Lincoln in the Bardo

When it was published this past winter, I made a mental note that I wished to read George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo. The reviews, to be certain, were rapturous, and the subject represents a confluence of several of my interests (Lincolniana, postmodern literature, melancholy). I just finished the book, and highly recommend it. Here's the gist: the body of Abraham Lincoln's son Willie has just been interred in Oak Hill Cemetery, and his soul lingers there, instead of passing on ahead to — whatever follows. The story is related by the souls of the dead men and women of the graveyard, those who have also refused to leave, over the course of a single night in 1862. Narratively, then, Lincoln in the Bardo resembles the transcript of an audio play, for the dozens of characters interrupt, contradict, reinforce, argue. Some readers have found the narrative effect disorienting, but I liked it very much. (Apparently the audio book captures the spirit of the book very well, as it is narrated by an appropriately large cast of voice actors.) To say Saunders is a terrific writer is a feeble understatement. I'll simply quote, here, one of my favorite passages in the book. (It's lightly edited for flow, as the original is narrated by two of the main characters. I've condensed it into two paragraphs.)

His [Lincoln's] mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it.

All were in sorrow, or had been, or soon would be. It was the nature of things. Though on the surface it seemed every person was different, this was not true. At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end, the many losses we must experience on the way to that end. We must try to see one another in this way. As suffering, limited beings— Perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces. His sympathy extended to all in this instant, blundering, in its strict logic, across all divides.

"The Chill of Death"

"He who can," George Bernard Shaw observed, "does. He who cannot, teaches." It is, though not entirely unfounded, a rather cheap comment. It is an undeniably false comment with regards to Strunk and White. Anyone who doubts the advice given therein need merely read the essays of E.B. White: they are exemplary. Skim One Man's Meat, an essay collection of his, and you'll happen upon any number of fine passages.

On priorities: "We teach our child many things I don't believe in, and almost nothing I do believe in. We teach punctuality, but I do not honestly think there is any considerable good in punctuality, particularly if the enforcement of it disturbs the peace. My father taught me, by example, that the greatest defeat in life was to miss a train. Only after many years did I learn that an escaping train carries away with it nothing vital to my health. Railroad trains are such magnificent objects that we commonly mistake them for Destiny."

On church music: "The organ makes a curious whine, sentimental, grandiose — half cello, half bagpipes. ... Praise God from whom all blessings flow ... hesitatingly the assembled voices, embarrassed at the sudden sound of their own once-a-week excursion in piety, the too weak, the over strong, praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost."

On poets: "We would all like it if the bards would make themselves plain, or we think we would. The poets, however, are not easily diverted from their high mysterious ways. A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer; he approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring."

In "Once More to the Lake", perhaps White's best essay, he dwells on the confusion, the duality, he experiences in taking his son to the same lake he visited as a boy. He is, at once, the boy he was and the father he has become — taking the place of his own father. White is too fine a writer to try and draw some greater conclusion from this. (He is not inclined, in any of the essays, towards tiresome moralizing.) He does not claim that it is a good or necessary thing for society that a man should know what it is to become his father. All the same, I cannot help but think it. I then wonder: what of those who cannot, or will not, have children? (To say nothing of the many who certainly should not.) Are they to always remain the child, and never the parent? Is it necessary to have one's own offspring in order to fully mature as a person? Or, rather, perhaps, is it necessary that one take responsibility for those placed into one's care? (Surely you know teachers and other mentors, without children, who have nonetheless served you as parental figures.) It is, in any case, worth thinking about. Can we only truly confront our mortality — as White does — by observing those who we once were?

