“In those days when Bedlam was open to the cruel curiosity of holyday ramblers, I have been a visitor there. Though a boy, I was not altogether insensible of the misery of the poor captives, nor destitute of feeling for them.”  The English poet William Cowper, a veteran of multiple suicide attempts and confinements in asylums, describes a common eighteenth-century recreation: viewing the “antics” of the insane for entertainment in Bedlam. He’s writing to his friend the Rev. William Newton on July 19, 1784:   “But the madness of some of them had such a humorous air, and displayed itself in so many whimsical freaks, that it was impossible not to be entertained, at the same time that I was angry with myself for being so.”   I’m skeptical of any claims of moral progress, though by the late twentieth century touring the nut house seems to have been curtailed  as an entertainment option. Of course, today we have “reality television,” professional sports and the drug-addled and schizophrenic homeless on the street. A man could earn a respectable living by corralling such people in an updated version of the carnival sideshow.   As a kid, the closest I came to such spectacle was the Cuyahoga County Fair in Berea, Ohio. Some time in the early sixties my brother and I were seduced into viewing the Giant Rat of Sumatra, behind walls of painted canvas. The barker’s pitch I still remember: “Live, livin’ and breathin'.” All I recall seeing is a fat rat in a pit filled with saw dust. As a bonus we viewed an enormously tall, skinny man dressed in cowboy duds and a tiny woman seated beside him. I think of her when I reread Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget. I recall an overwhelming sense of sadness – people living narrow, blighted lives.  The sadness has its origin in the understanding that in the future I might join them.

As a boy I was often told I spoke too loudly. It makes sense, as I came from a family of yellers. It’s an annoying habit, usually inappropriate, one I associate with self-centeredness. I made a conscious effort to lower the volume, a rare instance of successfully stifling an obnoxious personal habit. As a reporter I learned the value of modulating speech -- when to keep it soft and intimate, when to speak louder and more forcefully, depending on your audience. The latter usually applied to people holding public office. I tried to follow Teddy Roosevelt’s advice.  I’ve heard from several readers about the dearth of good, intelligent conversation in their lives. One woman complains of “every conversation turning into a scolding or shouting match.” I’ve seen the same thing, of course. I’ve always associated hollering and hair-trigger anger with what used to be called “poor breeding.” That is, people without elders to teach them basic etiquette. I’m not sure that’s the case any longer.      Back in 2011, Commentary asked forty-one people this question: “Are you optimistic or pessimistic about America’s future?” Among the respondents was one of my favorite poets and critics, Eric Ormsby. He chooses an appropriate passage from Whitman’s Democratic Vistas, and writes:   “But it isn’t the obvious dangers that America faces—terrorist attack, fiscal collapse—that most get me down but something humbler, less catastrophic, and yet more insidious. I think of it as the death of discourse. Nowadays, even among friends, a dissenting opinion is met not with rebuttal or debate but with stony silence or Whitman’s ‘melodramatic screamings.’ The purpose of conversation on any serious topic is no longer a ‘mass of badinage’ but an occasion for sniffing out ‘deviant’ views and affixing labels.”   Ormsby recounts that even when his family agued, “we were reconciled in mutual affection.” Wise words. A person is not his or her opinions. You don’t have to respect a stupid or offensive opinion but you do have to respect the person speaking it – at least for a little while. Good conversation is one of life's supreme pleasures. Boswell recounts Dr. Johnson saying: “The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered but a general effect of pleasing impression.”

