Tuesday, February 24, 2009

risibility

Risibility

[riz-uh-BIL-i-tee]

1. Often, risibilities.
the ability or disposition to laugh;
humorous awareness of the ridiculous and absurd.

1550–60; < LL rīsibilis that can laugh, equiv. to L rīs(us) (ptp. of rīdēre to laugh)

It might be too easy to praise the rhythm section considering how easy it is to find the risibility about the other half, but it is thrilling, after nearly two decades, to hear Steven Perkins and Eric A beast out after the bridge of "Ted, Just Admit It".

Friday, February 13, 2009

Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet

Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet, Penguin, New York, 1976

Each took off his hat to mop his brow and put it beside him; and the smaller man noticed, written inside his neighbor’s hat, Bouvard; while the latter easily made out the word Pecuchet, in the cap belonging to the individual in the frock-coat. / ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘we both had the same idea, writing our names inside our headgear.’ 21

Bouvard walked with long strides, while Pecuchet, with short, quick step, his frock-coat catching on his heels, seemed to glide on castors. Similarly their personal tastes were in harmony. Bouvard smoked a pipe, liked cheese, regularly took his cup of black coffee. Pecuchet took snuff, ate nothing but preserves for dessert and dipped a lump of sugar in his coffee. One was confident, thoughtless, generous; the other discreet, thoughtful, thrifty. 27

One Sunday they started walking in the morning and by way of Meudon, Bellevue, Suresnes, Auteuil, roamed about all day in vineyards, picked poppies from the edge of the fields, slept on the grass, drank milk, ate beneath the acacias of little inns, and came back very late, dusty, exhausted, delighted. They often repeated such excursions. They found the next day so dull that they finally gave them up. 29

He knew about their dream, and one fine day came to tell them that he had heard of an estate, at Chavignolles, between Caen and Falaise. It consisted of a farm of thirty-eight hectares, with a sort of manor house and a garden in full production. 33

When he approached (35) farms, dogs barked. He cried out with all his might to ask for directions. No one answered. He was afraid and went back into the open country. Suddenly two lanterns shone out. He saw a gig, and ran to meet it. Bouvard was aside. / But wherever could the removal van be? For a good hour they hailed it in the darkness. At last it turned up and they arrived at Chavignolles. / A great fire of brushwood and pine cones blazed in the main room. Two places were laid at the table. The furniture brought by the cart filled the vestibule. Nothing was missing. They sat down to talk. / The dinner prepared for them consisted of onion soup, a chicken, bacon and hard-boiled eggs. The old woman who did the cooking came from time to time to enquire how they found everything. They answered: ‘Oh, very good, very good!’ and the coarse bread, too hard to cut, the cream, the nuts, everything filled them with delight. There were holes in the flooring, the walls were sticky with damp. Yet they looked around them with a satisfied eye as they ate at the little table on which a candle burned. Their faces were flushed from the open air. They filled their bellies, leaned back on the backs of their chairs, making them crack, and kept saying to each other: ‘Well, here we are! Aren’t we lucky! It feels like a dream!’ 36

Then came the bad days, snow, bitter cold. They installed themselves in the kitchen, and made trellises; or perhaps inspected the bedrooms, chatted by the fireside, watched the rain come down. 40

A young girl, barefoot in her sandals, an din a dress so torn as to reveal her body, was giving the woman drinks, pouring out cider from a pitcher steadied against her hip. The count asked where the child came from; no one knew anything about it. The haymaking women had picked her up to serve them during the harvest. He shrugged his shoulders and, as he went off, made some critical remarks about rural immorality. 42

Bouvard tried to train the apricot trees. They rebelled. He cut their trunks down to ground level; none of them grew up again. The cherry trees, which he had notched, produced gum….They rose at dawn and worked on into the night, with a rush basket at their waist. In the chilly spring mornings Bouvard kept o his knitted waistcoat under his smock, Pecuchet his old coat under his overall, and people who passed along the fence heard them coughing in the mist. 54

Besides, her domestic talents were well-known, and she had an admirably well-kept little farm. / Foureau addressed Bouvard: ‘Do you intent to sell yours?’ / ‘My goodness, so far, I am not too sure…’ / ‘What, not even the bit at Les Ecalles?’ the lawyer went on; ‘It would just suit you, Madame Bordin.’ / The widow replied, simpering: ‘Monsieur Bouvard might be asking too much.’ / ‘Perhaps he could be softened up.’ / ‘I am not going to try!’ / ‘Oh, supposing you gave him a kiss?’ / ‘Let’s try, all the same,’ said Bouvard. / And he kissed her on both cheeks, amid general applause. / Almost immediately the champagne was opened, and the popping corks added further to the hilarity. Pecuchet gave a signal, the curtains parted and the garden appeared. 61

Suddenly, with a noise like a shell bursting, the still exploded into twenty pieces which shot up to the ceiling, breaking the sauce-pans, squashing the skimmers, shattering the glass; the coal scattered everywhere, the furnace was demolished, and next day Germaine found a spatula in the yard. / The pressure of the steam had broken the instrument, because the cucurbit was bolted to the top. / Pecuchet had at once crouched down behind the vat, and Bouvard had collapsed on a stool. For ten minutes they remained in these positioned, not daring to move a muscle, pale with terror, amid the shattered fragments. When they were capable of utterance, they (67) asked themselves the cause of so many misfortunes, especially this last one. It was all beyond their comprehension, except that they had nearly died. Pecuchet concluded with these words: / ‘Perhaps it is because we don’t know any chemistry!’ 68

How wonderful to find in living creatures the same substance as those which make up minerals. Nevertheless they felt a sort of humiliation at the idea that their persons contained phosphorus like matches, albumen like white of egg, hydrogen gas like street lamps. / After colours and fats they came on to fermentation. / This led them on to acids, and the law of equivalents upset them once more. They tried to elucidate it with the theory of atoms, and then they were completely lost. / If they were to understand all that, according to Bouvard, they would need instruments. / 69 The expense was considerable, and they had spent too much. / But Dr Vaucorbeil could no doubt enlighten them. / They presented themselves during his consulting hours. / ‘Yes, gentlemen? What is wrong with you?’ / Pecuchet replied that they were not ill, and after explaining the purpose of their visit: ‘First we should like to know about superior atomicity.’ / The doctor went very red, then criticized them for wanting to learn chemistry. 70

They were seen running along the highway, wearing damp clothes in the heat of the sun. This was to check whether think is allayed by applying water to the epidermis. 74

On the principle that inflammation can be prevented by lowering temperatures, they treated a woman suffering from meningitis by hanging her from the ceiling in her chair and pushing her to and fro, until her husband arrived and threw them out. 79

In the coach Bouvard and Pecuchet made conversation with three peasants, two women and a seminarist, and did not hesitate to describe themselves as engineers. / They stopped before the harbour. They made for the cliff, and five minutes later skirted it to avoid a great pool of water advancing like a gulf in the middle of the shore. Then they saw an arcade opening onto a deep cave; it was sonorous, very light, like a church, with columns from top to bottom and a carpet of seaweed all along its floor. / This work of nature astonished them, and gave rise to lofty considerations about the origin of the world. 93

Geology is too defective! We hardly know more than a few parts of Europe. As for the rest, including the sea bed, we shall never know about it. / Finally Pecuchet uttered the word ‘mineral kingdom’. / ‘I don’t believe in it, this mineral kingdom! Since organic matter contributed to the formation of flint, chalk, perhaps gold! Weren’t diamonds once carbon? Coal a collection of vegetable matter? If you heat it up to I forget how many degrees you get sawdust, so that everything decays, crumbles, changes form. Creation is put together in such an elusive and transitory fashion; we should do better to take up something else!’ 99

The academician was annoyed, and did not answer any more, which made them very glad, for they had become very bored with the Druids. / If they did not know where they stood with ceramics and Celticism it was because they were ignorant of history, especially the history of France. 118

It was during the summer of 1845, in the garden, under the arbour, Pecuchet, with his feet up on a small seat, was reading aloud in his booming voice, tirelessly, only stopping to dip his fingers into his snuff-box. Bouvard was listening to him, pipe in mouth, legs apart, the top of his trousers undone. 119

Besides, dates are not always authentic. They learned in a school manual that Christ’s birth should be brought back five years earlier than is generally reckoned, that the Greeks had three ways of counting Olympiads, and the Latins eight ways of beginning the year. These were all so many occasions for error, apart from those resulting from different zodiacs, eras and calendars. / From carelessness about dates they passed on to contempt for facts. / What matters is the philosophy of history! 122

‘How many questions there are of a quite different importance, and how much more difficult!’ / From which they concluded the external facts are not everything. They must be completed by psychology. Without imagination history of defective— ‘Let’s send for some historical novels!’ [129, end of Chapter 4] First they read Walter Scott. / They were as surprised as if they had found a new world. / The men of the past who had been mere names or phantoms for them became living beings… 130

After lunch they installed themselves in the small living-room, at either side of the fireplace; facing each other, with book in hand, they would read silently. When dusk began to fall they would go for a walk along the highway, then dine in haste and continue their reading into the night. 130

After Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas entertained them to a kind of magic lantern show. 130

Balzac’s work filled them with wonder, being at once like a teeming Babylon and specks of dust under the microscope. The most ordinary things revealed new aspects. They had not suspected that modern life had such depths. / ‘What an observer!’ cried Bouvard. / ‘Personally I find him fanciful,’ Pecuchet finally said. ‘He believes in occult sciences, the monarchy, the nobility, is dazzled by scoundrels, shoves millions around like centimes, and his bourgeois are not bourgeois but supermen. Why inflate something that is flat and describe so many idiotic things! 133