Spy Wednesday

There is a tradition for calling the Wednesday in Holy Week "Spy Wednesday", though I am not certain how widespread this usage is. At first I thought it might be exclusive to certain Romans (among whom, indeed, I first heard it), though I am informed that Anglicans also use the term. In any case, I like it: it is certainly more evocative than "Holy Wednesday", just like "Maundy Thursday" is better than "Holy Thursday". (Though I have found multitudes of people who pronounce Maundy as "Maun-day", as if it were some sort of bastardization of "Monday". The name probably comes from the Latin mandatum, referring to the new commandment Christ spoke of, shortly after washing the disciples' feet. This is the sort of thing people should know.) The name "Spy Wednesday" presumably comes from the trouble Judas Iscariot was getting up to, agreeing to betray Jesus to the chief priests. (So Judas was a spy, I guess? Expect to see my screenplay, Judas Iscariot: International Man of Mystery, any day now. I'm sure there's a clever tagline for that to be written. A Bond pun, perhaps? Or something about thirty shekels?)

It is no surprise that the character of Judas should be a matter of some fascination for modern man. What could drive someone to betray Jesus? Doubt? Disillusionment? Mere greed? No single reason really seems sufficient.
Borges addresses the idea of Judas in a pseudo-scholarly article (or, perhaps more accurately, a scholarly pseudo-article), Tres versiones de Judas. The work is short enough that I recommend you go ahead and read it presently. If you are accustomed to Borges, it is a deliciously characteristic article.

(An aside: Borges writes that

Judas buscó el Infierno, porque la dicha del Señor le bastaba. Pensó que la felicidad, como el bien, es un atributo divino y que no deben usurparlo los hombres.

This resonates curiously with something else I have been pondering, the idea of Christian happiness. I sent a spoof comparing horrible prosperity theology to Schopenhauer to a correspondent, who wrote back with some salient points about the nature of Christian suffering. Apparently, in her essay collection The Sovereignty of Good — which I must needs pick up sometime — Iris Murdoch writes that the idea of Christianity's emphasis on suffering as the chief end of human life is a misconception, brought about by Enlightenment thought. Borges had read his Schopenhauer, to be certain.)

Anyway, Borges presents an altogether not-unsympathetic view of Judas, though, as always, it is difficult to determine how sincere he (Borges) is. It is all absurd heresy, anyway. I suppose Borges delighted in the thought.

Dante, of course, places Judas in what is presumably the very worst part of hell, being eternally eaten by the most unpleasant of the three mouths of the devil. In other literature, however, Judas is afforded some small mercies. In the Navigatio Sancti Brendani, St. Brendan and his explorers find Judas sitting on a miserable rock in the middle of a storm-tossed sea. Yet this is in fact a respite compared to the torment he suffers in hell: Ego sum infelicissimus Judas atque negociator pessimus, he says; non pro meo merito habeo istum locum sed pro misericortia ineffabili Jhesu Christi. (In an oddly specific listing, Judas is spared on Sundays, between Christmas and Epiphany, from Easter to Pentecost, and on the feasts of the Purification and the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.) Even for the worst sinner, the "ineffable mercy of Jesus Christ" applies. We might take some comfort in this.

Bring Up the Bodies

People will insist on lending me books. I disappoint most of them, as I rarely find myself able to devote the time needed to properly digest a book, but I find it flattering, nonetheless, that people consider me someone to lend books to. The most recent loan, however, I have been reading with some vigor: Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies. It is a sequel to Wolf Hall, which I liked very much, and apparently it is the second in a projected Cromwell trilogy.

For anyone with a passing knowledge of Tudor history, the book should have little suspense: we know, after all, how all of the characters end up. (In both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies there are, at the beginning of the book, lists of characters with descriptions, a sort of dramatis personae that eliminates the need for tiresome exposition.) For every character we know it is just a matter of counting down the years, the months, the days, until their demise (usually violent, in that time, it seems). And yet Mantel is a fine enough author to make it all gripping. We know Anne Boleyn's fate, of course, and Catherine of Aragon's, and Thomas Cromwell's, but it is still fascinating to read about them as Mantel has written. She has managed to make us root for a man of questionable integrity. As she writes it, Cromwell is a modern man who happens to have lived in the late Renaissance. But it's not so hacky as that might sound; he is a man of unsure religious conviction, a moneylender (which is to say, capitalist), lawyer, extortionist, possibly a murderer. But he is sympathetic, as she writes him.

