Robert Burton and The Anatomy of Melancholy, always relevant

As I headed home from the office Friday evening, feeling momentarily overwhelmed by the events of the day and the week and the fortnight, from the horrors of the shootings in Charleston to the century-late acknowledgment of the reprehensibility of the South's cause to the juxtaposition of the terror killings in Europe and Africa and the celebrations that followed the Supreme Court's ruling on marriage, I found myself thinking of Robert Burton, and the showiest, most memorable passage from his endlessly fecund Anatomy of Melancholy (1621):

I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, etc., daily musters & preparations, & such-like, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarums. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, etc. Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of princes, new discoveries, expeditions, now comical, then tragical matters. Today we hear of new lords and officers created, to-morrow of some great men deposed and then again of fresh honours conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned; one purchaseth, another breaketh; he thrives, his neighbor turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps, etc. Thus I daily hear, and such-like, both private and public news; amidst the gallantry and misery of the world—jollity, pride, perplexities and cares, simplicity and villainy; subtlety, knavery, candour, and integrity mutually mixed and offering themselves—I rub on, privus privatus; as I have still lived, so I now continue, status quo prius, left to a solitary life and mine own domestic discontents.

It's a "wonderful epitome of what life is like," as Anthony Powell put it. Life seen properly as a cascade, so vast as to be almost incomprehensible in the moment, barely less so in in retrospect, mingling the good and the bad, the important and the silly, the lasting and the fugitive. It's enough on the bad days to call to mind a line from Kafka's diaries:

With "Woe!" you greet the night, with "Woe!" the day.

But there's also Charles Lamb, who speaks I think for the odd mixture of--as Burton might have seen it--humors in many of us when he writes,

I cannot divest me of an unseasonable disposition to levity upon the most awful occasions.

Burton's rippling, rivering register of events reminds us that an admixture is all we're ever allowed.

As I read the Anatomy Friday night, I realized something further, and unexpected: surely this, this very passage from Burton, is where Antonin Scalia encountered the archaic word "mummeries" in proximity to "weddings," such that it stuck in his mind and ended up in his blistering dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges? Has Scalia, feeling the tides of history, this week at least, running against him, been seeking consolation in The Anatomy of Melancholy?

Burton offers countless consolations--he is, as Powell puts it, "never a bore," and "one of the first writers to grasp the innate oddness of human nature"--but I'd perhaps recommend that the good Justice, at the end of a long term closeted up with books of law, eager clerks, and crotchety colleagues, instead put the book down and seek some version of Burton's own remedy for melancholy, as related by Powell:

At Oxford, when plagued by melancholy, Burton, who seems always to have enjoyed a joke, used to go down to the bridge over the river, and listen to the bargemen swearing at each other. That would always make him laugh, and at once feel better.

As someone who spent most of his weekend (in, let's note, a much more cheerful and optimistic frame of mind than I'm ascribing to Justice Scalia) sitting on the porch admiring the chuntering nonsense of the local bird population around my feeder, I give such a prescription my heartiest support.

Best of . . . well, not of the year. Or even anything beyond a narrow slice of publishing. But oh, what a great slice!

I drew up a brief list of the books I most enjoyed reading this year for Proustitute's blog that will appear laster this week. I'll tweet and post a link to it when it shows up (though until then, you could do worse than trawling through the other lists he's gathered--I've already found some promising new books that way).

Rather than rehash that list, I'll do something different here. There's no secret that my favorite publisher--other, that is, than the one that pays my salary--is New York Review of Books Classics. They take up more than half a bookcase in my library. Those shelves contain nearly as many unread books--stored away against a rainy day--as favorites, and nothing that's not at least of interest.

But which are my favorites? Which do I return to again and again? Which recommend most often? It's not an easy choice--easier than picking my favorite of our three cats, but not wildly so. Still, five it is, so here they are (with apologies to Alvaro Mutis, Rebecca West, William Dean Howells, Thomas Browne, Richard Hughes, Elizabeth Taylor, Elaine Dundy, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Felix Feneon, Raymond Kennedy, John Williams, Edith Wharton, and so many others who could have made this list).

J. F. Powers/The Stories of J. F. Powers

Powers could easily be on this list for any of the three books NYRB Classics publishes. His novels Morte D'Urban and Wheat That Springeth Green, especially the former, are masterpieces of thoughtful comedy, their satire pointed and effective while not carrying anything like the scorched-earth quality so often found in that form. Powers shows us human frailty, but nonetheless leaves us with belief--belief, if not always or necessarily in the god the priests he writes about purportedly serve, then at least in the value of acts of human kindness and morality.

I selected the short stories rather than the novels for the simple reason that the collection includes my two favorite pieces of Powers's writing: "A Losing Game," which may be the funniest story I've ever read (I have tried many times to read the first pages aloud to friends, and I've never gotten through it without dissolving into laughter), and, even more remarkable, its sequel, "The Presence of Grace," which within a few short pages transforms a priest whom we've seen as a figure of fun into, for one shimmering moment, an agent of grace.

Daphne Du Maurier/Don't Look Now

I first encountered Du Maurier as a child, when Robert Arthur included "The Birds" in one of the many Alfred Hitchcock-branded anthologies of suspense stories for children that he edited. I read and re-read that story, year after year, to the point where even today I know many sentences by heart--which I realized a few years back as I listened to an old radio adaptation and found myself speaking along with it.