But Bouvard looked at himself in the mirror. His cheeks still had their colour, his hair curled as it used to, not a tooth had gone, and at the idea that he might still be attractive, his youth returned. Madame Bordin rose up in his memory. She had made advances to him, the first time, when the ricks caught fire, the second at their dinner, then in the museum, during the declamation, and recently she had come without ill-feeling three Sundays running. So he went to see her, and went again, promising himself he would seduce her. / Ever since the day that Pecuchet had watched the young servant drawing water he spoke to her more often; and whether she was sweeping the corridor, hanging out the washing, turning the sauce-pans, he could not have enough of the pleasure of seeing her, surprising himself with his emotions, as during adolescence. He had the same fevers and languors, and was persecuted by the memory of Madame Castillon embracing Gorju. / He questioned Bouvard on the way libertines set about getting themselves women. / ‘You give them presents, take them out to restaurants.’ / ‘Very good! But then?’ / ‘Some pretend to faint, so that you carry them onto a sofa, others drop their handkerchief, the best ones openly give you a rendezvous.’ 176

The table, which was on castors, slid towards the right; the operators, without undoing their fingers, followed its movement; and of its own accord it made two more turns. Everyone was stupefied. / Then Monsieur Alfred said loud and clear: / ‘Spirit, how do you find my cousin?’ / The table, slowly oscillating, rapped nine times. / According to a placard, on which the number of strokes was translated into letters, that meant ‘charming’. Applause broke out. 187

They bribed Chamberlan, who secretly provided them with an old skull. A tailor made them two long black coats, with hoods, as on a monk’s habit. The Falaise coach brought them a long roll in an envelope. Then they set to work, one of them curious to carry it out, the other afraid to believe in it. 198 …They had even stuck a candle inside the skull, and its rays shone out through the two eye-sockets. / In the middle, on a foot-warmer, incense smoked. Bouvard stood behind; and Pecuchet, with his back to him, threw handfuls of sulphur into the hearth. 199 … It was their old servant who, spying on them through a crack in the partition, thought she had seen the devil, and was kneeling in the corridor repeatedly making the sign of the cross. / Any discussion was pointless. She left them that very evening, unwilling to serve such people any longer. 200

The aim of psychology is to study the facts taking place ‘in the heart of the self’. They are discovered by observation. / ‘Let us observe!’ And for two weeks, usually after lunch, they searched their consciousness, at random, hoping to make great discoveries, and made none, which greatly astonished them. 206

And they examined the question of suicide. / What is wrong with throwing off a crushing burden and committing an act that does nobody any harm? It is offended God, should we have such a power? It is not an act of cowardice, whatever people may say, and it is a fine piece of insolence to flout, even to one’s own detriment, what men esteem most. 219

The Gospel made their souls expand, dazzled them like sunshine. 222

In order to mortify himself, Pecuchet stopped his glass of spirits after meals, cut himself down to four pinches of snuff a day, left off his cap in the coldest weather. / One day Bouvard, who was tying up the vine, set a ladder against the wall of the terrace near the house, and unintentionally found himself looking into Pecuchet’s room. / 224 His friend, stripped to the waist, was gently beating his shoulders with the clothes-beater, then, warming to his task, took off his breeches, lashed his backside, and fell into a chair, out of breath. / Bouvard was disturbed as one is at discovering any mystery which is not meant to be detected. 225

In return for an income of 7,500 francs, Madam Bordin was proposing to Monsieur Bouvard that she should buy their farm. / She had had her eye on it since her youth, knew all its ins and outs, good and bad points; and this desire was eating away at her like a cancer. For the good lady, like any true Norman, cherished above all property, not so much for the sake of capital security as for the pleasure of treading on ground actually belonging to oneself. 231

Meditating on Christ’s Passion, Pecuchet worked himself up into a fervour of love. He would have liked to offer Christ his soul, others’ souls, the ecstasies, transports, illuminations of the saints, every creature, the whole universe. 232

It is an excellent habit to look at things as so many symbols. If (234) thunder rumbles, picture to yourself the Last Judgment; faced with a cloudless sky, think of the sojourn of the blessed; say to yourself when you are out walking that every step brings you nearer death. Pecuchet observed this method. 234

‘Explain the Trinity to me,’ said Bouvard. / ‘With pleasure. Let us take a comparison: the three sides of a triangle, or rather our soul, which contains being, knowing, willing; what in man is called a faculty is in God a person. That is the mystery.’ / ‘But each of the three sides of the triangle is not the triangle; these three faculties of the soul do not make three souls, and your persons of the Trinity are three Gods.’ / ‘Blasphemy!’ / ‘Then there is only one person, one God, one substance affected in three ways!’ / ‘Let us worship without understanding,’ said the cure. 235

Friday, February 06, 2009

Julian Barnes, Nothing To Be Frightened Of

Julian Barnes, Nothing To Be Frightened Of, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2008

My brother remembers a ritual—never witnessed by me—which he called the Reading of the Diaries. Grandma and Grandpa each kept separate diaries, and of an evening would sometimes entertain themselves by reading out loud to one another what they had recorded on that very week several years previously. The entries were apparently of considerable banality but frequent disagreement. Grandpa: “ ‘Friday. Worked in garden. Planted potatoes.’” Grandma: “Nonsense. ‘Rained all day. Too wet to work in garden.’” 6

…I asked, “But you approve of R.?” / “It’s irrelevant,” my brother replied, “whether or not I approve of R.” / “No, it’s not. C. might want you to approve of him.” / “On the contrary, she might want me not to approve of him.” / “But either way, it’s not irrelevant to her whether or not you approve or disapprove.” / He thought this over for a moment. “You’re right,” he said. / You can perhaps tell from the these exchanges that he is the elder brother. 8-9

…my mother telephoned and picked up on the fact that I had described myself as an agnostic. She told me that this was how Dad used to describe himself—whereas she was an atheist. She made it sound as if being an agnostic was a wishy-washy liberal position, as opposed to the truth-and-marked-forces reality of atheism. “What’s all this about death anyway?” she continued. I explained that I didn’t like the idea of it. “You’re just like your father,” she replied. “Maybe it’s your age. When you get to my age you won’t mind so much. I’ve seen the best of life anyway. 9

He died a modern death, in hospital, without his family, attended in his final minutes by a nurse, months—indeed, years—after medical science had prolonged his life to a point where the terms on which it was being offered were unimpressive. 10

Wanting to see her dead came more, I admit, from writerly curiosity than filial feeling… 13

My father had died at the same age. I had always imagined that his would be the harder death, because I had loved him the more, whereas at best I could only be irritatedly fond of my mother. But it worked the other way round… 13

The son of a tobacconist, Alex was reading Wittgenstein at sixteen, and writing poetry which pulsed with ambiguities—double, triple, quadruple, like heart bypasses. He was better than me at English, and took a scholarship to Cambridge, after which I lost sight of him. Down the years I would occasionally imagine his presumed success in one of the liberal professions. I was over fifty when I learnt that such biography-giving was an idle fantasy. Alex had killed himself—with pills, over a woman—in his late twenties, half my life ago. / So I had no faith to lose, only a resistance, which felt more heroic than it was, to the mild regime of God-fearing that an English education entailed: scripture lessons, morning prayers and hymns, the annual Thanksgiving service in St. Paul’s Cathedral. And what was it, apart from the role of Second Shepherd in a nativity play at my primary school. I was never baptized, never sent to Sunday school. I have never been to a normal church service in my life. I do baptisms, weddings, funerals. I am constantly going into churches, but for architectural reasons; and, more widely, to get a sense of what Englishness once was. 15

… “Go on, believe! It does no harm.” This weak-tea version, the weary murmur of a man with a metaphysical headache, comes from Wittgenstein’s notebooks. If you were the Deity, you might be a little unimpressed by such lukewarm endorsement. But there are times, probably, when “it does no harm”—except for not being true, which some might find irreducible, unnegotiable harm. / As an example: some twenty years before he wrote this note, Wittgenstein worked as a schoolmaster in several remote villages of lower Austria. The locals found him austere and eccentric, yet devoted to his pupils; also willing, despite his own religious doubts, to begin and end each day with the paternoster. While teaching at Trattenbach, Wittgenstein took his pupils on a study trip to Vienna. The nearest station was at Gloggnitz, twelve miles away, so the trip began with a pedagogic hike through the intervening forest, with the children being asked to identify plants and stones they had studied in class. In Vienna, they spent two days doing the same with examples of architecture and technology. Then they took the train back to Gloggnitz. By the time it arrived, night was falling. They set off on their return twelve-mile hike. Wittgenstein, sensing that many of the children were frightened, went from one to the other, saying quietly, “Are you afraid? Well, then, you must think only about God.” They were, quite literally, in a dark wood. Go on, believe! It does no harm. And presumably it didn’t. A nonexistent God will at least protect you from nonexistent elves and sprites and wood demons, even if not from existent wolves and bears (and lionesses.) / A Wittgenstein scholar suggests that while the philosopher was not “a religious person,” there was in him “in some sense, the possibility of religion”; though his idea of it was less to do with belief in a creator than with a sense of sin and a desire for judgment. He thought that “Life can educate one to a belief in God”—this is one of his last notes. He also imagined himself being asked the question of whether or not he would survive death, and replying that he couldn’t say: not for the reasons you or I might give, but because “I haven’t a clear idea of what I am saying when I’m saying ‘I don’t cease to exist.’” I shouldn’t think many of us do, except for fundamentalist self-immolators expecting very specific rewards. Though what it means, rather than what it might imply, is surely within our grasp. 22-23

My friend R. recently asked me how often I think about death, and in what circumstances. At least once each waking day, I replied; and then there are the intermittent nocturnal attacks. Mortality often gatecrashes my consciousness when the outside world presents an obvious parallel: as evening falls, as the days shorten, or towards the end of a long day’s hiking. 24

In the 1920s, Sibelius would go to the Kamp restaurant in Helsinki and join the so-called “lemon table”: the lemon being the Chinese symbol of death. He and his fellow-diners—painters, industrialists, doctors, and lawyers—were not just permitted, but required to talk about death. 25