It is also helpful that Mantel is capable of simply stunning prose:

When he sleeps he dreams of the fruit of the Garden of Eden, outstretched in Eve's plump hand. He wakes momentarily: if the fruit is ripe, when did those boughs blossom? In what possible month, in what possible spring? Schoolmen will have addressed the question. A dozen furrowed generations. Tonsured heads bent. Chilblained fingers fumbling scrolls. It's the sort of silly question monks are made for. I'll ask Cranmer, he thinks: my archbishop.
...
He sleeps again and dreams of the flowers made before the dawn of the world. They are made of white silk. There is no bush or stem to pluck them from. They lie on the bare uncreated ground.

Upon Nearly Finishing a Translation

Spurred by the music of Ástor Piazzolla (I made a Pandora station), I have decided once more to try my hand at a translation of that Borges essay on Job I've been attempting to translate for almost five years, now. Again it is worth remembering Eco's dictum that "translation is the art of failure".

Nevertheless, I feel more optimistic this time around. I've managed to root out a few embarrassing errors. (Naïve younger-me glossed los caldeos han atacado su tierra as "droughts have attacked his land", assuming a link between caldeo and caldear, when in fact it is the word for "Chaldean". Well, I told you it was embarrassing.) And I've had more luck in finding some of Borges's more obscure citations, especially in Quevedo (who, it should be observed, is stylistically superior to Góngora). After some peer review and once I've nailed down some last few mysterious references, the translation should be as done as I'll ever get it. I am resolved that I shall never be entirely happy with it, but it is satisfying enough to decipher some of Borges's dizzying erudition. (In a relatively brief lecture on the Book of Job he offhandedly mentions Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, the Authorised Version, Fray Luis de León, Quevedo (many times), Ernest Renan, James Anthony Froude, Milton, Vergil, Leibniz, Max Brod, Huxley, Coleridge, Jung, Aristotle, and Plato. No doubt there are other citations, as I am surely missing some of them.) I'll let you know, dear reader, when I am finally finished.

I need little projects such as this. I have found life outside of a college campus to be rewarding in some ways, but not especially intellectually stimulating. (Perhaps, pace Republicans, there's nothing wrong with a college education.)

Book as Sacrament

I grow increasingly tired of incorporeal worship. Scripture and music are good, and all — of course they are; would I be a church musician if I didn't think church music was important? — but I don't get much out of a church service without sacrament. I almost added "and without ritual", there, but of course a sacrament is by its nature an act of ritual. The really sustaining thing about sacrament is the thrill of the tangible — and I use the word here according to its root: tangere, "to touch". It is remarkable that we should be made aware of God's mercies by means of things as simple as water, bread and wine. It helps remind us that we cannot dwell entirely within abstractions; that is to say, it goes some way towards rescuïng us from gnosticism.

It is for similar reasons that I cannot abide e-books (among other e- things; I grudgingly use e-mail, but that completes the list of e-nouns and e-verbs I employ. No doubt some wag will point out the irony that I am writing this on a web-log. My only response is to sigh). The experience of reading a book is a tangible pleasure. Bibliophiles will tell you how pleasant is the crispness of new pages, the smell of the ink, the heft of a weighty tome in one's hands. These things I could take or leave, but they are certainly preferable to the antiseptic experience of staring at a screen.

