auction.” The emphasis is not on law in the abstract but on the minutiae of legal documentation. The books are eminently practical, as useful as dictionaries, and are aimed not just at lawyers but at average American citizens. They are early examples of a well-known category of books today: “Self-Help.” The autodidactic impulse among Americans was once very strong. People seemed to assume they could teach themselves almost anything – a trade or craft, science, engineering, medicine, the Western literary tradition. “Experts” were not automatically deferred to. One could, like Abraham Lincoln, attach himself as an apprentice to an experienced professional. Few Americans attended a college or university or even completed their secondary education. Lincoln practiced law for twenty-three years before he was elected president. He may have consulted Wells’ guides. He never attended law school – not unusual for the mid-nineteenth century -- and was entirely self-taught. He handled cases ranging from debt to murder at the justice of the peace, county, circuit, appellate and federal levels, and kept an office in Springfield, Ill. Consider that even in his own day, Lincoln was judged by some a hick, born in 1809 on the frontier in Hodgenville, Kentucky. Now we know he was educated and well-read by the standards of his day, and through strict application became one of the great American writers of prose. In 2007, Robert Bray published “What Abraham Lincoln Read—An Evaluative and Annotated List” in the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association. Bray’s research determined which books were read by Lincoln. Among others he confirmed were John Bunyan, Robert Burns, Lord Byron, William Cowper, Daniel Defoe, Euclid, Edward Gibbon, Thomas Gray, Edgar Allan Poe, Alexander Pope and much of Shakespeare. In 2010, Bray published Reading with Lincoln (Southern Illinois University Press), in which he writes: “From boyhood on, Lincoln’s habit of reading concentrated a naturally powerful mind; and reading provided models of voice and diction to one who had inborn talent as a storyteller and a near-flawless memory and therefore needed only the stimulus of literary greatness, and emulative practice, to emerge as a great writer himself.” Bray emphasizes that Lincoln as an adult read “deeply rather than broadly.” In his own words, he went to school “by littles” and his reading was full of holes, but he read deliberately and what he read he remembered. He read like a writer – learning, testing, gleaning, absorbing, assimilating. Serious writers, when they read, are always weighing and assessing: “This works. This I can use. Forget that.” Lincoln’s mind was deeply analytical, coupled with a gift for pithily articulating his thoughts – essential gifts for a successful lawyer and an embodiment of the democratic ideal. In his “Introductory,” Wells describes his guide as “a book that everybody can understand, and that will enable every man or woman to be his or her own lawyer.”
I’ve learned with time that my mind has periods of attentiveness followed by drifts into passive, relaxed states of consciousness. I’m awake but almost empty. I might be taking a shower or staring out the window at nothing. That’s when I occasionally find myself in an old song or childhood memory or, more mysteriously, inhabiting a character from fiction, taking on his values. When I become conscious of this channeling, it disappears leaving a faint, lingering impression, like the afterimages left by bright lights. Recently I found myself in Austin King, the Illinois lawyer, father and put-upon husband at the center of William Maxwell’s 1948 novel, Time Will Darken It. It’s the opening scene. King is in his bedroom getting dressed for a party for relatives visiting from Mississippi. His wife, pregnant with their second child, is not speaking to him. She resents the party and the presence of outsiders. I wasn’t recalling the words but the setting, emotional and physical, which I had abstracted from the text. I’ve read Maxwell’s novel three or four times, starting in the late seventies. I know it well. Unintentionally, I had projected myself into King because his emotional state was familiar – conflicted, guilty, wanting to satisfy contradictory wishes and please everyone. I didn’t have to go looking for it. I carry it as a latent memory. There’s a semi-popular theory floating around out there that we read fiction to boost our empathy quotient. In short, we read to learn to be better human beings, to feel the pain of others. That’s silly but also kind of obnoxious. How self-centered. Willa Cather would have snorted. My flashing onto the bedroom of Austin and Martha King lasted seconds. I enjoyed the sensation but made no effort to hang on to it. It was a fairly primitive mental event, not freighted with philosophical baggage. A handful of other fiction writers have done this for me, all in my private pantheon – Chekhov, James, Proust, among others. Part of the reason I value them is that they leave these phantom scenes in my subconscious mind, through no effort of my own. Time Will Darken It, along with So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), is Maxwell’s finest novel. In 1955, Maxwell delivered a speech at Smith College, “The Writer as Illusionist” (collected in the 2024 volume of the same title, published by Godine). He likens a novelist to a dog who dreams of chasing a rabbit. He writes: “The novelist’s rabbit is the truth—about life, about human character, about himself and therefore by extensionh, it is to be hoped, about other people. He is convinced that this is all knowable, can be described, can be recorded, by a person sufficiently dedicated to describing and recording, can be caught is a net of narration. . . . . But what, seriously, was accomplished by these writers [Maxwell has just mentioned Turgenev, Lawrence, Woolf and Forster] or can the abstract dummy novelist I have been describing hope to accomplish? Not life, of course; not the real thing; not children and roses; but only a facsimile that is called literature.” The finest writers of fiction, those we treasure most highly, work simultaneously in two mediums – words and human beings. William Maxwell died twenty-five years ago today, on July 31, 2ooo, at age ninety-one.
And create an interspecies future that benefits humans and ecologies alike.