… “Fear of death may be the most intense emotion of all. I sometimes think that there is no deeper feeling.” These views were not publicly expressed. Shostakovich knew that death—unless it came in the form of heroic martyrdom—was not an appropriate subject for Soviet art, that it was “tantamount to wiping your nose on your sleeve in company.” He could not have the Dies Irae blaze from his scores; he had to be musically covert. 27

This is not, by the way, “my autobiography.” Nor am I “in search of my parents.” I know that being someone’s child involves both a sense of nauseated familiarity and large no-go areas of ignorance—at least, if my family is anything to judge by. And though I still wouldn’t mind a transcript of that pouffe’s contents, I don’t think my parents had any rare secrets. Part of what I’m doing—which may seem unnecessary—is trying to work out how dead they are. My father died in 1992, my mother in 1997. 35-36

…Jules Renard, who said: “It is when faced with death that we turn most bookish.” 39

Nowadays, our ambitions have grown more puny. “Courage,” Larkin wrote “Aubade,” his great death-poem, “means not scaring others.” Not back then it didn’t. It meant a great deal more: showing others how to die honourably, wisely, and with constancy. / One of Montaigne’s key instances is the story of Pomponius Atticus, a correspondent of Cicero’s. When Atticus fell ill, and medical attempts to prolong his existence merely prolonged his pain, he decided that the best solution was to starve himself to death. 41

Miraculously, abstinence turned out to be the best cure for his (unnamed) condition; and soon, the sick man was undeniably on the mend. There was much rejoicing and feasting; perhaps the doctors even withdrew their bills. But Atticus interrupted the merriment. Since we all must die one day, he announced, and since I have already made such fine strides in that direction, I have no desire to turn around now, only to start again another time. And so, to the admiring dismay of those around him, Atticus continued to refuse food and went to his exemplary death. 42

He hopes that death, his companion, his familiar, will make its final house-call when he is in the middle of doing something ordinary—like planting his cabbages. 42

…what exactly are you asking for when you complain against death? Do you want an immortality spent on this earth, given the terms and conditions currently applicable? (I see the argument, but how about a bit of immortality? Half? OK, I’ll settle for a quarter.) 43

I asked him to elaborate on his dismissal of the line “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him” as “soppy.” He admits that he isn’t really sure how to take my statement: “I suppose as a way of saying ‘I don’t believe there are any gods, but I wish there were (or perhaps: but I wish I did).’ 44-45

A common response in surveys of religious attitudes is to say something like, “I don’t got to church, but I have my own personal idea of God.” This kind of statement makes me in turn react like a philosopher. Soppy, I cry. You may have your own personal idea of God, but does God have His own personal idea of you? Because that’s what matters. Whether He’s an old man with a white beard sitting in the sky, or a life force, or a disinterested prime mover, or a clockmaker, or a woman, or a nebulous moral force, or Nothing At All, what counts is what He, She, It or Nothing thinks of you rather than you of them. The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque. It also doesn’t matter whether God is just or benevolent or even observant—of which there seems startlingly little proof—only that He exists. 46

Renard never indulges his child alter ego with retrospective self-pity, that emotion (normally arising in adolescence, though it may last for ever) which renders many reworkings of childhood fake. For Renard, a child was “a small, necessary animal, less human than cat.” This remark comes from his masterpiece, the Journal he kept form 1887 until his death in 1910. 48

Francois Renard, however, knows or believes himself to be incurably ill. Four weeks later, he locks the bedroom door, takes his shotgun, and uses a walking stick to press the trigger. He succeeds in firing both barrels, just to make sure. Jules is summoned; he breaks down the door; there is smoke and the smell of powder. At first he thinks his father must be joking; then he is obliged to believe in the sprawled figure, the unseeing eyes, and the “dark place above the waist, like a small extinguished fire.” He takes his father’s hands; they are still warm, still pliant (50)…Jules judges that his father has died heroically, showing Roman virtues. He notes: “On the whole, this death has added to my sense of pride.” Six weeks after the funeral, he concludes: “The death of my father makes me feel as if I had written a beautiful book.” 51

Missing God is focused for me by missing the underlying sense of purpose and belief when confronted with religious art. Is is one of the haunting hypotheticals for the nonbeliever: what would it be like “if it were true”…Imagine hearing the Mozart Requiem in a great cathedral… 54

Pretending to beliefs we don’t have during Mozart’s Requiem is like pretending to find Shakespeare’s horn jokes funny (though some theatre goers still relentlessly laugh). 55

Montaigne’s nearest British equivalent, Sir Thomas Browne, wrote: “For a pagan there might be some motives to be in love with life, but, for a Christian to be amazed at [i.e. terrified of] death, I cannot see how he can escape this dilemma—that he is too sensible of this life, or hopeless of the life to come.” 61

I can’t claim that confronting death (no, that sounds too active, too pretend-heroic—the passive mode is better: I can’t claim that being confronted by death) has given me any greater accommodation with it, let alone made me wiser, or more serious, or more…anything, really. I could try arguing that we cannot truly savour life without a regular awareness of extinction: it’s the squeeze of the lemon, the pinch of salt that intensifies the flavour. But do I really think that my death-denying (or religious) friends appreciate that bunch of flowers/work of art/glass of wine less than I do? No. 65-66

But I repeat and insist that I suffer from rational (yet RATIONAL) fear. The earliest known Dance of Death, painted on a wall of the Cimetiere des Innocents in Paris in 1425, had a text which began “O creature roysonnable/ Qui desires vie eternelle” [O rational creature/ Who wishes for eternal life]. 66

In 1987 an American neuroscientist claimed to have located exactly where in the brain a certain electrical instability triggers religious feelings…In one experiment, fifteen Carmelite nuns were asked to remember their most profound mystical experiences: scans showed electrical activity and blood oxygen levels surging in at least twelve separate regions of their brains. 68

The differences my mother observed in her two sons pleased me more. “When they were boys, if I was ill, Julian climbed into bed and snuggled up to me, while his brother brought me a cup of tea.” Another distinction she reported: my brother once cacked his pants and responded with the words, “It will never happen again”—and it didn’t; whereas, when I failed to control my infant bowels, I was discovered merrily smearing my shit into the cracks between the floorboards. My favourite differentiation, however, was made much later in our mother’s life. By this time both her sons were established in their separate fields. This is how she expressed her pride in them: “One of my sons writes books I can read but can’t understand, and the other writes books I can understand but can’t read.” 69

Fear of death replaces fear of God. But fear of God—an entirely sane early principle, given the hazard of life and our vulnerability to thunderbolts of unknown origin—at least allowed for negotiation. We talked God down from being the Vengeful One and rebranded Him the Infinitely Merciful; we changed Him form Old to New, like the Testaments and the Labour Party. We levered up His graven image, put it on runners, and dragged it to a place where the weather was sunnier. We can’t do the same with death. Death can’t be talked down, or parlayed into anything; it simply declines to come to the negotiating table. 70

Stendhal… “Waiting for God to reveal himself, I believe that his prime minister, Chance, governs this sad world just as well.” (73)…And now he comes to Florence for the first time. He is arriving from Bologna; the coach crosses the Apennines and begins its descent towards the city. “My heart was leaping wildly within me. What utterly childlike excitement!” As the road bends, the cathedral, with Brunelleschi’s famous dome, comes into sight. At (73) the city gate, he abandons the coach—and his luggage—to enter Florence on foot, like a pilgrim. He finds himself at the church of Santa Croce. Here are the tombs of Michelangelo and Galileo; nearby is Canova’s bust of Alfieri. He thinks of the other great Tuscans: Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch. “The tide of emotion that overwhelmed me flowed so deep that it was scarce to be distinguished from religious awe.” He asks a friar to unlock the Niccolini Chapel and let him look at the frescoes. He seats himself “on the step of a faldstool, with my head thrown back to rest upon the desk, so that I might let my gaze dwell on the ceiling.” The city and the proximity of its famous children have already put Beyle in a state of near trance. Now he is “absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty”; he attains “the supreme degree of sensibility where the divine intimations of art merge with the impassioned sensuality of emotion.” The italics are his. / The physical consequence of all this is a fainting fit. “As I emerged from the porch of Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart…The wellspring of life dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.” Beyle (who was Stendhal by the time he published this account in Rome, Naples and Florence) could describe his symptoms but not name his condition. Posterity, however, can, since posterity always knows best. Beyle was suffering, we can now tell him, from Stendhal’s Syndrome, a condition identified in 1979 by a Florentine psychiatrist who had noted almost a hundred cases of dizziness and nausea brought on by exposure to the city’s art treasures (74-75)…city confusion, timetable stress, masterpiece anxiety, information overload, and too much hot sun mixed with chilly air-conditioning. The very skeptical might wonder whether Stendhal himself was really suffering from Stendhal’s Syndrome…if you sit with your head back, staring for a long time at a painted wall, and then get to your feet and walk from the cool darkness of a church into the bright, dusty, frenetic swirl of a city, might you not expect to feel a little faint?...who would not understand and envy a man swooning at the Giottos in Santa Croce, the more so as he was seeing them with a mind and eye untrammeled by previous reproduction? The story is true, not least because we want it, we need it to be true. 75

Professor C. of Oxford… “The religion of art makes people worse, because it encourages contempt for those considered inartistic.” There may be something in this, though the larger problem, in Britain at least, is that of contempt from the opposite direction: from the complacent philistine towards those who practice and value the arts. 76

In my second term at Oxford, I had decided to give up modern languages for the more “serious” study of philosophy and psychology…How, I asked him, could I possibly be expected to have any understanding of, or sensible opinions about, a play like Phedre when I had only the remotest experience of the volcanic emotions depicted in it? He gave me a wry, donnish smile: “Well, which of us can ever say that we have?” / At this time, I kept a box of green index cards, onto which I copied epigrams, witticisms, scraps of dialogue, and pieces of wisdom worth preserving. Some of them strike me now as the meretricious generalizations that youth endorses… 83

