Sad and baffling riddles

By 1909 a gathering pessimism converged upon the Liberals and those allied with them. "A thousand sad and baffling riddles" had somehow replaced the simple verities of politics, wrote Masterman[...]. He saw the world divided vertically "between nation and nation armed to the teeth" and horizontally between rich and poor. "The future of progress is still doubtful and precarious. Humanity at best appears as a shipwrecked crew which has taken refuge on a narrow ledge of rock beaten by wind and wave; we cannot tell how many, if any at all, will survive when the long night gives place to morning."

James Bryce, another member of the Liberal government as Chief Secretary for Ireland and since 1907 as Ambassador to Washington, found discouragement in the central theme of his life, the democratic process. In a series of lectures he delivered at Yale in 1909 on "Hindrances to Good Citizenship," he admitted that the practice of democracy had not lived up to the theory. The numbers who could read and vote had increased twenty times in the last seventy years but "the percentage of those who reflect before they vote has not kept pace either with popular education or with the extension of the suffrage." The "natural average man" was not exhibiting in public affairs the innate wisdom which democracy had presumed he possessed. [...]

One of the most influential of English studies of the mental processes at work in public affairs was Hobhouses's Democracy and Reaction, published in 1904. An Oxford don whose deep interest in the labour movement led him to leave the University for the staff of the Manchester Guardian, Hobhouse found that the average man "has not the time to think and will not take the trouble to do so if he has the time." His opinions faithfully reflect "the popular sheet and shouting newsboy...To this new public of the streets and tramcars it is useless to appeal in terms of reason."

The Columbus of this discovery was a surgeon, Wilfred Trotter. [...] In his two essays on "The Herd Instinct" in the Sociological Review in 1908 and 1909 he found man's social behavior springing from that same dark and sinister well of the subconscious whose uncovering marked the end of the Victorian age. [...] Because of man's innate desire for group approval, he is at the mercy of this irrational force and vulnerable to the herd reaction. "It needs but little imagination to see," he concluded, "how great are the probabilities that after all man will prove but one more of nature's failures."

- from The Proud Tower, Barbara Tuchman, pgs. 382-384, 1966

Punching my sister

"In 1964, 300 years after he made his mark on the world, a page in one of his [Isaac Newton] notebooks, penned cryptically in 1662, was finally decoded; on it, addressed to God, was a list of sins 19-year old Newton had committed."

Some selections:

2. Eating an apple at Thy house
3. Making a feather while on Thy day
4. Denying that I made it
14. Wishing death and hoping it to some
15. Striking many
16. Having uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamese
17. Stealing cherry cobs from Eduard Storer
18. Denying that I did so
24. Punching my sister
25. Robbing my mothers box of plums and sugars
26. Calling Derothy Rose a jade
44. Beating Arthur Storer


- from Lists of Note, ed. Shaun Usher

The possibility of poetry

Theoretically - and, indeed, empirically - a case can be made that there ought to be more first-class poets at the present than in earlier centuries. There are, after all, many more people, and more of them receive an education that could expose them to the possibility of poetry. There are all those workshops, throughout the country, which every year award diplomas to a new cohort of MFAs, among whom some significant percentage should have what it takes.

Whether or not workshops are, in fact, the most fertile grounds for the breeding of good poetry, I think that the twentieth century has produced a bumper crop of excellent to world-class poets in America[...] But [...] I think the great preponderance of the best poetry was written before our present laureate (Rita Dove, born in 1952) had indited her first poem to paper.

And for this simple reason - that the workshops, which have a monopoly on the training of poets, encourage indolence, incompetence, smugness and - most perniciously - that sense of victimization and special entitlement that poets have now come to share with other artists who depend on government or institutional patronage to sustain their art, pay their salaries, and provide free vacations.

[Furthermore, by ignoring canonical poetry in these workshops], at a time when Theory has taken over graduate English departments, where it was once possible to study poetry in a serious way [...] justice is done while at the same time drastically simplifying the curriculum. Why bother with dead white males when there are so many living poets who share Levinson's sense of the world they so systematically misrepresented?

In this devaluation of the past, academic theorists offer aid and comfort to the indolence of the workshops, where the poetry that is studied is, by and large, the poetry that is written there....[Yet], in the absence of critical standards, all poets are equal. [...And] what better way to compensate for the demands of Organic Chemistry that to twang the lyre?

I do believe there is a remedy and that is the disestablishment of the poetry workshops as an academic institution. The art of poetry is poorly served by its bureaucratization, and only the trade is advanced. I will even venture a prophecy (which is the prerogative of poets, if not of critics) - that they will, in my own lifetime, self-destruct. Not because of Jesse Helms, or his like, mandates a holy war against the poets funded by the NEA, but because students, wiser than their teachers, choose other electives.

- from "The Castle of Indolence," Thomas Disch

Far and near and low and louder

The dews drop slowly and dreams gather: unknown spears
Suddenly hurtle before my dream-awakened eyes
And then the clash of fallen horseman and the cries
Of unknown perishing armies beat about my ears.
We who still labour by the cromlech on the shore,
The grey cairn on the hill, when day sinks drowned in dew
Being weary of the world's empires, bow down to you.
Master of the still stars and of the flaming door.