More important is the notion of book ownership, something that is only possible so long as books remain physical items and not a series of zeroes and ones in a hard drive. (Indeed, the notion of ownership is an ephemeral one on this series of tubes: when we are dead, who shall inherit the mp3 files that replaced our records? The Word documents that replaced our manuscripts? Those jpegs that have replaced our family albums?) I am a habitué of used-book shops, so perhaps I am more aware than some that a book ought to outlast its reader. Moreover, it is an gratifying experience to be lent a book, or, better (though indeed, worse), to inherit one. The book becomes more than an object: it is the signifier of a bond between us and those who have shared with us this collection of characters, locations, ideas. If the secondhand book has annotations in someone else's handwriting, so much the better. The tangible object that points us to a greater reality: that is what we are truly losing if we switch to e-readers.

Wolf Hall

Finished, at last, with my slog through Tolkien, I turned immediately to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. It's been a bit of an adjustment, going from Tolkien (who, though a worthwhile read, has too many adverbs and all the humor of the Heimskringla) to Mantel, whose wit could be metaphorically compared to something that is very sharp.

The hero (or antihero, if you must) of the book is Thomas Cromwell (who was indeed related to Oliver, though we mustn't hold that against him). History, for the most part, has not been kind to Cromwell: the impression one often gets is that he was an amoral schemer, who, in the end, reaped the whirlwind after several years of attempting to manipulate the king's favor. If you've seen A Man for All Seasons you've probably got a much more charitable opinion of Cromwell's rival Thomas More, whom Roman Catholics now call a saint; he's held in high esteem at Notre Dame, certainly. But Mantel deconstructs this beatific image we have of More: as she sees it, he was little more than a religious zealot.

[Cromwell] never sees More — a star in another firmament, who acknowledges him with a grim nod — without wanting to ask him, what's wrong with you? Or what's wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you've learned, confirm you in what you believed before?

It's worth remembering that More was not some selfless defender of personal conscience to be compared to Cromwell's unprincipled henchman of royal prerogative. More merely preferred Papal tyranny to royal tyranny. The question, perhaps, is: which should one prefer in Henry VIII's England? Despite my fondness for Anglicanism, I still have this image of the king as this horrible sort of Bluebeard character, ruled by his appetites, quite probably more beast than man. I don't know if Mantel means to dispel this characterization further on in the book; after all, I've only read about a hundred of its six-hundred-odd pages. But I recommend it highly, so far.

The Lord of the Rings, Considered

You know, late August is actually very pleasant. This had never occurred to me before, as for the past twenty years I had always been distracted at this time of year by the beginning of school. I must say, I do not particularly miss being so busy that I have no time to devote to worthwhile things beyond the scope of my studies. For the first time in many years I am re-reading The Lord of the Rings. I must say, it is a different experience reading the book when one is finally past adolescence. One never steps in the same river twice; nor does he read the same novel, apparently.

Tolkien's two deep and abiding passions, it seems, are nature and words. The strengths and weaknesses of his writing reflect these. He is fond of writing about landscapes — trees and hills and valleys and such — and I think he is quite good at this: certainly his descriptions of places are strong enough that I have always found the movies rather disappointing on that front. (New Zealand looks like a pleasant enough place, but it lacks the grand scope of Middle-earth. They are little islands, after all.) The other thing Tolkien clearly enjoys is poetry, and the books are littered with songs. Some of these are effective, and many are not. (One presumes that they all might be better with music, but then, that is a limitation of the medium.)

Tolkien's greatest strength as an author is his capacity for depth: as in a Netherlandish painting, the background (the histories, the geography, the languages of Middle-earth) is just as interesting as the foreground (the main characters and their travails). Indeed, the background is often more interesting. Tolkien's chief defect, I think, is a general lack of humor; even his intended levity (mostly hobbit matters) comes across as rather strained. Nor is he particularly good at writing about action — but then, few writers really are. The characters are best read as archetypes, as in myth, for in most cases there is little evidence of compelling underlying psychology. These faults — and all those songs! — aside, I'd still say The Lord of the Rings is not so easily dismissed as some literature snobs would have it. It is more than the sum of its parts.