In his critical works, Samuel Johnson respected tradition if not reputation or even physical appearance. He could be eloquently brutish and write of Jonathan Swift:  “The person of Swift had not many recommendations. He had a kind of muddy complexion, which, though he washed himself with Oriental scrupulosity, did not look clear. He had a countenance sour and severe, which he seldom softened by any appearance of gaiety. He stubbornly resisted any tendency to laughter.”   Today we would frown on mocking a writer’s looks. It would be judged “insensitive.” I associate Johnson’s description of Swift with one of the late John Simon’s more amusing assaults on Barbra Streisand: “Miss Streisand looks like a cross between an aardvark and an albino rat surmounted by a platinum-coated horse bun. Though she has good eyes and a nice complexion, the rest of her is a veritable anthology of disaster areas. Her speaking voice seems to have graduated with top honors from the Brooklyn Conservatory of Yentaism.” That Streisand is a mediocre singer/actress endowed with a surfeit of self-esteem eases potential offense. The difference between Johson’s judgment and Simon’s being that the former mingles admiration with distaste:   “It was from the time when [Swift] first began to patronise the Irish, that they may date their riches and prosperity. He taught them first to know their own interest, their weight, and their strength, and gave them spirit to assert that equality with their fellow-subjects to which they have ever since been making vigorous advances, and to claim those rights which they have at last established.”   R.L. Barth has translated Martial’s epigram XI.99. As a satirist, Martial was no respecter of persons:   “Whenever you stand up, I see your gown Treat you indecently, flat let you down. You pluck it with your left hand then your right— You’re positively groaning!—it’s held tight In the Cyanean straits of your huge butt. What’s my advice? Don’t sit. Don’t stand. That’s what.”   Bob wrote to me on his approach to translation: “Translation can be a vexing problem if you let it be--or even if you don’t. For me, all that matters is that the translated poem makes a good English poem (or why bother) and that it stays as close to the original as this or that translator is able to keep it. However, I'm willing to vary, add, substitute, if it works for the poem and doesn’t violate the spirit of the original. I may not be as good a poet as Martial, but I’m pretty much his equal as a smart-ass, which helps my translations.”

The Louisiana poet Gail White published three poems in Peacock Journal, all freighted with serious thought and all skirting the charms of light verse. White avoids the failings of pretentiousness and mere silliness. Consider “Resemblances”:  “Somewhere along the primrose path That led to my seventies, I lost the blithe agility Of the young springbok’s knees,   “The swift gait of the wildebeest Running with its herd, And the keen eye of the crouching cat Under the nesting bird,   “Retaining only the stoic love Of the elephant for its kin And the fierce desire of the salmon For the stream it was nurtured in.”   Chronicling the losses and infirmities of aging can turn readily into a wallow in self-pity, which is ridiculous if you consider the alternative. Unspoiled youth is incompatible with longevity, and adults accept those inevitabilities with dignity and “stoic love.” White’s twelve-line, one-sentence poem reminds us that mortality is universal, what we share with the rest of the Earth’s fauna. We’re in the same boat (Noah’s ark) as nematodes and capybaras. White adds a prose statement to her poems:   “Aquinas, who had a gift for concise definition, once said that ‘We call that beautiful which pleases the eye.’ It’s hard to improve on the simplicity of that. Pleasing the eye, which includes reading, has always been my goal, and aesthetics my primary value. From this comes a love of art museums, travel, living next to running water, poetry, the Victorian novel, and cats. (Few things please the eye as much as a good cat). It might have been more noble if my highest value had been unconditional love, but if I’m honest, I admit I’m stuck with beauty.”   Not a bad place to be stuck. Beauty is one of the things that makes life worth enduring. In the final chapter of The Pleasure of Ruins (1953) – one of my favorite books -- Rose Macaulay reminds us to look at new buildings geologically, beyond the scale of a single human lifetime: “Very soon trees will be thrusting through the empty window sockets, the rose-bay and fennel blossoming within the broken walls, the brambles tangling outside them. Very soon the ruin will be enjungled, engulfed, and the appropriate creatures will revel.” It’s a chastening thought (and goes on for another half-page), like the Time Traveller’s view of the dress shop across the street from his lab in George Pal’s film of The Time Machine (1960). Macaulay gets even more apocalyptically inspired in her final sentences:   “Ruin must be a fantasy, veiled by the mind’s dark imaginings: in the objects that we see before us, we get to agree with St Thomas Aquinas, that qua enim diminutae sunt, hoc ipso turpia sunt, and to feel that, in beauty, wholeness is all. But such wholesome hankerings are, it seems likely, merely a phase of our fearful and fragmented age.”   Macaulay takes her Latin phrase from this passage in Summa Theologica (trans. T.C. O’Brien): “Beauty must include three qualities: integrity, or completeness--since things that lack something are thereby ugly; right proportion or harmony; and brightness—we call things bright in colour beautiful.”

