Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

RIDICULOUS MISCELLANY 

I’m sure you’re used to those clever lists of one-liners and wise sayings that are often presented in magazines. Usually they have been plucked by their compilers out of dictionaries of quotations, the same source that is often plundered by speechmakers who wouldn’t know their Candide from their Republic but who will say airily “As Voltaire said…” or “As Plato said…”, as if they have been deeply immersed in such literature. Compiling quotations and one-liners in this way can be fun, but it often results in only the more familiar, glib and brief quotations getting an airing.  

Which brings me the ridiculous miscellany of quotations I am about to unload on you. Always eager to find material for these “Something Thoughtful” sermons, I have often copied out quotations and passages from books I am reading or reviewing. My aim was to make any such quotation the nucleus of one of my longer musings. But recently I looked again at some of the passages I had compiled and thought – why not just let each of them be read for itself, with minimal commentary? So here we go [noting that the highlighted titles refer to books that have been reviewed on this blog].

 

Take this offhanded remark, made in A.Alvarez’s treatise on suicide, The Savage God, : “The Anatomy [of Melancholy] is an addict’s book, like the Faerie Queen, more or less unreadable to those who have not joined the club.”

I hooted with laughter as I read this. As one who has never read The Faerie Queen and who has only dipped into Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (though both books sit accusingly on my shelves), by reading this I felt absolved of the necessity to read either book.

 

            Now for a similarly inconsequential statement. In Unconditional Surrender, the final novel in his Sword of Honour  trilogy, Evelyn Waugh lets rip at the way some people, even if they have apparently fine aesthetic tastes, can switch their allegiances rapidly if their masters tell them to. In this case he is referring to doctrinare left-wingers who condemned avant garde art in the 1930s, because they admired the Soviet Union, which insisted on “socialist realist” representational painting. But the situation changed in 1939. Hence “… the Ministry of Information in the early days of ‘Survival’, before the Russian alliance, had pointed out that since Hitler had proclaimed a taste for ‘figurative’ painting, defence of the cosmopolitan avant garde had become a patriotic duty in England.”

 

Okay, if the specific historical context of that one didn’t mean anything to you, try this, which is a little more testing for the brain. In his incredibly eccentric treatise on clothes SartorResartus , Thomas Carlyle comments on how his fantastical character Herr Teufelsdrockh grew mentally in a small town setting and interpreted the world in terms of it. Stick with it, and you will see this statement is an intelligent reflection on the persistence of early impressions in the way we imagine the world:

“These things were the Alphabet whereby in after-time he was to syllable and partly read the grand Volume of the World: what matters it whether such Alphabet be in large gilt letters or in small ungilt ones, so you have an eye to read it?”

Not too cryptic for you, was it? 

 

Now for something rather more straightforward, as is my reason for preserving it.  David Coventry’s debut novel The Invisible Mile (2015), is set in 1928, exactly ten years after the end of the First World War. In it, the young narrator visits what were battlefields a mere decade previously. He is surprised at how peaceful and gentle the landscape now is, and has to force himself to picture what a terrible scene it would have presented when the war was in progress. To put it simply, that is exactly the reaction I had myself when, three or four years ago, I looked over the placid Flemish countryside where the Battle of Passchendaele was fought.:

“It’s the gentle rolling hills that get me, the undulations that seem quite unlikely to hide armies and artillery and guns. I grew up with the name of ridges and towns inked into memory: Messines, Vimy, Verdun, Flanders. I had imagined great rising lands, precipices to conquer and fortify, but I am reminded that their part of the war was a front of gentle mounds on the apron of some poor farmer. It was desperation that made these hillocks into mountains, these gentle rises into great ridgebacks on which life was fought and held.” 

 

And here is something I preserved simply for its accuracy of observation in its description of an octopus, its awareness on our essential incommunicability with another species, and perhaps also for its strong sting in the tail. It comes from Richard Hughes’ classic A High Wind in Jamaica :

“When swimming under water, it is a very sobering thing suddenly to look a large octopus in the face. One never forgets it: one’s respect, yet one’s feeling of the hopelessness of any real intellectual sympathy. One is soon reduced to mere physical admiration, like a silly painter, of the cow-like tenderness of the eye, of the beautiful and infinitesimal mobility of the large and toothless mouth, which accepts as a matter of course that very water against which you, for your life’s sake, must be holding your breath. There he reposes in a fold of rock, apparently weightless in the clear green medium but very large, his long arms, suppler than silk, coiled in repose, or stirring in recognition of your presence. Far above, everything is bounded by the surface of the air, like a bright window of glass. Contact with a small baby can conjure up at least an echo of that feeling in those who are not obscured by an uprush of maternity to the brain.”

Also from A High Wind in Jamaica, I enjoyed this brilliant reversal of the reader’s expectations:  “Mathias shrugged. After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion: the lawyer does not, cannot be expected to go further than to show what the ordinary man would be most likely to do under presumed circumstances.”

 

Then there is this interesting observation from Oliver Schreiner’s melodramatic, preachy and very imperfect 1883 novel TheStory of an African Farm. It nevertheless says something truthful about the retention and priority of early childhood memories:

“The year of infancy, where from the shadowy background of forgetfulness start out pictures of startling clearness, disconnected, but brightly coloured, and indelibly printed in the mind. Much that follows fades, but the colours of those baby pictures are permanent.”

 

I will end this ridiculous miscellany with two quotations which do not come from anything reviewed on this blog. First, the opening lines of “Beauty”, a poem by Abraham Cowley (1618-1667). Does not this poet, over three hundred years ago, rightly perceive what is now a commonplace – to wit, that ideas of what beauty is are different in different cultures, and there is no one universal cultural measure of what beauty is? Behold:

“Beauty, thou wild fantastic ape,

Who dost in ev’ry country change thy shape!

Here black, there brown, here tawny, and there white;

Thou flatt-rer which compli’st with every sight!”

 

And of course, to round off this pointless bookish ramble into which I have heartlessly drawn you, let me end with the ultimate comment on books, the wise words of Ecclesiastes 12:11-12 in the RSV translation. The second sentence is, of course, my own reaction to much that is placed before me:

“The sayings of the wise are like goads, and like nails fixed firmly are the collected sayings that are given by one Shepherd. My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh”.