Adventures in Openmindedness, Part II

Well, I finished that Murdoch book. It was, at least, more satisfying than A Severed Head, though I suspect the discrepancy owes much to the different circumstances in which I read each: one was drudgery — and, as it seemed, not morally or intellectually profitable drudgery — while the other was my own choice to read, upon the recommendation of (relatively trustworthy) counsel.

A Fairly Honourable Defeat belongs in that class of books, along with The Picture of Dorian Gray and Lolita, in which people do wicked things — things which lead readers to denounce the books as immoral — but eventually receive their comeuppance — a fact that is often ignored by the outraged sort of reader. Such books have, as Wilde observed of his book, "a terrible moral". (This is, of course, the older and more etymologically correct meaning of terrible: "causing terror", not "very bad".) Murdoch's work differs from those two books, however, in that justice is not visited upon all transgressors equally. Indeed, the peccadilloes of relatively good characters result in harsh consequences, while far worse offenders go, for the most part, unpunished.

If a morality can be gleaned from this book, it is a decidedly anti-consequentialist one. We've all discussed the hypothetical scenario: it's 1941 and you're hiding Jews in your attic: when the Gestapo officer asks you whether you're hiding anyone, is it immoral to lie? If it is always immoral to lie, then the moral thing to do is to tell him, "why yes, they're in the attic." However, if morality is determined by the consequences of one's actions, and the result of honesty in this case would be the death of innocents, then the consequentialist would lie (normally a moral evil) to effect the saving of lives (considered — we must assume! — a good). But in Murdoch's world, even the best-intentioned lies lead to disaster and despair. It is, perhaps, a reminder that we are ultimately ignorant creatures, quite unable to judge the consequences of our actions, regardless of our intentions. It is not a reässuring moral.

In any case, I have reconsidered my opinion of Dame Iris. I don't believe I'd get along with her very well if we were to meet, but then, that is rarely the case with authors and composers and artists I admire. (Dürer or Mahler would probably be rather irritating in person, I suspect.) Hers is not a world I wish to inhabit, but it is an acceptable one — perhaps even a necessary one — to visit.

Adventures in Openmindedness, Part I

It is important to examine one's prejudices. This is not to say that all prejudice is bad; no, indeed! We need prejudice to adequately function in the world: without prejudice we'd have to impartially examine each and every person and situation we meet, and there simply isn't time for that. But we must, when we have time, reässess certain things, in case we have judged them unfairly.

The particular thing I wish to examine, in this instance, is the work of Iris Murdoch, which (and whom) I took a dislike to during my years of undergraduate study. My distaste was fortified by the opinion of one of my favorite writers, Flannery O'Connor, who said Murdoch's works are "completely hollow". Thus summarily dismissed, I was content to leave it at that. But considering the advice of a friend, who gave me a copy of A Fairly Honorable Defeat, I am prepared to give Dame Iris another chance.

I am now two chapters into that book. Almost immediately I noticed a similarity between it and A Severed Head, my other foray into Murdochiana. The chief characteristic of Murdoch's characters — at least, all those I've encountered so far — is that they are all terribly bored, and it is this boredom that leads them to do various wicked things. (I do not mean to say that the characters are boring; Murdoch is a good enough writer that she can at least keep our interest. And besides, I am not yet of the opinion that only virtuous people are genuinely interesting; there are enough books with bad sorts that are still compelling.)

Existential boredom — which we must differentiate from incidental boredom, the sort even the sanest man might sometimes have, as when waiting for a bus or discussing politics with a libertarian — is indicative of spiritual malaise. It is the result of a lack of joy in one's life. It is probably the same thing as acedia, which the desert fathers were right to consider the worst of sins. What is one to make of a writer whose every last character is existentially bored? May we fairly assume that Murdoch herself felt this way? I'm not sure. Further reading should prove useful; I shall continue my (re)evaluation.