Yet another hero of autodidacticism is Michael Faraday (1791-1867), the English physicist and chemist who discovered electromagnetic induction, which eventually led to development of inductors and transformers, and such devices as electric motors and generators. True to the practice of rigorous self-education, Faraday was also a first-rate writer, with a gift for clarity and vividness. He had little formal education and starting at age fourteen, he was apprenticed to a bookbinder and bookseller.   Faraday was then employed as a chemical assistant in the Royal Institution in London, where he worked with the great chemist Humphry Davy. He went on to discover benzene and carbon tetrachloride, invented an early form of the Bunsen burner and the system of oxidation numbers, and popularized the use of such words as anode, cathode, electrode and ion.   In 1818, Faraday and four friends organized what we would call a self-help writing group, and much of what they produced is collected in Michael Faraday's Mental Exercises: An Artisan Essay-Circle in Regency London (2008). Faraday sought naturalness in his writing, and blamed the practice of what English teachers today call “topic sentences” for his early awkwardness:   “[It] introduces a dryness and stiffness into the style of the piece composed by it for the parts come together like bricks one flat on the other [. . .] I would if possible imitate a tree in its progression from roots to a trunk to branches trees & twigs where every alteration is made with so much ease & yet effect that though the manner is constantly varied the effect is precise and determined.”   I recommend Faraday’s The Chemical History of a Candle, which started as a series of six lectures for young people in 1848 on the chemistry and physics of flames and was published in 1861: “There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy,” Faraday writes, “than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle.”   He suggests we look first at the brightest part of the flame. Writers, like scientists, are rewarded by close observation:   “Why, there I get these black particles, which already you have seen many times evolved from the flame, and which I am now about to evolve in a different way. I will take this candle and clear away the gutterage, which occurs by reason of the currents of air; and if I now arrange a glass tube so as just to dip into this luminous part . . . you see the result. In place of having the same white vapour that you had before, you will now have a black vapour. There it goes, as black as ink. It is certainly very different from the white vapour; and when we put a light to it, we shall find that it does not burn, but that it puts the light out.”   Faraday’s exercise is simple and easily repeatable even by young people, and certainly by non-chemists. Note Faraday’s conversational prose:   “Well, these particles, as I said before, are just the smoke of the candle; and this brings to mind that old employment which Dean Swift recommended to servants for their amusement, namely, writing on the ceiling of a room with a candle.” In “Directions to Servants” (1798), Jonathan Swift had written: “Write your own name, and your sweet-heart’s, with the smoak of a candle, on the roof of the kitchen, or the servants hall, to Shew your learning.” Faraday goes on:   “But what is that black substance? Why, it is the same carbon which exists in the candle. How comes it out of the candle? It evidently existed in the candle, or else we should not have had it here. And now I want you to follow me in this explanation. You would hardly think that all those substances which fly about London, in the form of soots and blacks, are the very beauty and life of the flame, and which are burned in it as those iron filings were burned here. Here is a piece of wire gauze, which will not let the flame go through it; and I think you will see, almost immediately, that when I bring it low enough to touch that part of the flame which is otherwise so bright, that it quells and quenches it at once, and allows a volume of smoke to rise up.”   A self-educated man, Faraday encourages the ongoing self-education of his audience by encouraging close examination of commonplace phenomena.   Faraday died on this date, August 25, in 1867, at age seventy-five.