Why Plutarch Rocks

You know with Plutarch - as you do with no other classical historian - that you are dealing with a man and not a machine. The man shines forth in his Moralia and Table Talk series of essays. Whereas you might be tempted to think of Suetonius as a sort of central office of the bureau of ancient gossip, you could not mistake Plutarch for anything but a man.

And a good man at that. Plutarch really knew men, and it shows in his Lives that he did. He might know less about politics that we commonly do now, but he knew about loyalty, lies, and lechery - saw that these are the bricks and mortar of power - and so when he sought to define a man he limited him by his character, not only by his intelligence.

I have just finished reading the Lives of the leaders of the Roman Civil War. Caesar, Sulla, Marius, Pompey, Cicero, Antony - the way Plutarch breaks down the times through the lens of each man is strangely impersonal - we see the time, but every character is covered with a sort of gloss of noble rhetoric. I had to go to Cicero's second Phillipic to see Anthony through the eyes of the day, and he sprang forth with unusual violence from Cicero's pen.

Nevertheless, the men are there in shape, if not in energy. Plutarch has maybe hellenized his Roman heroes - since we see Caesar's outrageous energy as merely a tumble of events, and Antony's inhuman vigor as a little roughness at the edges. Clearly Shakespeare had no access to Cicero's Phillipics, or else he would have created a more fierce Anthony. But in the life of Pompey and in the events of Cicero's life, Plutarch is sincere and shines with august words.

No other book evokes the times so well, already perhaps glazed with a thin patina of sentiment for the past, but nevertheless representing the real smell of the time and place from the point of view of a hellene. Plutarch is like a British journalist living in Washington DC - he can see and hear and report, but can he understand the American ways completely? Perhaps not, but the strength and goodness of his vision make the journey worth while

Schopenhauer's "On Style": the Do List of Suggestions for Writers

I just read Schopenhauer's essay on style. And while it is a lovely sort of a rant, good for a blog entry, it tends to focus mostly on the Don'ts and very little on the Dos. So I thought I would record all of Schopenhauer's Do List.

Schopenhauer says the source of the best writing is epigraphic and monumental. I had to look up epigraphic in the dictionary, on google, and in the encyclopaedia before I got insight into what Schopenhauer means by this.

Before paper, all the most important statements a nation used to make were written painstakingly on stone. Throughout the ancient world, then, the style used was spare, grand, round, full, rich, right and true, and it is this Schopenhauer means when he says "epigraphic" style.

Next: "An author should have sometime to say; no, this is in itself almost all that is necessary. Ah, how much it means!" This is his key piece of advice.

"Le Style Empese" means to pour out words like a flood, according to Schopenhauer - again, no hint of this from a google search - and this he contrasts with a prim polite style, both of which are deviations from the epigraphic ideal.

I like Schopenhauer's nice taste, derived from the French, where he says after Hesiod that the half is more than the whole. I learn the same lesson from Gide as a child when I read in his journals that the problem with the English is that they do not know what to leave out. Knowing what to leave out, however, remains the great problem of style.

Style must be objective - that is, directly forcing the reader to think the same thought as the author.

Always write with care, as if the words are to remain forever.

Always write one thought at a time, then link thoughts logically together into paragraphs, rather than interrupting a sentence with parentheses.

Write like an architect builds, sketching out the plan, and thinking it over down the smallest detail.

That's the sum of Schopenhauer's positive advice. There's much negative advice to of great use, and the essay is well worth a read.

Now, I wish I could only apply all this to my writing retrospectively!

Henry James and His Path to Individuation in 'The American'

I just read Henry James' novel, "The American".

I was inspired to read it by the Great Books suggested novels list. I looked it up on Amazon and it sounded fun and easier to read than the later James novels, and so it was. The style is wonderful, humorous, and vibrant. The prose is luxuriant and jewels up into a bon mot every few pages.

It starts with Christopher Newman, a charming character with a kind of flexible moral fibre that can take almost any kind of shock - except those shocks entailed by the plot of the novel.

Newman is very much a free American, and so he is attracted to the bondage of old European values as his path to individuality and wholeness. His attraction to Madame De Cintre has all the hallmarks of a shadow attraction - the inner feminine draws Newman into contact with his vengefulness, hatred, bitterness, narrowness, and evil side - in other words, his shadow. The solitude and loneliness of Newman's character at the end of the novel can be read as a kind of belated adolescence in him - he finally has come to grips with his shadow side as represented by the Bellegarde family.

The Jungian typology is quite convenient for explaining James' novel, because he plays the opposites of European and American with an open hand about his mixed feelings for both sides of the Atlantic. The charged polarities of emotion represent a sort of gateway for the reader into the authorial consciousness itself, which for me is the deepest and most satisfying experience of reading Henry James.

(James is just a wonderful man - the experience of his living consciousness through the text is ineffable. I do not feel I know him yet, but I should want to, and I intend to read "Daisy Miller", "What Maisie Knew", "Turn of the Screw" and "Portrait of a Lady" to discover more about him.)

But back to "The American".

It is as if by externalizing his European-ness and American-ness, Henry James becomes something larger than both. The effort at becoming aware is tangible by the number of times James reverted to the material of the novel in his long career.

Henry James sought perhaps that intoxicating liberty from culture that came from transcending experiencing itself, and instead, it seems, fell into entrapment in the gravity well of Great Britain's culture. Anglophilic became British. Plain-spoken became ornate. The image of the American unconsciously became something more universal through Henry James' conscious rejection of American moeurs.