I wrote about "The Birds" a few years ago, and what I said about why the story affected me so deeply as a kid remains true:

Death in "The Birds," whether avian or human, is concrete and horrible. It takes something beautiful and right--a living, moving, even graceful creature--and it replaces it with a broken thing, a perversion, an object of horror. It is irreversible, and, as the tension mounts, page by page, it seems increasingly inevitable. To a child, that knowledge is as chilling as anything. I read the story again and again, knowing the bleak ending would never change.

And that's only one story! Du Maurier was a master of the tightly turning suspense story, and this collection is full of them. A few are relatively slight, but they're never less than surprising, and the best of them are genuinely creepy and strange. "The Birds" may be unshakable because of childhood, but the one that I think will stay with me as an adult is "Monte Verità," a novella-length tale of interwar rootlessness, hopeless love, and the slow erasure of the hidden places of the earth. It's a daring story with a mystical tinge, and you turn its last page feeling as if you've been returned from somewhere very far away--possibly against your will.

Robert Burton/The Anatomy of Melancholy

I came to this book through Anthony Powell, who makes his fictional stand-in in A Dance to the Music of Time, a fan (and eventual biographer) of Burton. Powell admires the sheer surfeit of the Anatomy's 1,200-plus pages, its cascade of endless sentences and quotations and interpolations, the sense it gives of an attempt--under the guise of delineating and explicating melancholy--to take in all of the drivers and hidden currents of human life.

I'll admit to not having read nearly all of the Anatomy, but that doesn't keep me from wholeheartedly endorsing it in this list: it's not a book to read all of, but one to keep at your side for occasional investigation, serious or otherwise. For example, after hearing Melvyn Bragg devote an episode of his BBC radio program In Our Time to the book, I looked (with the help of Google Books) for "news" and found a passage that, if we imagine it beaten into submission with the AP Stylebook, could describe our media environment today:

Be content; 'tis but a nine dayes wonder; and as one sorrow drives out another, one passion another, one cloud another, one rumour is expelled by another; every day almost, come new news unto our ears, as how the sun was eclipsed, meteors seen i'th' aire, monsters born, prodigies, how the Turks were overthrown in Persia, an earth-quake in Helvetia, Calabria, Japan, or China, an inundation in Holland, a great plague in Constantinople, a fire at Prage, a dearth in Germany, such a man is made a lord, a bishop, another hanged, deposed, prest to death, for some murder, treason, rape, theft, oppression; all which we do hear at first with a kind of admiration, detestation, consternation; but by and by they are buried in silence: thy father's dead, thy brother rob'd, wife runs mad, neighbour hath kild himselfe; 'tis heavy, gastly, fearful newes at first, in every mans mouth, table talk; but, after a while, who speaks or thinks of it? It will be so with thee and thine offence: it will be forgotten in an instant, be it theft, rape, sodomy, murder, incest, treason, &c. thou art not the first offender, nor shalt thou be the last; 'tis no wonder; every houre such malefactors are called in question: nothing so common,

Even better, however, is to use the book like the ancients used to use Virgil, as I did with my Thanksgiving post. The sortes Burtonae rarely will divulge anything like comprehensible prophecy, but it is almost guaranteed to offer some previously unnoted gem. Let's give it a try:

We watch a sorrowful person, lest he abuse his solitariness, and so should we do a melancholy man; set him about some business, exercise, or recreation, which may divert his thoughts, and still keep him otherwise intent; for his phantasy is so restless, operative and quick, that if it be not in perpetual action, ever employed, it will work upon itself, melancholize, and be carried away instantly, with some fear, jealousy, discontent, suspicion, some vain conceit or other.

May the melancholy man be always accompanied by Burton.

J. L. Carr/A Month in the Country

This slim novel is the most haunting, and maybe the most moving, of all the NYRB Classics I've read. A young man returns from World War I and takes a job restoring a medieval mural in a country church. He sleeps out in the bell tower, surrounded by quiet--Carr makes us feel the comforting warmth of the English summer--as each day he scrapes away just a bit more of the covering to reveal the anonymous painter's hellish vision of the apocalypse.

It's a novel about loss, and, obliquely, about war. About returning a different person to a place become different itself, and thus being rootless. About that feeling of being between--of watching days peel off the calendar pleasurably, but darkened by the endpoint you know is nearing. It's about craft, and work, and solitude, and the power of all three to transport and transform us, about what a job done well can do for the doer. And it's about the risks we court when we open our hearts, especially--as with Carr's protagonist--when we've just come from a situation that demanded we close them.

A Month in the Country is a book I return to reliably every few years. I'm rewarded each time, and I don't see that changing in the decades to come.

(Actually, this book would be worth buying solely for Michael Holroyd's introduction, which includes a bizarre, Carr-related story of a literary prize that bestows meat on its winners.)

Henry David Thoreau/The Journal, 1837-1861

This final book, like Burton's, is more one for dipping into than for reading straight through. It's not been far out of my reach at any time since it was published. Through these journals Thoreau emerges, to my mind, as more interesting, more companionable, less irritating (for, let's be honest, he can be irritating) than anywhere else. He goes about in nature, and we walk alongside, day by month by year.

Whereas Burton is best enjoyed through the index or randomness, Thoreau's journal is perhaps most fun as a regular companion, a way to peer through the years to see what this specific day, long past, was like. As I write this, Christmas approaches--and on that day in 1856 a thirty-nine-year-old Thoreau offers advice from experience

Take long walks in stormy weather, or through deeps snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.