- "The Valley of the Black Pig," W.B. Yeats, 1895

On the idle hill of summer
Sleepy with the flow of streams,
Far I hear the steady drummer
Drumming like a noise in dreams.

Far and near and low and louder
On the roads of earth go by,
Dear to friends and food for powder,
Soldiers marching, all to die.

East and west on fields forgotten
Bleach the bones of comrades slain,
Lovely lads and dead and rotten;
None that go return again.

Far the calling bugles hollo,
High the screaming fife replies,
Gay the files of scarlet follow:
Woman bore me, I will rise.

- from A Shropshire Lad, No. 35, A.E. Housman, 1895.

Superb incompetence to command

Let me say that when I talk of disasters I speak with authority. I have served at Balaclava, Cawnpore, and Little Big Horn. Name the biggest born fools who wore uniform in the nineteenth century - Cardigan, Sale, Custer, Raglan, Lucan - I knew them all. Think of all the conceivable misfortunes that can arise from combinations of folly, cowardice, and sheer bad luck, and I'll give you chapter and verse. But I still state unhesitatingly, that for pure, vacillating stupidity, for superb incompetence to command, for ignorance combined with bad judgement - in short, for the true talent for catastrophe - Elphy Bey [Elphinstone] stood alone. Others abide our question, but Elphy outshines them all as the greatest military idiot of our own or any other day.

Only he could have permitted the First Afghan War and let it develop to such a ruinous defeat. It was not easy: he started with a good army, a secure position, some excellent officers, a disorganised enemy, and repeated opportunities to save the situation. But Elphy, with the touch of true genius, swept aside these obstacles with unerring precision, and out of order wrought complete chaos. We shall not, with luck, look upon his like again.

- from Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser, 1969

Some frightful catastrophe

"The United States finds itself in possession of enormous power and is eager to use it in brutal fashion against anyone who comes along without knowing how to do so and is therefore constantly on the brink of some frightful catastrophe."

- from a letter by E.L. Godkin, 1895

The fifth of August, 1942

"The Book of Yolek"

Wir haben ein Gesetz
Und nach dem Gesetz soll er sterben. 

The dowsed coals fume and hiss after your meal
Of grilled brook trout, and you saunter off for a walk
Down the fern trail, it doesn't matter where to,
Just so you're weeks and worlds away from home,
And among midsummer hills have set up camp
In the deep bronze glories of declining day.

You remember, peacefully, an earlier day
In childhood, remember a quite specific meal:
A corn roast and bonfire in summer camp.
That summer you got lost on a Nature Walk;
More than you dared admit, you thought of home;
No one else knows where the mind wanders to.

The fifth of August, 1942.
It was morning and very hot. It was the day
They came at dawn with rifles to The Home
For Jewish Children, cutting short the meal
Of bread and soup, lining them up to walk
In close formation off to a special camp.

How often you have thought about that camp,
As though in some strange way you were driven to,
And about the children, and how they were made to walk,
Yolek who had bad lungs, who wasn't a day
Over five years old, commanded to leave his meal
And shamble between armed guards to his long home.

We're approaching August again. It will drive home
The regulation torments of that camp
Yolek was sent to, his small, unfinished meal,
The electric fences, the numeral tattoo,
The quite extraordinary heat of the day
They all were forced to take that terrible walk.

Whether on a silent, solitary walk
Or among crowds, far off or safe at home,
You will remember, helplessly, that day,
And the smell of smoke, and the loudspeakers of the camp.
Wherever you are, Yolek will be there, too.
His unuttered name will interrupt your meal.

Prepare to receive him in your home some day.
Though they killed him in the camp they sent him to,
He will walk in as you're sitting down to a meal.

- Anthony Hecht. The quote at the beginning is John 19:7 - "We have a law, and according to the law he shall die."

That quiet rapture

I want that quiet rapture again. I want to feel that same powerful, nameless urge that I used to feel when I turned to my books. The breath of desire that then arose from the coloured backs of the books, shall fill me again, melt the heavy, dead lump of lead that lies somewhere in me and waken again the impatience of the future, the quick joy in the world of thought, it shall bring back again the lost eagerness of my youth. I sit and wait.

- from All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque, 1928, pg. 171

Where the ice is thick

Parker sat down beside her, put his sunglasses on, leaned back on the chaise longue with his face in the sun, and said, "I'm going away for a while."

Still looking at the book, she said, "I knew."

"It may just be for a day or two. If I'm not back in two days figure me to be gone for a couple weeks at least."

"Or maybe for ever," she said.

He looked at her, but her eyes were still on the book. He said, "I'm not walking out on you."

"Maybe not on purpose," she said. "I've known men like you before."

She might have been talking about her airline pilot husband, who wound up smeared like raspberry jam across some mountaintop. Parker didn't like the analogy.

"You've never known anybody like me before," he said. "I only walk where the ice is thick."

"You walk on ice," she said. "That's what I mean."

- from The Green Eagle Score, Richard Stark, 1967