On Henry James: 'the Simpler Manners of Men Live Forever'

In discussing Henry James' influences, Carl Van Doren in 'The American Novel' writes thus:

'Balzac, of course, James greatly preferred to either Flaubert or George Sand, for his great range and close texture: “He has against him,” James however added, “that he lacks that slight but needful thing—charm.” '

I laughed when I read this. How often have I read some clumsy attempt at graciousness in Balzac fall flat! You read it and say "Well, he tried!" but the fact is he kept trying and trying to charm and failing quite completely. The interest of the Comedie Humaine seems less in its charm than in its vitality. By attempting, Balzac would make it so. But words alone do not a novel make.

In concluding his brilliant commentary, Carl Van Doren writes this remarkable and lucid passage. It is written as a single par but I have broken it up for the medium of a blog:

'James’s essential limitation may rather accurately be expressed by saying that he attempted, in a democratic age, to write courtly romances.

'He did not, naturally, go back for his models to the Roman de la Rose or Morte d’Arthur or Sidney’s Arcadia or the Grand Cyrus. But he did devote himself to those classes in modern society which descend from the classes represented by the romancers of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. His characters, for the most part, neither toil nor spin, trade nor make war, bear children in pain nor bring them up with sacrifices. The characters who do such things in his novels are likely to be the servants or dependents of others more comfortably established. His books consequently lack the interest of that fiction which shows men and women making some kind of way in the world—except the interest which can be taken in the arts by which the penniless creep into the golden favor of the rich or the socially unarrived wriggle into an envied caste. James is the laureate of leisure. Moreover the leisure he cared to write about concerns itself in not the slightest degree with any action whatsoever, even games or sports. Love of course concerns it, as with all novelists. Yet even love in this chosen universe must constantly run the gauntlet of a decorum incomprehensible to all but the initiate.

'Decorum is what damns James with the public. In one of Chrétien de Troyes’s romances Lancelot, on his way to rescue Guinevere from a most precarious situation, commits the blunder of riding part of the way in a cart and thereby brings upon himself a disgrace which his most gallant deeds can scarcely wipe out. Sensible citizens who may have happened upon this narrative in the twelfth century probably felt mystified at the pother much as do their congeners in the twentieth who stare at the wounds which James’s heroes and heroines suffer from blunders intrinsically no more serious than Lancelot’s. How much leisure these persons must enjoy, the sensible citizen thinks, to have evolved and to keep up this mandarin formality; and how little use they make of it!

'Only readers accustomed to such decorums can walk entirely at ease in the universe James constructed. But they have the privileges of a domain unprecedented and unmatched in modern literature. It is not merely that he is the most fascinating historian of the most elegant society of the century. He is the creator of a world immensely beautiful in its own right: a world of international proportions, peopled by charming human beings who live graceful lives in settings lovely almost beyond description; a world which vibrates with the finest instincts and sentiments and trembles at vulgarity and ugliness; a world full of works of art and learning and intelligence, a world infinitely refined, a world perfectly civilized.

'In real life the danger to such a world is that it may be overwhelmed by some burly rush of actuality from without. In literature the danger is that such a world will gradually fade out as dreams fade, and as the old romances of feudalism have already faded. Elaborate systems of decorum pass away; it is only the simpler manners of men which live forever.'

Reading Hippocrates

Today I read Hippocrates' piece on how the environment creates health or illness. The core idea is that a harsh, dry, mountainous, unfriendly environement gives rise to a courageous and strong people, while a soft, swampy, luxurious environment gives rise to weak and soft people.

Hippocrates tries his hand at some ethnology too. He compares the Scythians, Persians, and Europeans. His views don't seem very cogent. But the most interesting part about his opinions is his views on the causes of the impotence of the Scythians. His diagnosis of the Scythian's commonplace impotence is fascinating. I have to wonder if he borrowed it from someone who had lived among them, though. Hippocrates does not seem much like a travelling man.

The piece is called 'Airs, Waters, Places'. It's quite a sensible paper when you read it in historical context. Hippocrates apprehends the malleable nature of humans, and tries to grasp how humans fit the environment without recourse to myth or religion. In that light, his first efforts are very good indeed.

I love the Gateway to the Great Books of the Western World

Imagine having the perfect uncle.

Not only does he introduce you to the world at large, but he is a relentless adventurer. He travels far and wide in search of brilliant trophies.

Your perfect uncle (or aunt) knows all the best stories. He knows all the best places to go.

But more than that, imagine he is of the highest discretion and so only speaks to lead you out into further adventures of your own. Imagine his tact and forebearance allow you to explore exactly what you need to at your own pace and depth.

This is what the Gateway to the Great Books are.

"The works in that set [the Great Books] have a certain magnitude, but they also occupy a unique place in the formation and development of Western Culture. Each of them represents a primary, original, and fundamental contribution to man's understanding of the universe and of himself. It has been said of them that they are books which never have to be written again, that they are inexhaustibly rereadable, that they are always contemporary, and that they are at once the most intelligible books (because so lucidly written) and the most rewarding to understand (because they deal with the most profound and important subjects). It has also been said of them that they are the repository and reservoir of the relatively small number of great ideas which man has forged in his efforts to understand the world and his place in it; and that they are over everyone's head all of the time, which gives them the inexhaustible power to elevate all of us who will make the effort to lift our minds by reaching up to the ideas they contain."

The above sustained and sublime piece of prose is from the Introduction to the Gateway to the Great Books. From the prose style I believe it may be written by Hutchins, but it doesn't say.

I read and reread this paragraph with wonder. The Great Books are larger than my comprehension. And it is the Gateway to the Great Books that have enlarged my sensibility bit by bit so that I can appreciate the truth of these words.

For the last 18 months I have been taking a liberal arts degree through the Gateway to the Great Books. I am just over half way and feel my sense of myself, the world, other humans, nature, and God has been profoundly deepened by this study. It has been liberating. Becoming an autodidact has been empowering. And sharing what I have learnt has been enriching.