Though I will admit to having no intention of following Thoreau's advice--a seat by the Christmas tree with my family and cups of tea beckon instead--I find it bracing nonetheless. Day after day after day, he's there with you; you'll never regret it if you decide to join him on his daily wanderings.

Happy holidays, folks. Here's to another year of great reading (and perhaps even more reliable blogging? I can hope . . . )

Seven years

Being as it's generally taken as a sign that you're out of your first youth when you begin to scant your birthdays, I suppose the fact that the seventh anniversary of this blog slipped past without my noticing earlier this month is a signal: middle age, surely, has arrived for IBRL, and I therefore should probably keep a weather eye out for midlife crises and hints of senescence.

With the period of seven years in mind, I turned to Isaac D'Israeli and the Curiosities of Literature. Surely he wouldn't mind if I took a passage completely out of context and applied an account of a young boy to a blog instead, one that could be described as

a child of [my] misfortunes, . . born in trouble, and a stranger to domestic endearments.

Oh, but that's not simply unfair to D'Israeli, but to IBRL, too: it's far from one of misfortune's many children--rather, its parents are enthusiasm and obsession, and though that pair could often be excused for looking askance at their offspring, I like to think that in this case they're at least not embarrassed.

If that passage isn't quite suitable, even when repurposed, then how about this one, from D'Israeli's later (and, one assumes, less successful) work, The Literary Character, Illustrated by the History of Men of Genius, Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions. The quotation is attributed to Boccaccio, praising himself as a prodigy while watering the grounds of his Decameron with modesty:

Before seven years of age, when as yet I had met with no stories, was without a master and hardly knew my letters, I had a natural talent for fiction, and produced some little tales.

There's been precious little fiction on this blog, but I do like the idea that seven years is the point at which one can say that he's begun to know some stories. In the Anatomy of Melancholy Robert Burton points out that, for a scholar, seven years is essentially nothing:

Most other Trades and Professions, after seven years' Prenticeship, are enabled by their craft to live of themselves. . . . only scholars, methinks, are most uncertain, unrespected, subject to all casualties and hazards.

Since I'm ripping quotations out at their roots and appropriating them inappropriately, I'll close with a few lines found in Holbrook Jackson's wonderfully strange and deliberately Burton-like Anatomy of Bibliomania. Nineteenth-century English scholar and librarian Henry Bradshaw, Jackson writes, donated his "famous collection of Irish books" to the Cambridge University library in gratitude for, Bradshaw explained,

the liberal manner in which the University enabled him for more than seven years to pursue the studies which he had most at heart.

Bradshaw's situation, of course, differed from mine in many ways, but the one that is perhaps the most salient is his gratitude that during that time  "no report during that time was ever demanded of him." No one, mind you, has been demanding the casual, modest, often silly reports I've been making here for seven years, but I've enjoyed writing them and hope you've enjoyed reading them. Thanks for taking the time to stop by over the years..

The Anatomy of Melancholy, anatomized

Melyvn Bragg's "In Our Time" program on the BBC's Radio 4 is almost always worth attending to: Bragg assembles three or four experts on a topic, anything from logic to Cleopatra to the neutrino, and he somehow manages to keep them all on point and speaking clearly at a smart layman's level for an hour of fascinating discussion and explanation.

Recently, "In Our Time" covered one of my favorite books for perpetual consultation, Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. You can listen to the program at the BBC's site, though I believe they only keep them up for a limited time; it's possible that if it's disappeared from that link you can find it for free in the iTunes store.

One of the pleasures of the digital age is being able to consult Burton on specific topics merely through a keyword search. A search for "broadcast," which seemed unlikely (Yes, I find: Merriam-Webster's dates it to 1767), led me to a search for "news," which was more productive, turning up this bit of advice about letting go of one's regrets and not dwelling on one's past--for everyone else will soon be distracted by other topics:

Be content; 'tis but a nine dayes wonder; and as one sorrow drives out another, one passion another, one cloud another, one rumour is expelled by another; every day almost, come new news unto our ears, as how the sun was eclipsed, meteors seen i'th' aire, monsters born, prodigies, how the Turks were overthrown in Persia, an earth-quake in Helvetia, Calabria, Japan, or China, an inundation in Holland, a great plague in Constantinople, a fire at Prage, a dearth in Germany, such a man is made a lord, a bishop, another hanged, deposed, prest to death, for some murder, treason, rape, theft, oppression; all which we do hear at first with a kind of admiration, detestation, consternation; but by and by they are buried in silence: thy father's dead, thy brother rob'd, wife runs mad, neighbour hath kild himselfe; 'tis heavy, gastly, fearful newes at first, in every mans mouth, table talk; but, after a while, who speaks or thinks of it? It will be so with thee and thine offence: it will be forgotten in an instant, be it theft, rape, sodomy, murder, incest, treason, &c. thou art not the first offender, nor shalt thou be the last; 'tis no wonder; every houre such malefactors are called in question: nothing so common,

There is, of course, the alternative approach, taken by Charlie Sheen, of reveling in one's bad acts and noising them about oneself. I don't know how Burton would have addressed such a tack, but this passage might suffice:

for his intemperance he hath aches, crudities, gowts, and, as fruits of his idleness and fulness, lust, surfeiting and drunkenness, all manner of diseases: pecuniis augetur improbitas: the wealthier, the more dishonest. He is exposed to hatred, envy, peril and treason, fear of death of degradation, &c. 'tis lubrica statio et proxima prxcipitio; and the higher he climbs, the greater is his fall.