Knoxville: Summer of 1915

In this time of leaving, becoming aware of all the places and things and people at Notre Dame I will see no more, I have spent some time thinking about those other times that are now lost to me: my undergraduate years, high school (however unpleasant), even my childhood. In a short while my years at Notre Dame will join those others, to add to the pain of recollection (which, happy or not, is painful; that is the nature of nostalgia).

Ah, but now it is nearly summer, the part of the year I remember best from my childhood. (For all my love of Rilke and autumn and that sort of Sehnsucht, there is something more personal about the memories of summer.) I suspect it was the same for James Agee, who wrote about his own childhood in Knoxville, Tennessee:

It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds' hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by.
...
On the rough wet grass of the backyard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there. They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine... with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth, and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night.

May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble, and in the hour of their taking away.

After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.

That is from Agee's essay, "Knoxville: Summer of 1915", which was later selected to serve as the introduction to his semi-autobiographical (posthumous) novel, A Death in the Family.

Samuel Barber set much of Agee's essay to music in his Knoxville: Summer of 1915. I am not sure which is my favorite recording of this admirable work (it is probably either that of Eleanor Steber or Leontyne Price). But in any case I will refer you here, where you can listen to it. (That particular recording is not special, but is the most convenient and legal to come by.)

I have been listening to the piece many times in the last few weeks. It resonates with the sense of loss I already have begun to feel about this particular place, these particular people. Oh, the terrible sweetness of nostalgia! — nostalgia, even, as in this prose poem and this composition, for a time I myself have never known and will never know. Discussing the piece in a 1949 radio interview, Barber noted its expression of "a child's feeling of loneliness, wonder, and lack of identity in that marginal world between twilight and sleep." Do you recall these feelings? I do. Sometimes I wonder whether there's much difference at all between the insecurities of childhood and the insecurities of the present.

On Translating Borges

For what amounts to years, now, I have been attempting to translate a lecture given by Jorge Luis Borges on the Book of Job. (He's got some interesting ideas about it, as it so happens.) Every time I near completion, however, I find myself dissatisfied with the result. It is invariably either unfaithful to the original or awkward-sounding in English. (One will note that often Borges used Spanish words to unusual effect. But the English-speaking reader is not aware of this and will likely attribute it to poor translation.) Consider, if you will, the opening paragraph — insofar as an oral lecture can be divided into paragraphs:

A pesar de la hospitalidad que siento en ustedes me considero un poco intruso. Pero hay dos razones que me hacen mitigar esa impresión. Una de las razones es que yo he sido criado dentro de la fe cristiana y la cultura occidental; la cristiandad, más allá de nuestras convicciones o de nuestras dudas personales, es una malgama de dos naciones que me parecen esenciales para el mundo occidental. Esas son: Israel (el cristianismo procede de Israel) y Grecia. Más allá de las vicisitudes de nuestra sangre, de nuestra múltiple sangre, ya que tenemos dos padres, cuatro abuelos, etc. — en progresión geométrica — y ya que Roma fue una suerte de extensión del helenismo, creo que todos, por el mero hecho de pertener a la cultura occidental, somos hebreos y griegos. De modo que algún derecho me asiste hoy al hablar sobre el Libro de Job, aunque ignore la lengua hebrea y aunque no he podido leer el texto original y los comentarios Rabínicos.

And here is my attempt at a translation:

Despite the hospitality I sense in all of you, I consider myself rather intrusive. But there are two reasons that mitigate this impression of mine. One of them is that I have been raised in the Christian faith and in western culture; Christianity, notwithstanding our personal beliefs or doubts, is an amalgam of two nations that seem to me essential to the western world. They are: Israel (Christianity arose out of Israel) and Greece. Regardless of the vicissitudes of our blood, out of our multiple heritages, since we have two parents, four grandparents, etc. — in a geometrical progression — and since Rome was a sort of extension of Hellenism, I believe that all of us, by the mere fact of belonging to western culture, are Hebrews and Greeks. As a result, I have a certain right to speak today about the Book of Job, though I know no Hebrew and though I have not been able to read the original text nor its Rabbinical commentaries.

