Category: Reading

“In this breathless pause at the threshold of a long passage we seemed to be measuring our fitness for a long and arduous enterprise, the appointed task of both our existences to be carried out, far from all human eyes, with only sky and sea for spectators and for judges.”

 

I bought this book last year on a rare during the great snowstorms in New England.  Life wasn’t very conducive to reading at that time. The book languished on the coffee table until spring arrived. By then wintry obsessions were the last thing I wanted to read about.  Now we are snowed in again, so the book will get another chance.

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Ornithology

“There is here, first, an interest in human life as a whole, and secondly, a desire to make it a better thing than it is. That is, we shall find two main marks of this spirit: First what is properly called realism; though the word is so constantly misused that we had better avoid it. I mean, a permanent interest in life itself, and an aversion to unreality or make-believe. … Secondly, a keen feeling of the values of things, that some things are good and others bad, some delightful, others horrible; and a power of appreciating, like a sensitive instrument, the various degrees of attraction and repulsion, joy and pain.

“Here we run upon one of the great antitheses of life, and one which, it seems to me, is largely solved by the progressive, or I may say, by the Hellenic spirit: the antitheses between asceticism or Puritanism on the one hand, and the full artistic appreciation of life on the other. In real life and in literature these two spirits fight a good deal. But both, of course, are parts of one truth. If life is to be enriched and ennobled, you must first of all have an appreciation of life. A man who refuses to feel and enjoy life destroys it at its very heart. On the other hand, any strict Puritan can always point to an immense amount of wreckage produced by great appreciation of the joys of life, and also to a large amount of good safe living produced by the principles of avoiding pleasure, dulling the desires, and habitually pouring cold water into your won and other people’s soup, ‘to take the Devil out of it.’ There is plenty of opportunity for dispute here in real life. In speculation there seems to me to be none. The truth simply is that in order to get at one desirable end you have to sacrifice another. The artistic side of man insists upon the need of understanding and appreciating all good and desirable things: the ascetic side insists on the need of a power to resist, a power even to despise and ignore, every one of them, lest they should hinder the attainment of something better.

“The combination of these two, the appreciation of good things and the power to refuse them, is characteristic of the spirit of progress. I think most scholars will admit that it is also eminently characteristic of Greek civilization.”

“Origo means a spring, a rising of water. And, though it is generally a mere waste of ingenuity to tie the sense of a word down to its supposed derivation, I suspect that the most fruitful way of understanding the word ‘originality’ may be to remember this meaning. We do call a work of art original when it produces the impression of a living source, so that one says: ‘Here is beauty or wisdom springing; not drawn through long pipes nor collected in buckets.’ This spring-like self-moving quality is a thing which does not depend on novelty, and therefore cannot grow stale. I remember examining in Florence a MS. of Euripides, which was very hard to read, blurred with age and sea-water and exposure to the sun. And as I pored over it, there gradually showed through the dusty blur the first words of a  lyric in the Alcestis. It was as old as the hills, and I had long known it by heart. Yet the freshness of it glowed through that rather stale air like something young and living. I remember a feeling of flowers and of springing water.”

“The thing that is of importance in a poem, given the necessary technical power, is not mere novelty, nor yet personal knowledge or experience, but simply the intensity of imagination with which the poet has realized his subject. And that intensity may be the product of a thousand things; of which personal experience may, but need not, be one. Almost the first characteristic which one notes in what we call a ‘man of genius’ is his power of making a very little experience reach an enormous way. This sounds very different from Carlyle’s definition of genius as an infinite capacity for taking pains. But in reality that capacity for taking pains is itself dependent on an intense and absorbing interest. So long as you are really interested, you cannot help taking pains. As the interest fades, you first begin to be conscious of the pains, and then cease to take any more.

“In the same way, when we blame a work of Art as ‘conventional’ or ‘laboured’ or the like, we are often using language loosely. A laboured work is of course not a work on which the man has worked hard: it is a work in which the labour is more manifest than the result, or in which one is somehow conscious of labour. Pains have been taken, but some other factor of success is not there. A conventional work is not a work composed according to the rules of some convention or other. All art is that. It is a work in which other qualities are lacking, and the convention obtrudes itself.”

“Intensity of imagination is the important thing. It is intensity of imagination that makes a poet’s work ‘real’, as we say; spontaneous, infectious or convincing. Especially it is this that creates an atmosphere; that makes us feel, on opening the pages of a book, that we are in a different world, and a world full of real beings about whom, in one way or another, we care. And I suspect that ultimately the greatness of a poem or work of imaginative art depends mostly upon two questions: how strongly we feel ourselves transported to this new world, and what sort of a world it is when we get there, how great or interesting or beautiful. Think of the first scene of Hamlet, the first page of the Divina Commedia, the first lines of the Agamemnon; how swiftly and into what wonderful regions they carry you! And if you apply this same test to the Iliad or Odyssey, the response is so amazing that you understand at once why these poems have so often and in such various ages been considered absolutely of all the greatest.”

“Now this intensity of imagination can be attained by many writers at their most exalted moments. Their imagination can follow the call of their emotions. But one of the extraordinary things in the Iliad is the prevalence of this intensity all through the ordinary things of life. ‘As riseth the screaming of cranes in front of the sunrise, cranes that have fled from winter and measureless rain, screaming they fly over the streams of ocean, bearing unto the dwarf-men battle and death.’  Who that can once read Homer freely, untroubled by difficulties of language, can ever forget the cranes? And not only the cranes, but the swarming bees, the flies about the milk-pails, the wolves and boars and lions and swift dogs, and the crook-horned swing-footed kine? It is a fairly wide world that the poets lay open to us, and every remotest corner of it is interesting and vivid, every commonest experience in it, the washing of hands, the eating of food, the acts of sleeping and waking, shares somehow in the beauty and even in the grandeur of the whole. Mr. Mackail has observed how full the poems are of images drawn from fire: the bright armour flashes like fire, the armies clash, ‘even as destroying fire that falls upon a limitless forest’; a hero’s ‘hands are like unto fire and his wrath unto red iron’; and the men ‘fight together, a body of burning fire’. The whole poem is shot through with this fire, which seems like a symbol of the inward force of which we have been speaking, a fiery intensity of imagination. Given this force within, and the Homeric language as an instrument for its expression, a language more gorgeous than Milton’s, yet as simple and direct as that of Burns, there is no further need to be surprised at the extraordinary greatness of the Iliad.”

“…because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”