"For some are so gently melancholy, that in all their carriage, and to the outward apprehension of others it can hardly be discerned."

{Photo by rocketlass.}

The fickleness of Chicago's perennial false spring, as perhaps best evidenced by the delusions of returning robins and the stubborn redoubts of filthy snow curled about the gravestones in the cemetery behind my apartment, brought on a thoughts of melancholy on Sunday--thoughts which, as they tend to do, led me to Robert Burton, who reminds us that "It comes to many in fits, and goes; to others it is continuate:many in spring and fall only are molested." Burton himself led, inevitably, to Anthony Powell. It is time, hints the weather, to recommence my perpetual re-reading of A Dance to the Music of Time.

Next up is the fourth volume, which, while I've defended it before from its overly ardent detractors, is nonetheless the least overtly satisfying of the batch. There are pleasures, many pleasures, to be found there, but they are for the most part the pleasures of life drawing in rather than of life setting out: if the first two books are about discovery and attempts to set the terms on which one is to enter the lists of adult life, and the third about the catastrophes and losses that begin to assail us, then the fourth is about realizing that the shadows of our day are growing longer, even as we watch closely those who are still learning the earliest steps of the dance.

So it seemed right to begin the fourth volume by returning briefly to the close of the third, the end-of-war memorial service at St Paul's that closes The Military Philosophers. It's a moving scene, less for what happens there than for the way that, prompted by the familiar hymns and ritual words of the service, narrator Nick Jenkins lets his mind wander, memories of the war and its losses side by side with casually habitual close readings of the lyrics, a reminder that even at life's most solemn moments, it is twined about with the words we've used to try to understand it.

Early in the service, Nick recalls his old friend Stringham:

Hymns always made me think of Stringham, addicted to quoting their imagery within the context of his own life.

"Hymns describe people and places so well," he used to say. "Nothing else quite like them. What could be better, for example, on the subject of one's friends and relations than:

    Some are sick and some are sad,
    And some have never loved one well,
    And some have lost the love they had.

The explicitness of the categories is marvellous. Then that wonderful statement: 'fading is the world's best pleasure.' One sees very clearly which particular pleasure its writer considered the best."

For an incurably rackety and fragile character like Stringham, such kidding carries notes of whistling past the graveyard; he would have fared far, far better in a world of precision and order.

A quotation from Blake--"as impenetrable as Isaiah; in his way, more so"--brings on general reflections on poetry, "its changes in form and fashion," which leads to the recollection of some lines from Abraham Cowley:

    Thou with strange adultery
    Doest in each breast a brothel keep;
    Awake, all men lust for thee,
    And some enjoy thee while they sleep.

No poet deserved to be forgotten who could face facts like that, the blending of conscious and unconscious, Love's free-for-all in dreams.

The service, as one would expect, ends with "God Save the King," all three verses:

God save our gracious King!
Long live our noble King!
God save the King!
Send him victorious
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us;
God save the King!

O Lord, our God arise,
Scatter his enemies,
And make them fall.
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks,
On Thee our hopes we fix,
God save us all.

Thy choicest gifts in store,
On him be pleased to pour;
Long may he reign:
May he defend our laws,
And ever give us cause
To sing with heart and voice,
God save the King!

Which leads Nick into a reflection that brings out many of his characteristics as a narrator: honesty, attention to detail, a fine discrimination of feeling, an eye for historical resonances and anachronism, and, most of all, an acceptance of things as they are:

Repetitive, jerky, subjective in feeling, not much ornamented by imagination or subtlety of thought and phraseology, the words possessed at the same time a kind of depth, an unpretentious expression of sentiments suited somehow to the moment. It would be interesting to know whether, at the period they were written, "reign" had been considered an adequate rhyme to "king"; or whether the poet had simply not bothered to achieve identity of sound in the termination of the last verse. Language, pronunciation, sentiment, were always changing. There must have been advantages, moral and otherwise, in living at an outwardly less squeamish period, when the verbiage of high-thinking had not yet cloaked such petitions as those put forward in the second verse, incidentally much the best; when, in certain respects at least, hypocrisy had established less of a stranglehold on the public mind. Such a mental picture of the past was no doubt largely unhistorical, indeed, totally illusory, freedom from one sort of humbug merely implying, with human beings of any epoch, thraldom to another. The past, just as the present, had to be accepted for what it thought and what it was.

Burton reminds us that we, like Powell's characters, "according to the continuance of time . . . have been troubled"; but without that trouble, where would we be?

And now I think I'm ready for volume four.

"Now comical then tragical matters"

{Photos by rocketlass.}

From Best Thought, Worst Thought (2008), by Don Paterson:

There is no day. The sun interrupts a continuous night. Our ancestors were correct: the sun abandons us.