Maugham… “Beauty is a bore.” 84

During the era of piety, princes and rich burghers used to summon priest and prelate to reassure them of the certainty of heaven and the rewards their prayers and monetary offerings had ensured. The agnostic Maugham now did the opposite: he summoned A. J. Ayer, the most intellectually and socially fashionable philosopher of the day, to reassure him that death was indeed final, and that nothing, and nothingness, followed it. The need for such reassurance might be explained by a passage in The Summing Up. There Maugham relates how, as a young man, he lost his belief in God, but nonetheless retained for a while an instinctive fear of hell, which it took him another metaphysical shrug to dislodge. Perhaps he was still looking over his shoulder. 84-85

Jules Renard imagined just such a parade-ground God, who would keep reminding those who finally made it to heaven: “You aren’t here to have fun, you know.” 88

On another day the wireless would disgorge The Critics, a band of suave aesthetic experts droning on about plays we would never see and books that never came into the house. My brother and I would listen with a kind of stunned boredom, which was not just of the present, but anticipatory: if such opinion-giving and –receiving was what adulthood contained, then it seemed not merely unattainable, but actively undesirable. 90

…will Richard Dawkins die better than our genetic ancestors hundreds or thousands of years ago? Dawkins has expressed the hope that “When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.” Clear enough, if illegal; yet death has an obstinate way of denying us the solutions we imagine for ourselves. 94

His father was a hospital surgeon; the family lived above the shop; Achille Flaubert would often come straight from his operating table to his dining table. The boy Gustave would climb a trellis and peer in at his father instructing medical students how to dissect corpses. He saw bodies covered in flies, and students casually resting their lit cigars on the limbs and trunks they were hacking away at. Achille would glance up, spot his son’s face at the window, and wave him away with his scalpel. 95

In April 1848, when Flaubert was twenty-six, the literary friend of his youth, Alfred Le Poittevin, died…He kept a vigil over his dead friend for two consecutive nights…When the undertakers arrived with the coffin, he kissed his friend on the temple (95) …Twenty-one years after Le Poittevin’s death, Louis Bouilhet, the literary friend of Flaubert’s maturity, died…You might think—if pit-gazing worked—that the previous experiences would make this one more bearable. But Flaubert found that he could not bear to see, watch over, embrace, wrap, or kiss the friend who had been so close that he once called him “my left testicle.”… “I did not dare see him! I feel weaker than I did twenty years ago…I lack any internal toughness. I feel worn out.” 96

Ah, the therapeuto-autobiographical fallacy. However well meant, it irritates me…Nor does writing about death either diminish or increase my fear of it. 97

I expect my departure to have been preceded by severe pain, fear, and exasperation at the imprecise or euphemistic use of language around me. 99

[Before mid-20s] As a young man, I was terrified of flying. The book I would choose to read on a plane would be something I felt appropriate to have found on my corpse. I remember taking Bouvard et Pecuchet on a flight from Paris to London…and I was naturally too scared during the flight to concentrate on a novel whose ironic truths in any case tend to be withheld from younger readers. 105

…Flaubertian self-reminder: “Be regular and ordinary in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” 108

…Voltaire had similarly clung to his own pulse until the moment he slowly shook his head and, a few minutes later, died. An admirable death—with not a priest in sight—worthy of Montaigne’s catalogue. Not that it impressed everyone. Mozart, then in Paris, wrote to his father, “You probably already know that that godless arch-rogue Voltaire has died like a dog, like a beast—that’s his reward!” Like a dog, indeed. 110

Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death. 111

That medieval bird flies from darkness into a lighted hall and back out again. One of the oh-so-sensible arguments against death-anxiety goes like this: if we don’t fear and hate the eternity of time leading up to our brief moment of illuminated life, why therefore should we feel differently about the second spell of darkness, the universe—or at least, a very, very insignificant part of it—was leading up to the creation of something of decided interest…So that darkness had some purpose—at least, from my solipsistic point of view… 114

…my sense of morality is influenced by Christian teaching (or, more exactly, pre-Christian tribal behaviour codified by the religion)… 116

My mother considered quite seriously whether she would rather go deaf or go blind. Preferring one incapacity in advance seemed a superstitious method of ruling out the other. 121

The arrival into New York—the transit from airport to city—involves passing one of the vastest cemeteries I have ever seen. I always half-enjoy this ritual memento mori, probably because I have never come to love New York. All the bustle in that most ever-bustling and narcissistic of cities will come to this; Manhattan mocked by the packed verticality of the headstones. 127

Wharton’s success as a novelist is the more surprising—and the more admirable—given how little her view of life accorded with American hopefulness. She saw small evidence of redemption. She thought life a tragedy—or at best a grim comedy—with a tragic ending. Or, sometimes, just a drama with a dramatic ending. (Her friend Henry James defined life as “a predicament before death.” And his friend Turgenev believed that “the most interesting part of life is death.”) 129

A biographer friend once suggested she take the slightly longer view and write my life. Her husband argued satirically that this would make a very short work as all my days were the same. “Got up,” his version went. “Wrote book. Went out, brought bottle of wine. Came home, cooked dinner. Drank wine.” 129

Eugene O’Kelly was a fifty-three-year-old chairman and CEO of a top American accountancy firm (139)… three months and barely a day longer. / O’Kelly responds to this news like the “goal-driven person” and ultimate corporate competitor that he is. “Just as a successful executive is driven to be as strategic and prepared as possible to ‘win’ at everything, so I was now driven to be as methodical as possible during my last hundred days.” He plans to apply “the skill set of a CEO” to his predicament. He realizes that he must “come up with new goals. Fast.” He tries to “figure out how I as an individual needed to reposition swiftly to adjust to the new circumstances of my life.” He draws up “the final and most important to-do list of my life.” / Priorities, methods, targets. He gets his business and financial affairs in order. He decides how he is going to “unwind” his rela-(140)tionships by creating “perfect moments” and “perfect days.” He begins “transition to the next state.” He plans his own funeral. Ever competitive, he wants to make his death “the best death possible,” and after completing his to-do list, concludes: “Now, I was motivated to ‘succeed’ at death.” 141

Montaigne didn’t die, as he had dreamed, while planting out his cabbage patch. Death came for the sceptic and epicurean, the tolerant deist, the writer of boundless curiosity and learning, while mass was being celebrated in his bedroom: at the exact moment (or so they said) of the elevation of the host. 144

I, or even I, do not produce thoughts; thoughts produce me. 148

At Oxford, after giving up modern languages, my old-fashioned I studied philosophy for a couple of terms, at the end of which it was told it lacked the appropriate brain for the job. 148

Berkley’s. He held that the world of “houses, mountains, rivers and in a word all sensible objects” consists entirely of ideas, sensory experiences. What we like to think of as the real world, out there, corporeal, touchable, linear in time, is just private images—early cinema—unreeling in our heads…Dr. Johnson kicking a stone and crying, “I refute it thus!” 149

Oh yes, and he often wears a kind of eighteenth-century costume designed for him by his younger daughter: knee breeches, stockings, buckle shoes on the lower half; brocade waistcoat, stock, long hair tied in a bow on the upper. Perhaps I should have mentioned this before. 153

The better you know someone, the less well you often see them…They may be so close as to be out of focus…Often, when we talk about someone very familiar, we are referring back to the time when we first properly saw them, when they were held in the most useful—and flattering—light at the correct focal distance. 155

When I search my memory for specific instructions or advice laid down by my mother—for she would have been the lawgiver—I can only recall dicta not specifically aimed at me. For instance: only a spiv wears brown shoes with a blue suit; never move the hands of a clock or watch backwards; don’t put cheese biscuits in the same tin as sweet ones. Hardly urgent copy for the commonplace book. 156

In all my remembered life, he never told me that he loved me; nor did I reply in kind. 161

Hegel, on his deathbed, said, “Only one man ever understood me,” then added, “and he didn’t understand me.” Emily Dickenson said, “I must go on in. The fog is rising.”…Sometimes a last word might be a last gesture: Mozart’s was to mouth the sound of the timpani in his Requiem, whose unfinished score lay open on his bedspread. 166

Zola died in literary character, in a scene of psycho-melodrama worthy of his early friction. He and Alexandrine had returned to Paris from the house with the threatening window. It was a chilly day in late September, so they ordered a fire to be lit in their bedroom. While they were away, work had been done on the roof of the apartment building, and here the narrative offers the reader a choice of interpretations. The chimney leading from their bedroom had been blocked, either by incompetent artisans or—so the conspiracy runs—by murderous anti-Dreyfusards. The Zolas retired to be, locking the door as was their superstitious habit’ the smokeless fuel in the grate gave off carbon monoxide. In the morning, when servants broke down the door, they found the writer dead on the floor, and Alexandrine—spared the killing concentration of fumes by a few extra feet—unconscious on the bed. 175

[Barnes] A London man, aged anything from sixty-two upwards, died yesterday. For most of his life, he enjoyed good health, and had never spent a night in hospital until his final illness. After a slow and impecunious professional start, he achieved more success than he had expected. After a slow and precarious emotional start, he achieved as much happiness as his nature permitted (“Mine has been a happy life, tinged with despair”). Despite the selfishness of his genes, he failed—or rather, declined—to hand them on, further believing that this refusal constituted an act of free will in the face of biological determinism. He wrote books, then he died. Though a satirical friend thought his life was divided between literature and the kitchen (and the wine bottle), there were other aspects to it: love, friendship, music, art, society, travel, sport, jokes. He was happy in his own company as long as he knew when that solitude would end. He loved his wife and feared death. 175