What is one to do? Part of the problem is that spoken sentences can be far longer than their written counterparts before becoming excessive; one can nest parentheticals (as I am wont to do) without too badly breaking up the flow of a spoken idea, but when written this becomes tiresome after a while, unless you read lots of James and must therefore enjoy endless sentences.

The chief problem, I suppose, is that Borges's style is deliberately obscure. In a review of five new Borges anthologies, Martin Schifino (interesting surname, that) explains this well:

[Alfred] MacAdam describes Borges's early style as "tortuous" and his vocabulary as "rarefied". [Suzanne] Levine calls the writing of his essays "radical" and even "bizarre to those who read him in Spanish today". Both are right in general. But it is a matter of detail in which way Borges "replays the Latinate prose of the Baroque era", and perhaps the best way to convey this might not be to "improvise a rococo English" – an intention declared, but fortunately never carried out, by Levine. The baroque influence can be felt, sure enough, in Borges's inkhorn terms, but his rhetorical habits are much closer to home: plain Edwardian. He sounds a little like Kipling, and a lot like Chesterton. His essays are full of Chestertonian throat-clearing and oratorical flourishes. Part of the challenge for translators may be to make new an existing manner that has fallen out of favour. In any case, more resources from the English tradition will need mining if Borges's big voice is to be fully energized.

The best way to translate Borges, then? Read more Chesterton. Borges was famously fond of him, anyway.

Lucky Jim

I took advantage of the Schneetag today to finish Kingsley Amis's first novel, Lucky Jim. (I have added to my list of aliases the name "Kingsley"; why does no one name their son Kingsley nowadays?) The book is really quite funny. It is about the goings-on at a university. As anyone who has attended an institution of "higher" "education" can tell you, academics are generally an absurd lot: their foibles call out to be lampooned, and Amis is mercilessly accurate. Though the novel can be said to have a protagonist (the titular Jim), all of the characters therein are for the most part contemptible, loathsome, and unpleasant. The book is a rogues' gallery of all the worst types of people one can find on a college campus: the soporific tenured professor (whose natural habitat is the history or English department), the incompetent and disinterested junior professor, the perpetually-medicated and emotionally unstable female academic, the spiteful colleague, the pretentious and self-absorbed artiste...

One might think that such a book, lacking any character of any virtue whatsoëver, would be a depressing read. On the contrary: it is the funniest book I've read in a good long while. Whether you be a misanthrope or not, it is still gratifying to see absurd pomposity — the sort of behavior any college student can identify — mocked.

Writer's Voice

Recently I've been getting into E.B. White's (yes, he of Charlotte's Web; also, the White of Strunk & White) book of essays, One Man's Meat. It is rather good, so far. The writing, at least, is well-crafted. Surely you know the feeling, when beginning a book, of making the acquaintance of a particular voice, a personality. It is even better when that voice is not only unique but also agreeable. (There are enough voices that are distinctive but towards which I feel little natural affinity: Hemingway, or Wilde. That's not to say I dislike The Sun Also Rises — and indeed, I would place The Picture of Dorian Gray among my top thirty favorite books — but I can't imagine having a particularly satisfying conversation with either of those authors. Perhaps it is a matter of temperament, or childhood inculcation. I will always enjoy that chummy, donnish tone of C.S. Lewis, but then, the Narnia books were my constant companions when I was young.) E.B. White's voice is honest and simple: earnest without being humorless, occasionally wise without being pompous. If you weren't assigned to read "Once More to the Lake" in school, you simply must go and read it. (I was assigned it, and although being given as homework is generally sufficient to ruin any good thing, I still remember that essay fondly.)

In any case, the man knew what writing is like:

[T]here is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments — moments of sustained creation — when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on.