The new year has issued its summons, requiring our attendance, and whether we leap enthusiastically into its unknown reaches or grudglingly edge up to the starting line trembling with suspicion, it seems worth commemorating the moment with a passage from Robert Burton's evergreen The Anatomy of Melancholy. This passage, which Anthony Powell invokes near the end of A Dance to the Music of Time as almost a precis of what has come before, never fails to remind me simultaneously of the transitory nature of most human endeavor and the abiding fascination with which we follow it regardless:

I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, firs, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged, in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c., daily musters and preparations, and suchlike, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances, are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c. Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of Princes, new discoveries, expeditions; now comical then tragical matters. Today we hear of new Lords and officers created, to-morrow of some great men deposed. And then again of fresh honors conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned, one purchaseth, another breaketh; he thrives, his neighbor turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps, &c.

Burton's effusion puts me in the mind a couple of lines from poet, translator, and scholar D. J. Enright, who died on a New Year's Eve early in this decade. Taken from his Interplay: A Kind of Commonplace Book (1995), they seem worth carrying with us to our various dinners and parties tonight:

One mistake: to suppose you are so different from other people; another: to suppose other people are just like you. Common v. uncommon: lifeblood of many a commonplace.

Here's to another year, different as it's sure to be, same as it's sure to be.

Let not your imagination plague you--send me stories instead!

From Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy:

For as the body works upon the mind by his bad humours, troubling the spirits, sending gross fumes into the brain, and so per consequens disturbing the soul, and all the faculties of it . . . with fear, sorrow, etc., which are ordinary symptoms of this disease: so, on the other side, the mind most effectually works upon the body, producing by his passions and perturbations miraculous alterations, as melancholy, despaire, cruel diseases, and sometimes death itself. . . . What imagination I have is sufficiently declared in my digression of the anatomy of the soul. I will only now point at the wonderful effects and power of it; which as it is eminent in all, so most especially it rageth in melancholy persons, in keeping the species of objects so long, mistaking, amplifying them by continual and strong meditation, until at length it produceth in some parties real effects, causeth this and many other maladies.

Attention Chicagoans! If your imagination produceth such real effects and maladies, it no longer need do so in vain: I've taken the position of Chicago editor for Joyland, an online hub for short fiction, and my mailbox is now open for submissions! In the face of the perennial gloom and doom about the short story, Joyland is an effort to try something new, and I'm excited to be part of it. Joyland is organized by city, with each editor responsible for stories from residents (or former residents) of his or her city; authors already published there include Joe Meno, Ed Park, Nathan Sellyn, Rebecca Rosenblum, and more. I'll be posting one story a month or so, and I'm open at this point to pretty much any style or theme. So if you've had a story percolating in your brain, disrupting your sleep and bringing despaire, drop me a line and I'll be happy to give you more information.

For if, as Montaigne agrees, the imagination can be a troubling possession--

Wee sweat, we shake, we grow pale, and we blush at the motions of our imaginations; and wallowing in our beds we feele our bodies agitated and turmoiled by their apprehensions, yea in such manner as we are sometimes ready to yeeld up the spirit.

--you might as well get some good short stories out of it, right?

And now to find the place in The Anatomy of Melancholy where Burton explains the melancholy that can be caused by taking on too many responsibilities . . .

Notes on notebooks

{Photo by rocketlass. It only belongs here because that toothy face stared at me as I wrote the essay that was the starting point for this post.}

I have a piece about three poetry notebooks up at the Poetry Foundation today. In writing the article, I took a lot of notes (on a laptop rather than a notebook) that I didn't end up using, so a brief notes post about my notebooks piece seems in order. But you should read the finished article first!

You've done that now? Okay, then here are the odds and ends.

1 I flagged a lot of great lines in all three books as I read, not knowing at the time what I'd end up needing. Most of them didn't make it, but some at least are worth sharing here. Like this one from Gabriel Gudding's massive Rhode Island Notebook:

[. . .] My head was formed
in library, my hope there, and
have always loved meeting lib'arians
may they always be my friends
They are like surrogate aunts. There is
no other job
more materteral.

I don't think of my current librarian friends as surrogate aunts, but it does seem an apt description of the relationship one can develop with a librarian as a kid: not quite a proper friendship, and too attenuated to be a true familial relationship, yet shot through with real warmth, affection, and appreciation. Surrogate aunt it is.

2 George Oppen's Daybooks include many a memorable line, most seeming relatively casual, chance thoughts put down in case of later value. But as Oppen kept working at his notebooks for years, even decades, some entries bear the marks of later emendation, or even complete reconsideration. I think this one, complete in its negation, is my favorite:

All there is to say

It's so perfect as to be a joke--but was it?

3 I'm not confident that in the relatively small space I had at the Poetry Foundation's site I conveyed just what good company Campbell McGrath is as a poet. That's not to say he's always cheery and upbeat, but that his attention to the stuff of the world is in itself satisfying, serving that time-honored poetic function of waking us up to it ourselves. In his "Forms of Attention" he describes that approach:

Often writing is a kind of listening,
a form of deep attention.
Turning the stations, fingering the dial.

Marry that to a wry sense of humor and an exuberance inherited from Whitman and you get odes to bureaucrats and Schaffer's beer, haiku about sparrows, and transporting reveries in a denuded strawberry patch--all wonderful poems.

4 Both George Oppen's and Gabriel Gudding's books mention Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, one of my favorites. Gudding quotes from it, while Oppen uses it as a prop in an argument about influences, positing his temperament as more . . . difficult? because in childhood he read Burton rather than Edna St. Vincent Millay and other poets of the day.