Studies indicate that “of all the professions, medicine is the one most likely to attract people with high personal anxieties about dying.” 177

I understand (I think) that life depends on death…in order for complex organisms like you and me to inhabit this planet, for there to be self-conscious and self-replicating life, and enormous sequence of evolutionary mutations has had to be tried out and discarded. 178

…mothers may feel their mortality more acutely when the children leave home—their biological function has been fulfilled, and all that the universe now needs of them is to die. 179

Camus… “what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport”—specifically to football… 181

…since people imagine themselves with free will, built character and largely consistent beliefs, then this is how the novelist should portray them. But in a few years this might seem the naïve self-justification of a deluded humanist unable to handle the logical consequences of modern thought and science. I am not yet ready to regard myself—or you, or a character in one of my novels—as a distributed neuronal process, let alone replace an “I” or a “he” or a “she” with an “it”… 183

My mother, whenever exasperated by the non-arrival or malfeasance of some goofy handyman or cack-handed service engineer, would remark that she could “write a book” about her experiences with workmen. So she could have done; and how very dull it would have been. It might have contained anecdotes, scenelets, character portraits, satire, even levity; but this would not add up to narrative. And so it is with our lives: one damn thing after another—a gutter replaced, a washing machine fixed—rather than a story. Or (since I meet my GP in concert halls) there is no proper announcement of theme, followed by development, variation, recapitulation, coda, and crunching resolution. There is an occasional heart-lifting aria, much prosaic recitative, but little through-composition. “Life is neither long or short—it merely has longueurs.” 185

When I was a boy, adulthood seemed an inaccessible condition—a mixture of unattainable competences and unenviable anxieties (pensions, dentures, chiropodists); and yet it arrived, though it did not feel from within how it looked from without. Nor did it seem like an achievement. Rather, it felt like conspiracy: I’ll pretend that you’re grown up if you pretend that I am. 186

…is our underlying desire any need for judgment. This is surely one of religion’s gut appeals—and its attraction for Wittgenstein…When we fall in love, we hope—both egotistically and altruistically—that we shall finally, truly seen: judged and approved. 190

For every decade of life after the age of fifty, the brain loses two per cent of its weight; it also takes on a creamy-yellow tinge—“even senescence is colour-coded.” The motor area of our frontal cortex will lose twenty to fifty per cent of its neurons, the visual area fifty per cent, and the physical sensory part about the same…the higher intellectual functions of the brain are much less affected by this widespread cellular morbidity. Indeed, “certain cortical neurons” seem to be become more abundant after we reach maturity, and there is even evidence that the filamentous branchings—the dendrites—of many neurons continue to grow in old people who don’t suffer from Alzheimer’s…From this, “Neurophysiologists may actually have discovered the source of what wisdom we like to think we can accumulate with advancing age.” 195

The truth, as revealed by his doctor’s diary, was that Goethe was “in the grip of a terrible fear and agitation.” The reason for the “horror” of that final day was evident to the doctor: Goethe, the wise Goethe, the man who had everything in perspective, could not avoid the dread… 196

In the first decades of his life, Larkin could sometimes persuade himself that extinction, when it eventually came, might prove a mercy. But by his fifties, his biographer tells us, “The dread of oblivion darkened everything”—and then, “As he entered his sixties his fears grew rapidly.” (203)…Larkin died in a hospital in Hull. A friend, visiting him the day before, said, “If Philip hadn’t been drugged, he would have been raving. He was that frightened.” At 1:24 a.m., a typical deathing hour, he said his last words, to a nurse holding his hand: “I am going to the inevitable.” 204

Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Professor of cosmology and astrophysics at Cambridge: I’d like to widen people’s awareness of the tremendous timespan lying ahead—for our planet, and for life itself. Most educated people are aware that we’re the outcome of nearly 4bn years of Darwinian selection, but may tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6bn years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae. 210-211

Stendhal…After suffering a first stroke, he wrote, “I find that there’s nothing ridiculous about dropping dead in the street, as long as one doesn’t do it deliberately.” On 22 March, 1842, after dining at the Foreign Ministry, he got the non-ridiculous end he sought, on the pavement of the Rue Neuve-des-Capucines. He was buried as “Arrigo Beyle, Milanese,” a rebuke to the French who did not read him, and a tribute to the city where the smell of horse dung had moved him almost to tears. And as a man not unprepared for death (he made twenty-one wills), Stendhal composed his own epitaph: Scrisse. Amo. Visse. He wrote. He loved. He lived. 217-218

Nowadays, it costs five euros to visit the church—or as the ticket prefers, the “monumental complex”—of Santa Croce in Florence. You enter not by the west front, as Stendhal did, but on the north side, and are immediately presented with a choice of route and purpose: the left gate for those who wish to pray, the right for tourists, atheists, aesthetes, idlers. The vast and airy nave of (221) this preaching church still contains those tombs of famous men whose presence softened up Stendhal. Among them now is a relative newcomer: Rossini, who is 1863 asked God to grant him paradise. The composer died in Paris five years later and was buried in Pere-Lachaise; but as with Zola, a proud state came and body-snatched him for its pantheon. Whether God chose to grant Rossini paradise depends perhaps on whether or not God has read the Goncourt Journal. “The sins of my old age”? Here is the Journal’s entry for 20 January 1876: “Last night, in the smoking-room at Princesse Mathilde’s, the conversation turned to Rossini. We talked of his priapism, and his taste, in the matter of love, for unwholesome practices; and then of the strange and innocent pleasures the old composer took in his final years. He would get young girls to undress to the waist and let his hands wander lasciviously over their torsos, while giving them the end of his little finger to suck.” / Stendhal wrote the first biography of Rossini in 1824. Two years later, he published Rome, Naples and Florence, in which he described how Henri, or Arrigo, Beyle had come to Florence in 1811. He descended from the Apennines one January morning, he saw “from a far distance” Brunelleschi’s great dome rising above the city, he got down from the coach to enter on foot like a pilgrim, he stood before paintings which thrilled him till he swooned. And we might still believe every word of his account if he had remembered to do one thing: destroy the diary he had kept of that original trip…In 1811 he couldn’t have seen Brunelleschi’s dome from afar for the simple reason that it was dark. He arrived in Florence at five in (222) the morning, “overcome with fatigue, wet, jolted, obliged to maintain a hold on the front of the mail wagon and sleeping while seated in a cramped position.” Unsurprisingly, he went straight to an inn, the Auberge d’Angleterre, and to bed. He left orders to be woken two hours later, but not for touristic purposes: he headed for the post-house and tried to book himself a seat on the next coach to Rome. But that day’s coach was full, and so was the next day’s—and this was the only reason he stayed in Florence for the three days in which he added to the history of aesthetic response. Another incompatibility: the book sets the visit in January; the diary dates it to September…In the memory of 1826, the chapel was unlocked by a friar, and Stendhal sat on the step of a faldstool, his head thrown back against a desk, to gaze at the frescoed ceiling. In the truth of 1811, there is no friar and no faldstool; further, in both 1811 and 1826, and at any date previous or since, the sibyls have been located (223) high on the walls of the chapel, but not on the ceiling. Indeed, the diary of 1811, after praising the Volterranos, continues: “The ceiling of the same chapel is very effective, but my eyesight is not good enough to judge ceilings. It merely appeared to me to be very effective.” (224) That famous episode in the porch of Santa Croce—the fierce palpitation of the heart, the wellspring of life drying up—was not deemed worthy of a diary entry at the time. The nearest approximation to it… “I was dead tired, my feet swollen and pinched in new boots—a little sensation which would prevent God from being admired in all His glory, but I overlooked it in front of the picture of limbo. Mon Dieu, how beautiful it is!”…Time brings not just narrative variation but emotional increase. And if forensic examination appears to diminish the story of Santa Croce, it remains, even in its original, unimproved version, about aesthetic (225) joy being greater than religious rapture. Fatigue and tight boots would have distracted Beyle from God’s glory, had he gone into the church to pray; but the power of art overcame pinched toes and rubbed heels. 226

The steerer was blindfolded. I’m pretty sure we took it in turns to steer and to push; but I suspect that I pushed you faster than you pushed me. I don’t recall any major accident (nor even anyone being pushed into a wall—which in fact would not have been at all easy, given the layout of the garden). I don’t recall your being frightened. I seem to think we thought it was fun, and rather naughty.” / My niece’s initial summary of the game—my brother blindfolding me before pushing me into a wall—might be a child’s shorthand memory, emphasizing what she herself would most have feared; or it might be a subsequent abbreviation or reimagining made in the light of her relationship with her father. 236

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Edward W. Said, On Late Style

Edward W. Said, On Late Style, Vintage, New York, 2006

...even—in one opera at least—Mozart, where a sudden lateness, as distinct from maturity, produces, as we read in this book, “a special ironic expressiveness well beyond the words and the situation.” / This type of lateness is quite different, Said argued, from the unearthly serenity we find in the last works of Sophocles and Shakespeare. Oedipus at Colonus, The Tempest, and The Winter’s Tale are late enough in their way, but they have settled their quarrel with time. xxi (Michael Wood, Introduction)

“For Adorno,” Said comments, “lateness is the idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal; in addition, lateness includes the idea that one cannot really go beyond lateness at all.” This is precisely what keeps us in time even when we seem to be out of time… xiv

…for all his deep interest in lateness and his awareness of the shortage of his own time, Said was not attracted by the idea of a late, dissolving self…Said wanted to continue with the self’s making, and if we divide a life into early, middle, and late periods, he was still in the middle when he died at the age of sixty-seven in September 2003, twelve years after the first diagnosis of leukemia. Still a little too early, I think he would have said, for real lateness. xviii