The Vertigo of Lists

Lists are interesting things, don't you agree? All sorts of things can be listed; it appeals to our sense of order and completeness. Anywho, I recently got another Umberto Eco book, The Infinity of Lists. (The Italian title is La Vertigine della Lista, which sounds much more like a title Eco would come up with. Why the translator changed it I do not know.) It's just the sort of book any list-lover will appreciate. Included are various and sundry lists: of rivers mentioned in Joyce, of pulp novels in Don Quijote's library, of saints, of the conquests of Don Giovanni (enumerated in Leporello's famous "catalogue aria"), of Borges' seres imaginarios, of the ancestors of Jesus, of gemstones, of things Rabelais discusses as substitutes for toilet paper. Indeed, these and many more things. The book is rather dizzying in its variety and erudition. But don't take *my* word for it!

Washington Irving, or, Irving Washington

The vicissitudes of my schedule this semester are such that I have very little to do on Fridays. (Indeed, Friday is my Sabbath, of sorts, as that whole church-music career thing precludes worklessness on Sundays.) This is the day, then, when I have time to try and remember what it's like to be a real human being, instead of a grad student: I can prepare myself actual meals, make my bed properly, indulge my peripatetic nature in walks 'round South Bend, &c. I also attempt to do some reading. Today, while my lunch was cooking, I finally began my volume of Washington Irving stories. (Lunch, incidentally, was a success: pierogies and haddock. The pierogies have a funny way of inflating in the oven, and Charity, Paul says, is not puffed-up; ergo, Charity is not a pierogi.)

There's a reason Washington Irving was so immensely popular: he's a fine writer, with an admirable sense of humor.

[Rip Van Winkle] was, moreover, a kind neighbor, and an obedient, hen-pecked husband. Indeed, to the latter circumstance might be owing that meekness of spirit which gained him such universal popularity; for those men are most apt to be obsequious and conciliating abroad, who are under the discipline of shrews at home. Their tempers, doubtless, are rendered pliant and malleable in the fiery furnace of domestic tribulation; and a curtain-lecture is worth all the sermons in the world for teaching the virtues of patience and long-suffering. A termagant wife may, therefore, in some respects, be considered a tolerable blessing; and if so, Rip Van Winkle was thrice blessed.

The modern reader, I suppose, is struck by the vocabulary level, especially considering that Irving's education was negligible. (Save for some law training, his formal education was complete by the age of sixteen.) How many college freshmen today can comprehend, let alone write, such prose? Sigh. Well, at least we have television! Take that, literate forebears!

Flannery; Sebastian

The more of Miss Flannery O'Connor I read, the more I realize how rich her works are. Presently I'm making my way through Everything That Rises Must Converge, and enjoying it thoroughly. Her stories are at times hilarious, and at times horrific. Sometimes it's hard to tell which. If there's a unifying characteristic of her main characters, it's that they're terribly unaware; the arc of each story is generally one in which this complacent ignorance is shaken apart. Grace is a fundamentally discomfiting, if not violent, undertaking.

"Well, I've never read O'Connor, but I'd like to start", you might say. "Should I then presume? And how should I begin?", you might continue, if you have a penchant for quoting Prufrock. The novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, are excellent, but the short stories may be better to start with. I'll recommend my favorites (so far): "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", "The Artificial Nigger", "Good Country People" and "Greenleaf" are particularly good.

In other news, another thing I've been making my figurative way through is George Ritchie's complete Bach organ works. (They're not quite complete, though; I noticed that he's missing the chorale partita on Christ, der du bist der helle Tag.) The nice thing about these discs, other than the fine musicianship and recording quality, is that Ritchie has used a variety of American instruments, two of which are by Paul Fritts, who built our organ here at Notre Dame. (This reminds me: come, if you like, to my recital on April 18th—at 5:00pm, Eastern.) One could listen to Bach every day and still only understand a tiny bit of his genius, I think. Heck, one can play Bach every day and still only understand a tiny bit of his genius.