That coincidence immediately sent me back to McGrath's Seven Notebooks in hopes that there was a Burton reference there, too, which I'd missed. But no luck--and I shouldn't have been surprised. Though McGrath writes frequently of late-night insomniac vigils--prime times for dipping into Burton--his does not appear to be a melancholic's nature.

Still, I think McGrath would enjoy Burton's magpie accumulations and his rush of words, his effort to somehow write it all down--the very act of which seemed to fend off the melancholy that inspired it.

5 Campbell McGrath taught the first poetry class I took, a reading and writing poetry class in the spring of 1993 when I was nineteen. He was an excellent teacher, enthusiastic but critical, treating our amateurish efforts with care while arguing strenuously for the necessity of unstinting reading as we tried to learn to write.

I wrote a sonnet for that class about Elvis Presley, not knowing McGrath well enough to know whether he was a fan. I suspect now that he is, given Elvis's symbolic place as a mish-mash of so much that is thought to be oppositional in American culture: high and low, North and South, white and black, art and trash, success and failure. Even an abiding love of Elvis, however, wouldn't have been likely to rescue that sonnet.

6 I'll close with a line from Oppen's Daybooks that is both apt and eerie, reminiscent of Kafka's more epigrammatic writings:

The poem (narrative) depends for its "argument" on vividness--One might regard it as incoherent in the way that a man may seem incoherent whose argument consists finally in repeating--"But look, But look--!"

I often feel that what I'm doing on this blog is saying, "Look! Look!"--a new version of the hand-selling that was the best part of my old bookseller days. I wouldn't claim to often achieve the vividness Oppen notes, but I like to think that some days I shout loud enough to get some people to follow my pointing finger to a book they wouldn't have tried. (Like this one!)

Some advice to the love-lorn, of questionable value, from Barbara Pym's journals

From A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters (1984), by Barbara Pym, edited by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym

31 July 1933

After lunch I took some Yeastvite tablets and continued to take them after tea and super. A slightly unromantic way of curing lovesickness I admit, but certainly I feel a lot better now. (Hilary is playing "Stormy Weather" incessantly--my theme song I think!) . . . I turned to Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and began to read about Love Melancholy--but I haven't yet got to the part where he deals with the cure. Perhaps I'm suffering from the spleen, too--in that case I may be completely cured by taking a course of our English poets--which all points to drowning my sorrows in work.

Friday 23 April 1943

Hilary has gone to the cottage this weekend--so Honor and I are by ourselves. We talked about things--the folly of day-dreaming amongst otheres. She thinks I ought to have a really good affaire. I quite agree, but OH DEAR.

January 1957

One talks so gaily about "old loves," but there comes a time when they really are old.

And to close, a description of a location that could serve to host the beginning of an intrigue--romantic or perhaps more sinister. Whichever it might turn out to be, though, Pym is clear that it would not be likely to end well:

7 Sepember 1954
Lisbon, Hotel Metropole

Near the Moorish style railway station. Dark little room looking into a well. I can see them washing up at 11 o'clock at night. The lower part of the walls covered with striped canvas like luggage (it's like living in a suitcase), the dim light and the grey iron bedstead like a French film. Setting for a Graham Greene novel.

That little goblin of melancholy

From The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), by Robert Burton

All my griefs to this are jolly,
Naught so damn'd as melancholy.

Yesterday I suggested that we could do worse than to start the new year hoping for the undimmable enthusiasm and lust for life (if not for other things) of Samuel Pepys. Today, therefore, I'll provide an example of one of the ways we could do worse: we could adopt the deep-rooted pessimism of Thomas Hardy.

Though certain scenes from his life and writings remind us that he was capable of taking real joy in life, Hardy as he has come down to us seems more comfortably at home in a fatalistic melancholy. In the following reminiscence, collected in the enthralling Thomas Hardy Remembered (2007), he delivers himself of an account of his pessimism so succinct and epigrammatic as to be almost risible. The memory comes from scientist and writer Sir Bertram Coghill Alan Windle, an acquaintance of Hardy who first mapped the real-life analogues of Hardy's imagined towns of Wessex:

Hardy was a quiet, courteous, somewhat reserved man, but an admirable conversationalist when he was interested, as he was in his beloved Wessex. The first thing anyone says about him is, of course, that he is a pessimist, and no doubt that in a sense is true, and perhaps must be true, of anyone who held—if he really did hold—the horrible philosophy to be met with in his books and summed up once and for all in the end of the account of the death of Tess. But perhaps he summed himself up better than anyone else could when he said to me once, "I am so constituted that, when it begins to rain, I find it impossible to believe it will ever be fine again." That might be a quotation from many of his characters in any of his books, but it came directly from his own lips.

Thomas Hardy Remembered is a bountiful treat for Hardy fans--we owe its editor, Martin Ray, great thanks--and I can't help but share a couple more memories from it. I love the following account of a 1919 meeting with Hardy by Llewelyn Powys, brother of John Cowper Powys; it seems fitting that a story from a Powys brother would introduce an element of the supernatural into a description of Hardy.

[Hardy] came in at last, a little old man (dressed in tweeds after the manner of a country squire) with the same round skull and the same goblin eyebrows, and the same eyes keen and alert. What was it that he reminded me of? A night hawk? A falcon owl? For I tell you, the eyes that looked out of that century-old skull were of the kind that see in the dark.