I published a book called Beginnings: Intention and Method about how the mind finds it necessary at certain times to retrospectively locate a point of origin for itself as to how things begin in the most elementary sense with birth (4)…Individually, the chronology of discovery is as important for a scientist as it is for someone like Immanuel Kant who reads David Hume for the first time and, he says memorably, is briskly awakened from his dogmatic slumber (4)…Beginnings of this sort necessarily involve an intention that either is fulfilled, totally or in part, or is viewed as totally or in part, or is viewed as totally failed, in successive time. And so the second great problematic is about the continuity that occurs after birth (4-5)…But there are also exceptions, examples of deviation form the overall assumed pattern to human life (5)…I come finally to the last great problematic, which for obvious personal reasons is my subject here—the last or late period of life, the decay of the body, the onset of ill health or other factors that even in a younger person bring on the possibility of an untimely end. I shall focus on great artists and how near the end of their lives their work and thought acquires a new idiom, what I shall be calling a late style. (6)

What if age and ill health don’t produce the serenity of “ripeness is all”? this is the case with Ibsen, whose final works, especially When We Dead Awaken, tear apart the career and the artist’s craft and reopen the questions of meaning, success, and progress that the artist’s late period is supposed to move beyond…It is this second type of lateness as a factor of style that I find deeply interesting. I’d like to explore the experience of late style that involves a nonharmonious, nonserene tension, and above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness going against… 7

In fact, studies of the very late Beethoven seldom fail to make reference to biography and fate. It is as if, confronted by the dignity of human death, the theory of art were to divest itself of its rights and abdicate in favor of reality” (EM 564). Late style is what happens if art does not abdicate its rights in favor of reality. 9

What has evidently gripped Adorno in Beethoven’s late work is its episodic character, its apparent disregard for its own continuity. If we compare a middle-period work, such as the Eroica with the opus 110 sonata, we will be struck with the totally cogent and integrative driven logic of the former and the somewhat distracted, often extremely careless and repetitive character of the latter. The opening theme in the thirty-first sonata is spaced very awkwardly, and when it moves on after the trill, its accompaniment—a studentlike, almost clumsy repetitive figure—is, Adorno correctly says, “unabashedly primitive.” And so it goes in the late works, massive polyphonic writing of the most abstruse and difficult sort alternating with what Adorno calls “conventions” that are often seemingly unmotivated rhetorical devices like trill, or appoggiaturas whose role in the work seems unintegrated into the structure. 10

…as Rose Subotnik puts it, that “no synthesis is conceivable…the vestige of an individual human subject sorely aware of the wholeness, and consequently the survival, that has eluded it forever.” (11)…What Adorno describes here is the way Beethoven seems to inhabit the late works as a lamenting personality, then seems to leave the work or phrases in it incomplete, abruptly dropped, as in the opening of the F Major Quartet or the A Minor. The sense of abandonment is peculiarly acute in comparison with the driven and relentless quality of second-period works such as the Fifth Symphony, where, at moments like the ending of the fourth movement, Beethoven cannot seem to tear himself away from the piece. 11-12

For Adorno…lateness includes the idea that one cannot really go beyond lateness at all, cannot transcend or lift oneself out of lateness, but can only deepen the lateness. 13

Adorno’s prose violates various norms: he assumes little community of understanding between himself and his audience; he is slow, unjournalistic, unpackageable, unskimmable (14-15)…its form exactly replicates its subtitle—reflections from damaged life—a cascading series of discontinuous fragments, all of them in some way assaulting suspicious “wholes,”…To work through the silences and fissures is to avoid packaging and administration and is in fact to accept and perform the lateness of his position. 15

Above all, late style as exemplified by Beethoven and Schoenberg cannot be replicated by invitation, or by lazy reproduction, or by mere dynastic or narrative reproduction, or by lazy reproduction, or by mere dynastic or narrative reproduction. There is a paradox: how essentially unrepeatable, uniquely articulated aesthetic works written not at the beginning but at the end of a career can nevertheless have an influence on what comes after them. 17-18

What we see is Adorno constructing a breathtakingly regressive sequence, an endgame procedure by which he threads his way back along the route taken by Lukacs; all the laboriously devised solutions volunteered by Lukacs for pulling himself out of the slough of modern despair are just as laboriously dismantled and rendered useless by Adorno’s account of what Schoenberg was really about. Fixated on the new music’s absolute rejection of the commercial sphere, Adorno’s words cut out the social ground from underneath art. For in fighting ornament, illusion, reconciliation, communication, humanism, and success, art becomes untenable. (18-19) …Adorno’s descriptions of [late-style Beethoven and Schoenberg] are models, paradigm, constructs intended to highlight certain features and thereby give the two composers a certain appearance, a certain profile in and for Adorno’s own writing… 19

I think it is right therefore to see Adorno’s extremely intense lifelong fixation on third-period Beethoven as the carefully maintained choice of a critical model, a construction made for the benefit of his own actuality as a philosopher and cultural critic in an enforced exile from the society that made him possible in the first place. 21-22

What affects us about Cosi is of course the music, which often seems so incongruously more interesting than the situation Mozart uses it for, except when (especially in the second act) the four lovers express their complex feelings of elation, regret, fear, and outrage. But even at such moments the disparity between Fiordiligi’s assertion of faith and devotion in “Come scoglio” and the genuinely frivolous game she is involved in deflates the noble sentiments and music she utters, making that music seem both impossibly overstated and sensationally beautiful at the same time—a combination, I think, that corresponds to Mozart’s feeling of unsatisfied longing and cold master. Listening to the aria and seeing the hubbub of serious and comic elements jostling one another on the stage, we are kept from wandering off into either speculation or despair, obligated to follow the tight discipline of Mozart’s rigor. 71

Identity is what we impose on ourselves through our lives as social, historical, political, and even spiritual beings. The logic of culture and of families doubles the strength of identity, which to someone like Genet who was a victim of the identity forced on him by his delinquency, his isolation, and his transgressive talents and delights—is something to be resolutely opposed. Above all, given Genet’s choice of sites like Algeria and Palestine, identity is the process by which the stronger culture, and the more developed society, imposes itself violently upon those who, by the same identity process, are decreed to be a lesser people. Imperialism is the export of identity. / Genet therefore is a traveler across identities, the tourist whose purpose is marriage with a foreign cause, so long as that cause is both revolutionary and in constant agitation. 85

Genet is like that other great modern dissolver of identity, Adorno, for whom no thought is translatable into any other equivalent, yet whose relentless urge to communicate his precision and desperation—with fineness and counternarratival energy that makes Minima Moralia his masterpiece—furnishes a perfect metaphysical accompaniment to Genet’s funeral pomp and his scabrous raucousness. 86

For all his geniality Strauss too was a late-style exponent in his last works, retreating into an elusive mix of eighteenth-century instrumentation and deceptively simple and rarified chamber expression designed to outrage his avant-garde contemporaries as much as his local and by-now-uninteresting audiences. 93

…Adorno, Strauss, Lempedusa, and Visconti—like Glenn Gould and Jean Genet…The one thing that is difficult to find in their work is embarrassment, even though they are egregiously self-conscious and supreme technicians. It is as if having achieved age, they want none of its supposed serenity or maturity, or any of its amiability or official ingratiation. Yet in none of them is mortality denied or evaded, but keeps coming back as the theme of death which undermines, and strangely elevates their uses of language and the aesthetic. 114

The virtuoso, after all, is a creation of the bourgeoisie and of the new autonomous, secular, and civic performing spaces (concert and recital halls, parks, and especially built palaces of art to accommodate precisely the recently emergent performer and not the composer) that had replaced the churches, courts, and private estates that had once nurtured Mozart, Haydn, Bach, and in his early years Beethoven. 118

I shall propose, though, is an account of Gould’s work that places him in a particular intellectual critical tradition, in which his quite conscious reformulation and restatements of virtuosity attempt to reach conclusions that are normally sought out not by performers but rather by intellectuals using language only. 121

Gould eschewed distorted effects that he thought typified the requirements of a stage presence, where one had to catch and retain listeners’ attention in the fifth balcony. So he escaped the stage altogether. But what was this an escape into, and where did Gould think he was going? And why was Bach’s music so specifically central to Gould’s intellectual trajectory as virtuoso? 122-123

…he had undertaken a long-standing, volubly stated, and restated rejection of what he called “vertical” romantic music, music that, by the time he began in earnest his career as a musician, had already become the highly commercialized and accepted staple of the piano repertory featuring the kind of manneristic pianistic effects that most of his performers (especially of Bach) avoided strenuously…added substance to Gould’s unusual virtuosic enterprise offstage so to speak. / And indeed the hallmark of his playing style as he continued to produce it, in the complete privacy of the recording studios that he inhabited late at night, was first of all that it communicated a sense of rational coherence and systematic sense, and second, that for that purpose it focused on performing Bach’s polyphonic music as embodying that ideal. 124

Gould’s Bach playing bears the inflections of a profound—and often objected to—idiosyncratic subjectivity, yet is paradoxically presented in such a way as to sound clear, didactically insistent, and contrapuntally sever, with no frills. The two extremes are united in Gould as, Adorno says, they were in Bach himself. 126

To put it simply, this is exactly the kind of Bach that Gould chose to play: a composer whose thinking compositions provided an occasion for the thinking, intellectual virtuoso to try to interpret and invent, or revise and rethink, in his own way, each performance becoming an occasion for decisions in terms of tempo, timbre, rhythm, color, tone, phrasing, voice leading, and inflection that never mindlessly or automatically repeat earlier such decisions but instead go to great lengths to communication a sense of reinvention and reworking of Bach’s own contrapuntal compositions. Dramatically the sight of Gould actually doing and acting this out gives an added dimensions to his piano-playing (130)…What Gould seems to be attempting here is a full realization of a protracted and sustained contrapuntal invention, disclosed, argued, and elaborated rather than simply presented, through performance. Hence his insistence throughout his career that they very act of performance itself had to be taken out of the concert hall, where it was limited to the implacable chronological sequence and set program of the recital order, and planted in the studio where the essential “take-twoness” of recording technique (one of Gould’s favorite terms) could be submitted to the art of invention (repeated invention, repeated takes) in the fullest rhetorical sense of that term. 130-131

In enacting it on the piano, the performer aligns himself with the composer, not with the consuming public, which is impelled by the performer’s virtuosity to pay attention not so much to the performance, as a passively looked at and heard presentation, as to a rational activity being intellectually as well as aurally and visually transmitted to others. 132

…one does not feel at the end of The Bacchae and Iphigenia the same sense of reconciliation and closure often found in earlier tragedies. Partly because of his relative lateness, Euripides uses his plays to repeat, reinterpret, return to, and revise his somewhat familiar material… 139

When, after having devastated Thebes and the house of Cadmus, Dionysus discloses himself, there is, I believe, an appallingly unique force in his words of self-revelation, as if he is perfectly prepared to go on playing with, harassing, and finally destroying the mortals who have slighted (but not seriously wronged) him. Euripides is as much the poet of that sadism as he is the melodist of Iphigenia’s victimhood, her advocate against Agamemnon’s ghastly tricks and macho insistence. 140

It is as if Cavafy’s basic poetic gesture were to deliver meaning to someone else while denying its rewards to himself: a form of exile that replicates his existential isolation in a de-Hellenized Alexandria… 146

Mann’s Death in Venice was published in 1911, and so within his oeuvre the work is a relatively early one, all the more paradoxical for its autumnal and even at times elegiac qualities. Britten came to it at a late point in his life and career… 149

Unlike Mann, whose ironic mode undercuts any simple moral resolution of Aschenbach’s experience, the narrator constantly employs a morally judgmental rhetoric, which some commentators (she cites T. S. Reed) want to associate with Mann’s failure of nerve: having conceived the tale “hymnically,” he now wants to resolve it “morally,” with the result, says Reed, that the tale is ambiguous in a bad sense, uncertain of its own meaning, disunited. / Like Cohn, however, I prefer to view the novella’s apparent moral resolution as answering to the narrator’s own needs and not to Mann himself, who scrupulously maintains an ironic distance from the narrator. 150

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Bob Eckstein, The History of the Snowman

Bob Eckstein, The History of the Snowman, Simon Spotlight Entertainment, New York, 2007

The Modern Snowman came into his own approximately at the turn of the nineteenth century, around the invention of the postcard, when the image of the snowman became a cog of commerce, exploited to sell any number of products. It is therefore not surprising that over time he has become an increasingly generic icon. 10

Not every large snowman dies a quiet, slow death. Each year in Zurich, the Swiss celebrate Sechselauten by using large amounts of explosives to blow up an innocent snowman. Always on the third Monday in April, bakers, butchers, blacksmiths, and other tradesmen parade on horses and throw bread and sausages to the crowds. In return for free meat, girls decorate the riders with garlands made of spring flowers. Sechselauten (which means “six bells ringings”) comes from the tradition that, at six o’clock, the guild members put down their tools and call it a day. Meanwhile, the Boogg is schlepped through town. The Boogg is a large, cotton-wool snowman with a corncob pipe, button nose, and two eyes made out of coal—he looks the same every year because the same guy has been making the Boogg for over thirty-five years. Unfortunately for Mr. Boogg, he’s filled with firecrackers and plopped onto a forty-foot pile of very flammable scrap of wood. For him, things will only get worse. After the bells of the Church of St. Peter have chimed six time, representing the passing of winter, the townspeople light the pile and watch and carnage. It is believed the shorter the combustions, the hotter and longer the summer will be. When the head of the snowman explodes to smithereens, winter is considered officially over. 18

Renaissance Snowmen go back to a time when snowmen, more often than not, were created by artists striving toward making works of art; as a result, snowman makers put considerable time and effort into the craftsmanship of snowmanship. 89

We know sailors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made snowmen right onboard their ships. One story, dating back to 1851, tells of the crew of the Pioneer who entertained themselves while trapped in ice floes near Greenland by building snow sculptures—including a notable statue of Britannia, the national symbol of Britain (the seated young woman holding a spear and shield seen on their money). 114

Not only did the snowman exist in the Middle Ages, he flourished. At a time when stilts and puppet shows passed for entertainment, the public was starved for the next “big thing.” With plenty of famine, plague, and sickness abounding, winter festivals and other government-endorsed morale boosters provided relief to the starving masses who were either feeding on grass or dropping dead. The thinking was to have the public blow off steam for a week or two and allow erotic dancing, excessive drinking, and political jokes, all under government supervision. During one brutal winter, the city of Brussels covered the entire city with snowmen, a spectacle they called the Miracle of 1511. / For six straight weeks, beginning January 1, the temperatures stayed below freezing and these snow sculptures represented the public’s fear and frustrations during what was called “the Winter of Death.” It was a much needed distraction from the problems of class strife, low self-esteem, and, of course, the Guelders. (The Guelders were from Gelderland, once a part of the Low Countries in the Netherlands, and a group that enjoyed attacking Brussels.) / From the colorful surviving accounts, we know that these were not your run-of-the-mill snowmen. Every corner of Brussels was occupied with snowmen and snow women pantomiming the local news or classical folklore: snow biblical figures, snow sea knights, snow unicorns, snow wildmen, snow mermaids, and snow village idiots. 119-121

Everyone, even great noblemen, went outside to make quality snowmen, not just trained artists…There were fifty elaborately executed scenes with total population of 110 snowmen. The 1511 winter festival displayed politically charged and sexually obscene snow scenes in the streets for all to see—an early form of visual satire and commentary (121)…More than half the scenes were sexual or scatological in nature. Numerous snowmen were sculpted in erotic embrace. (122)

Politically, the role of the snowman was never more integral to Brussels’s community. The display of frozen politicians was the town’s de facto op-ed page. Townspeople depicted the most feared characters, like the devil or enemy ruler, defecating. In one snow scene, a drunkard drowned in his own excrement. One group of snowmen, looking very much like those from a rival castle of Poederijen, show their leader wincing as his aide goes to the bathroom. Making the devil as a snowman helped the public laugh off this anxiety. A sculpture of the king of Friesland (Freeze Land) represented Satan, who was responsible for winter and blamed for deep frosts and the serious annual threat it brought to everyone’s health and earnings. 122

Jan Smeken also tells us that a virgin of snow with a unicorn in her lap graced the front of the ducal palace at Coudenberg in north Brussels. Although the unicorn is the traditional element of religious high art symbolizing Christ, the snow sculpture’s location in the front yard of the home of the absentee duke Charles V suggested otherwise—this was a political cartoon about Charles refusing to live in his palace and his insistence upon living instead with his aunt Margaret of Austria in Molines. Just as the Virgin protected the unicorn against enemies, Brussels hoped Charles would have done likewise. Brussels would eventually welcome him back with a festival in 1520, and all was forgiven. / The Miracle of 1511 was neither the first snow festival nor the first with snowmen. There was one of a smaller scale in 1481, and other nearby cities hosted similar events: Mechelen (1571), Rijssel (1600 and 1603), and Antwerp (throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). But the Miracle of 1511 was the festival to top all festivals. It literally changed the society of Brussels, by giving the public a voice, shifting the balance of power back to the public, and changing the class system within Brussels forever. 124

Meanwhile, the following year, Michelangelo pulled off a little thing called the Sistine Chapel. Blasphemous! How dare we lump Michelangelo in with the pedestrian activity of snowman making? Ahhh, but Michelangelo had already made a snowman earlier in his life. It didn’t snow often in Florence, but there was a tradition among artists to populate the city with snowmen when it did. In 1494, after a heavy snowfall on January 20, Piero de’Medici, who had inherited control of Florence, commissioned the young sculptor to model a colossal snowman in the courtyard of his palace for part of the evening’s winter festival. / Critics thought this was a real insult to the great artist (a prank by Piero, knowing the work would only melt away), but Michelangelo felt indebted to Piero’s father, who was an old friend and loyal patron of his work. 124-125

One of the hot button issues surrounding the Miracle of 1511 was classism and the exorcising of class prejudices through snowmen. Each social class (the elite, the middle class, the lower class) created its own brand of snowmen caricaturing their opponents and reflecting their ambitions and obsessions. The opinions among these social classes caused heated animosity when expressed through the snowmen. Offended partied acted out by beating up the snowmen hurtful to them. 127

The Brussels authorities decided to take action, and posted flyers with measures threatening severe punishments for any person caught damaging a snowman: “The noble men from the city of Brussels proclaim that nobody, during day or night, could break any personage into pieces.” Yet, while city magistrates were involved in the policing of the snowman jackers, snowman makers could still choose subjects of their own free will and exercise free speech. 128

Snowmen were a huge phenomenon in the Middle Ages. As soon as kneadable snow arrived, towns filled with snowmen and snow sculptures comparable in quality and concept to stone and bronze sculpture counterparts. A pharmacist of a Florentine apothecary (a medieval drugstore), Lucas Landucci, wrote in his diary in 1510, “A number of the most beautiful snow-lions were made in Florence…and many nude figures were made also by good masters.” A famous ballad written in 1461 by the great French poet Francois Villon asks, “But where are the snow (figures) of yester-year?” This was not referring to the prison Villon was writing from but to the snowmen of past winters, specifically, the gloriously creative explosions of Brussels (1457) and Arras, France (1434)—with their beautiful biblical representations, mythological stories, and medieval heroes. 128