A note that Ray appends adds to the fun: he explains that Powys's account was published in the Dial in May of 1922, prompting Hardy to comment that

those young interviewers who take notes without one's knowledge are a pest.

I'll leave you with this brief, idiosyncratic description from Hugh Walpole, who met Hardy in 1910:

Tea with Thomas Hardy—a little nutcracker faded man with a wistful smile and a soft voice.

Oh, I won't deny that that little nutcracker faded man is appropriate for some days and some moods, but I'm sticking with my plan: Pepys for the New Year!

Happily ever after?, part three

Part one is here and part two is here.

An interesting counterpoint to these examples—one that, I think, ultimately supports my thinking—is The Lord of the Rings. If ever there were a saga for which a neat, finalizing ending would be appropriate, it surely would be Tolkien's epic. After all, it's built around a quest and a war: complete the quest and win the war, and the saga is surely concluded. Tolkien gives us what we want, a big, dramatic ending followed by the crowning of Aragorn. The story should end there . . . but Tolkien seems to chafe at that idea. Evil, after all, is never vanquished, good never eternally triumphant, because as Crowley and Powell would surely agree, life—even in this fantasy world—still has to go on.

So instead of The End, Tolkien gives us The Scouring of the Shire. I don't think it's a successful chapter; it's a bit goofy and awkward after all the grand heroics. But it leads directly into what I think is one of Tolkien's most inspired ideas, the sailing of the heroes to the Grey Havens: after some years back at home, attempting to live an ordinary life, Frodo is called away across the sea to a place out of time and—more important—out of the story. For in the course of his adventures he was irrevocably changed, becoming, in a sense, infected with magic, poisoned by the realization that he was a character in a story that has now run its course. Made into a hero, he finds that with his quest over he cannot return to the continuing life of the world:

I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them. . . . You will . . . keep alive the memory of the age that is gone, so that people will remember the Great Danger and so love their beloved land all the more. And that will keep you as busy and as happy as anyone can be, as long as your part of the Story goes on.

Tolkien’s writing here in keeping with the mythical tradition that requires the death of magic in order for the new, modern world to be born; in addition, it's plausible that he's writing from personal experience about war and the difficulty of a return to normal life. But I think he’s also writing about the vacuum that any fulfilled purpose can leave: having realized what one is to do and done it can leave ordinary life itself feeling like an insurmountable struggle. Tolkien thus manages to satisfy our deep-rooted desire for a saga to have a clear ending while at the same time reminding us that few stories can be so neat. In Middle-Earth, the Grey Havens await those whose stories have run their course, but such rest is not available to the other characters, nor to us: our stories having no clear end, we will simply go on living them.

Even as they divide fans, I think all of these examples argue strongly for the open-ended and indefinite. Perhaps it's just a product of my childhood of reading comic books—surely at this point the longest-running open-ended narrative form—with their eternal promise of a new chapter of the story every month, but I think Aegypt, Dance, and (I imagine, sight unseen) The Sopranos are all surely richer for their creators' willingness to abjure the clarity of a definite ending.

I do realize that this openness is just another storytelling technique. It's as much an illusion as perfect closure would be--but I wholeheartedly prefer it nonetheless, finding it at least a shade closer to true. Plato distrusted art in part because he worried that we would get wrapped up in its illusions and let them blind us to reality. This particular illusion seems the opposite of blinding—I have a hard time believing that any illusion designed to return our thoughts to the inexplicable continuity and multiplicity of real life can ever do anything but deepen, widen, and strengthen our appreciation of the world. What better use could be made of the imagination?

So in lieu of an end, I'll leave you with some Robert Burton, the passage from The Anatomy of Melancholy that Powell makes for Nick Jenkins a sort of key and touchstone:

Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of princes, new discoveries, expeditions, now comical, then tragical matters. Today we hear of new lords and officers created, tomorrow of some great men deposed, and then again of fresh honours conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned; one purchaseth, another breaketh: he thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps, &c. This I daily hear, and such like, both private and public news, amidst the gallantry and misery of the world; jollity, pride, perplexities and cares, simplicity and villainy; subtlety, knavery, candour and integrity, mutually mixed and offering themselves.

A Marriage

From Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1651)

Stratocles the Physitian, upon his wedding day, when he was at dinner . . . could not eate his meat for kissing of the bride, &c. First a word, and then a kisse, then some other complement, and then a kisse, then an idle question, then a kisse, and when he hath pumped his wittes dry, can say no more, kissing and colling are never out of season, . . ’tis never at an end, another kisse, and then another, another, & another, &c.

My friends Sandy and Sarah were married yesterday. The ceremony featured
the reading of Genesis 2:18-24:

And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

I know this passage has been used through the years by those whose primary interest in religion is as a justification for placing women under the control of men. But regardless of how the Bible’s authors present the creation of Woman, the moment of recognition, down through the millennia, rings true: none of the others the Lord shows Adam is right, but when he sees Woman, he knows, “This is bone of my bone.”

It doesn’t happen for everyone—and the skeptic in me warns that sometimes when it does happen, it can’t entirely be trusted—but love at first sight can be real and glorious. I don’t know if Sandy and Sarah really knew the moment they met, but yesterday we heard again and again from friends and family who did see it, clear and beautiful, when they first saw the couple together.