At some point, he had a nasty run-in with the devil. The story does that, while Francis was praying, Satan asked for him by name three times. Feeling possessed by the shout-out, he decided the only sensible thing to do to rid himself of the devil would be to strip and begin whipping himself on the backside with a stick. “Crying while he didn’t it, ‘thus brother ass thou must be beaten,’ after which he ran into the snow and made seven snowballs, intending to swallow them if the devil had not taken his leave.” (The Every-Day Book) / Eating snowballs to ward off Satan would explain some of the peculiar snow activity pervasive in some later paintings. In Pieter Brueghel II’s painting Le Denombrement De Betheemi (1610), snowballs are seen being carted away and an angry mob force-feeds snowballs to a woman who could pass for a witch… 133-134

Why the public would embrace this notion is made more clear in Pieter Huy’s Le Jugement Dernier (1554), a massive, ambitious pil painting on display in the Royal Museum of Belgium, in Brussels. The artwork depicts judgment day: a fiery hell vividly illustrated in the foreground, with scorched scenes of grotesque images and bodily functions. Heaven is in the background and is represented as a kind of cool, enormous igloo. Fire, bad; snow, good. 135

The earliest visual evidence of a snowball can be found in an old fresco in Trento in an ancient Italian castle called Castillo del Buonconsiglio. The large, peeling fresco is January of the common “cycle of the months” motif and was made in 1403. It illustrates a snowball fight in the foreground between two aristocratic groups… 136

Over the years, Columbus became obsessed with finding an earthly nirvana, constantly spotting paradise on the horizon. (On his third voyage he found the Orinoco River, which he called one of the rivers of paradise. In a letter from 1498, he concluded that the world was indeed not round by pear shaped, like a woman’s breast, with the nipple as the newly discovered paradise.) 139

…first snowman ever in art of any form. Painted in the margins of a beautiful illuminated manuscript (currently in the Royal Library, in The Hague), which dates around 1380, is a snowman—wearing only a strange hat and a look of concern while his butt burns from a log fire under his stool. The melting snowman is created in the familiar method we’re accustomed to seeing today: a modern snowman with one snowball stacked on top of another. Medieval snowmen had always been sculpted pieces of art, and without the snowmen marginalia, it was uncertain whether the snowball method was even known at the time. Centuries would pass before anything similar would be seen again in any surviving books or art. / The text on the page is a sober, mournful psalm detailing the crucifixion of Jesus Christ: “Lord, you gave up the ghost shortly after uttering the words, ‘It is finished.’” Next to this line is the snowman with his back to us. The snowman is not so much an analogy for death as it an extreme example of using humor to deal with pain. The hat tells us this is a Jewish snowman. Artists painted unusual hats on Jews to brand them as outcasts. Fools and court jesters wore hats while Christians removed their hats in front of the altar. While Cain is depicted in dozens of paintings in a variety of hat designs, the intention behind the use of a Painting of the Crucifixion scenes often show those turning away from Christ and persecutors wearing bizarre hats. It is truly unfortunate that the oldest visual evidence of a snowman is anti-Semitic. The Cockaigne rationale for the melting Jewish snowman is twofold: (1) the ironic polarity of the light-hearted activity of snowmen making with the fact it illustrates a passage about Jesus dying on the cross; and (2) it’s the opposite of Christianity in the eyes of that unknown artist with the love of Christ playing off the “hatred” of Jews. Dying Europeans in the fourteenth century, needing to know why they were afflicted by the plague, sought out a scapegoat. Common people started a rumor that Jews of northern Spain and southern France were poisoning the Christian wells and spreading the plague. Pope Clement VI and recognized leaders tried to discredit the charge, calling the accusation “unthinkable,” but by 1348, Jews were blamed for the disease’s spread. 141-143

Lynne Truss. Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Gotham, New York, 2006

The initial letter of a sentence was first capitalized in the 13th century, but the rule was not consistently applied until the 16th. In manuscripts of the 4th to 7th centuries, the first letter of the page was decorated, regardless of whether it was the start of a sentence… 22-23

More than any other mark, the comma draws our attention to the mixed origin of modern punctuation, and its consequent mingling of two quite distinct functions: 1) To illuminate the grammar of a sentence 2) To point up—rather in the manner of musical notation—such literary qualities as rhythm, direction, pitch, tone and flow. 70

The earliest known punctuation—credited to Aristophanes of Byzantium (librarian at Alexandria) around 200 BC—was a three-part system of dramatic notation (involving single points at different heights on the line) advising actors when to breathe in preparation for a long bit, or a not-so-long bit, or a relatively short bit. 72

…if Hebrew or any other ancient languages had included punctuation…two thousand years of scriptural exegesis need never have occurred… 75

…Aldus Manutius the Elder (1450-1515)…Who invented the italic typeface? Aldus Manutius! Who printed the first semicolon? Aldus Manutius! The rise of printing in the 14th and 15th centuries meant that a standard system of punctuation was urgently required…facsimile examples of Aldus’s groundbreaking work include a page from Pietro Bembo’s De Aetna (1494) which features not only a very elegant roman typeface but the actual first semicolon (77)…They put colons and full stops at the ends of sentences. Like this. And also—less comfortably to the modern eye—like this:
Most significantly of all, however, they ignored the old marks that had aided the reader-aloud. Books were now for reading and understanding, not intoning. Moving your lips was becoming a no-no. within the seventy years it took Aldus Manutius the Elder to be replaced by Aldus Manutius the Younger, things changed so drastically that in 1566 Aldus Manutius the Younger was able to state that the main object of punctuation was the clarification of syntax. 78

…Gertrude Stein called the comma “servile” and refused to have anything to do with it… 80-81

[Commas before direct speech] Since this is a genuine old pause-for-breath use of the comma, however, it would be a shame to see it go. 90

Belinda opened the trap door, and after listening for a minute she closed it again. This is, actually, all right. True, it isn’t elegant, but it uses the comma grammatically as a “joining” comma, before the “and”. Most editors, however, turn purple at the sight of such a sentence. It becomes, suddenly: Belinda opened the trap door and, after listening for a minute, closed it again. It seems to me that there are two proper uses of the comma in conflict here, and that the problem arises simply from the laudable instinct in both the writer and the editor to choose just one at a time. In previous centuries…every single use of the comma would be observed: Belinda opened the trap door, and, after listening for a minute, she closed it again. 94-95

Just as there are writers who worship the semicolon, there are other high stylists who dismiss it—who label it, if you please, middle class. James Joyce preferred the colon, as more authentically classical; P.G. Wodehouse did an effortlessly marvelous job without it; George Orwell tried to avoid the semicolon completely in Coming Up for Air (1939), telling his editor in 1947, “I had decided about this time that the semicolon is an unnecessary stop and that I would write my next book without one.” Martin Amis included just one semicolon in Money (1984), and was afterwards (more than usually) pleased with himself. The American writer Donald Barthelme wrote that the semicolon is “ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly”…Gertrude Stein…They are more powerful more imposing more pretentious than a comma but they are a comma all the same. They really have within them deeply within them fundamentally within them the comma nature. Gertrude Stein, “Poetry and Grammar”, 1935. 108

…Aldus Manutius…1494, it was not, as it turns out, the first time a human being ever balanced a dot on top of a comma. The medieval scribes had used a symbol very similar to our modern semicolon in the Latin transcripts to indicate abbreviations (thus “atque” might appear as “atq;”). The Greeks used the semicolon mark to indicate a question (and still do, those crazy guys). Meanwhile, a suspiciously similar mark (the punctus versus) was used by medieval scribes to indicate a termination in a psalm. 111

A classic use of the colon is as a kind fulcrum between two antithetical or oppositional statements: Man proposes: God disposes. 119

Whereas the semicolon suggests a connection between the two halves of each of these sentences, the dash ought to be preserved for occasions when the connection is a lot less direct, when it can act as a bridge between bits of fractured sense: I loved Opal Fruits—why did they call them Starbust?—reminds me of that joke… 122

The America writer Paul Robinson, in his essay “The Philosophy of Punctuation” (2002), says that “pretentious and over-active” semicolons have reached epidemic proportions in the world of academe, where they are used to gloss over imprecise thought. 124

Introduced by humanist printers in the 15th century, it was known as “the note of admiration” until the mid 17th century, and was defined—in a lavishly titled 1680 book Treatise of Stops, Points, or Pauses, and the Notes which are used in Writing and Print; Both very necessary to be well known And the Use of each to be carefully taught—in the following rhyming way: This stop denotes our Suddain Admiration,/Of what we Read, or Write, or giv Relation,/And is always cal’d an Exclamation. 137

…starting out as the punctus interrogativus in the second half of the 8th century, when it resembled a lightning flash, striking from right to left. The name “question mark” (which is rather a dull one, quite frankly) was acquired in the second half of the 19th century… 139

But when the question is indirect, the sentence manages without it: What was the point of all this sudden/interest in Brussels, he wondered. 141

…Stein said that of all punctuation marks the question mark was “the most completely uninteresting”: It is evident that if you ask a question you ask a question…I never could bring myself to use a question mark… 144

When the dialogue stands on its own, the full stop comes inside the inverted commas: “Upon my word, my Lord, I neither/understand your words nor your behaviour.” 154

Square brackets are most commonly used around the word sic (from the Latin sicut, meaning “just as”), to explain the status of an apparent mistake. Generally, sic meaning the foregoing mistake (or apparent mistake) was made by writer/speaker I am quoting; I am but the faithful messenger;…She asked for “a packet of Starbust [sic]”…However , there are distinctions within sic: it can signify two different things: 1) This isn’t a mistake, actually; it just looks like one to the casual eye…2) Tee hee, what a dreadful error! But it would be dishonest of me to correct it. 163-164

Though it is less rigorously applied than applied than it used to be, there is a rule that when a noun phrase such as “stainless-steel kitchen”. Thus you have corrugated iron, but a corrugated-iron roof. The match has a second half, but lots of second-half excitement. Tom Jones was written in the 18th century, but is an 18th-century novel. 172-173

When a hyphenated phrase is coming up, and you are qualifying it beforehand, it is necessary to write, “He was a two-or three-year-old.” 174