Though the historical resonance and familiarity of the King James version of the Bible usually leads me to prefer it to any other, in this case I actually like Robert Alter’s recent translation a bit better, especially once he gets to that moment of recognition:

And the Lord God said, “It is not good for the human to be alone, I shall make him a sustainer beside him.” And the Lord God fashioned from the soil each beast of the fields and each fowl of the heavens and brought each to the human to see what he would call it, and whatever the human called a living creature, that was its name. And the human called names to all the cattle and to the fowl of the heavens and to all the beast s of the field, but for the human no sustainer beside him was found. And the Lord God cast a deep slumber on the human, and he slept, and He took one of his ribs and closed over the flesh where it had been, and the Lord God built the rib He had taken from the human into a woman and He brought her to the human. And the human said:

“This one at last, bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh,
This one shall be called Woman,
for from man was this one taken.”

Therefore does a man leave his father and his mother and cling to his wife and they become one flesh.

This one at last.

Congratulations, Sandy and Sarah. The years are ahead of you; be each the other’s sustainer.

Three dreams

1) I dreamed that one of the editors at my workplace had arranged for some prominent authors to give lectures on their craft to the entire office. First up were Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad. They took turns speaking, and they actually had fairly interesting things to say about each other’s work. Hemingway was surprisingly self-effacing, and Conrad was exactly as I expected: formal, precise, and thoroughly serious.

It was only after I’d returned to my office following the lecture that I remembered that both Hemingway and Conrad were long dead. “Of course!” I thought. “Those must have been professional impersonators!”

I ran for the front desk, hoping to catch them before they left. Conrad was gone by the time I got there, but Hemingway was just stepping into the elevator. “Wait!” I shouted. “Who do you do when you’re not doing Hemingway?”

Hemingway turned. Then, smiling, he ripped off his mask, held it aloft, and jauntily shouted, “Yourcenar!”

2) I dreamed that I was reading—and greatly enjoying—Anthony Powell’s biography of Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). It was only after I woke up that I remembered that Powell never wrote a biography of Burton; that was Nick Jenkins, the narrator of Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, who serves as Powell’s stand-in.

Realizing that I would never get to read the book I’d been enjoying so much in my dream was substantially disappointing and not a good way to start the day.

3) This one is Stacey’s dream. Friday morning, before we left to visit my parents for the weekend, she told me, “Last night, I dreamed that you were bringing fifty books on this trip.”

From Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)

Against fearful and troublesome dreams, nightmare and such inconveniences, wherewith melancholy men are molested, the best remedy is to eat a light supper, and of such meats as are easy of digestion; no Hare, Venison, Beef, &c. not to lie on his back, not to meditate or think in the day time of any terrible objects, or especially talk of them before he goes to bed. For, as he said in Lucian after such conference, I seem to dream of Hecate, I can think of nothing buy Hobgoblins; and, as Tully notes, for the most part our speeches in the day time cause our phantasy to work upon the like in our sleep, which Ennius writes of Homer: as a dog dreams of an hare, so do men dream on such subjects they thought on last.

Some of the perils of thinking

From Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books (1800-06)we

With all my indolence I have ever grown in knowledge of myself without possessing the power to effect an improvement; indeed, the fact that I could perceive how indolent I was has often seemed to me sufficient recompense for it, and the pleasure I received from the exact observation of a fault was often greater than the vexation aroused in me by the fault itself. So very much more did I account the professor in me than I did the man. Strange are the ways Heaven directs its saints.

From Soren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (1843), collected in The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard (1952)

The act of choosing is essentially a proper and stringent expression of the ethical. Whenever in a stricter sense there is a question of an either/or, one can always be sure that the ethical is involved. The only absolute either/or is the choice between good and evil, but that is also absolutely ethical.

From Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave (1951)

I am now forced to admit that anxiety is my true condition, occasionally intruded upon by work, pleasure, melancholy, or despair.

From Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)

Leonartus Fuchsius, Felix Plater, Herc. de Saxonia, speak of a peculiar fury which comes by overmuch study. Fernelius puts study, contemplation, and continual meditation as an especial cause of madness: and in his 86th consul. cites the same words. Jo. Arculanus amongst other causes reckons up studium vehemens [passionate study]: so doth Levinus Lemnius. “Many men” (saith he) “come to this malady by continual study, and night-waking, and of all other men, scholars are most subject to it”; and such, Rhasis adds, “that have commonly the finest wits.” Marsilius Ficinus puts melancholy amongst one of those five principal plagues of students, ’tis a common moll unto them all, and almost in some measure an inseparable companion.

From Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave (1951)

As we grow older, in fact, we discover that the lives of most human beings are worthless except in so far as they contribute to the enrichment and emancipation of the spirit. However attractive in our youth the animal graces may seem, if by out maturity they have not led us to emend one character in the corrupt text of existence, then our time has been wasted. No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, something more than we could learn by ourselves, from a book.

From Cicero’s De Senectute

For my part, in truth, I should rather be old less long than to be old before my time.

From James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951)

Warden sighed. “I believe the only sin is a conscious waste of energy. I believe all conscious dishonesty, such as religion, politics and the real estate business, are a conscious waste of energy. I believe that at a remarkable cost in energy people agree to pretend to believe each other’s lies so they can prove to themselves their own lies are the truth, like my brother. Since I cannot forget what the truth is, I gravitated, naturally, along with the rest of the social misfits who are honest into the Army as an EM. Now what do you say we have another drink? Since we’ve settled the problems of God, Society, and the Individual I really think we should have another drink.”