On Sainte-Beuve On Montaigne

Sainte-Beuve writes messily, but the fine feelings sweep you along quickly so you don't notice until the second read.

I have forced Sainte-Beuve to speak here of Montaigne in epigram, as I can only imagine he would have wished if he had a modern audience to communicate with.

Much as his work has been demolished for me by Proust's criticism, Sainte-Beuve's wonderful love and enthusiasm remains:

- "It may be said of Montaigne's style that it is a continual epigram, or an ever-renewed metaphor."

- "Montaigne is a writer naturally fertile in metaphors that are never detached from the thought, but that seize it in its very center."

- "If we desired to write with his severity, exact proportion, and diverse continuity of figures and turns - it is absolutely necessary to enlarge and extend the French language."

- "In imagining the expression and locution that is wanting, our prose should appear equally finished, inspired and emboldened, but not intoxicated, by the pure and direct spirit of ancient sources."

Some stray birds:

Can even a Frenchman still speak about enlarging the language? And now that English cannot be engrossed by any one human mind, can it even be called a single language, or is it rather a super-language or complex of languages?

I find in Montaigne's classicism the best possible kind: to treat the Roman and Greek authors as a matter for pleasure and wisdom alone, and to avoid all pretense of learning and unnatural composure.

The very same things said of Montaigne are also said of Dante by the critics. Can it be the sweet new style is anything other than a sweet fresh mind made intimate with the minds of the ancients?

Finally, how can we account for Dante in Italian, Montaigne in French, and Shakespeare in English? The mystery at least can be traced to the Roman writers. But that does not explain the light that entered the world through their work.

Crikey - It's Proust!

Reading Montaigne on the train today I came upon this:

"The men whose society and intimacy I seek are those who are called well-bred and talented men; and the thought of these gives me a distaste for others. Their kind is, rightly considered, the rarest that we have, a kind that owes almost everything to nature. The purpose of our intercourse is simply intimacy, familiarity, and talk; the exercise of the mind is our sole gain. In our conversations all subjects are alike to me. I do not care if there is no depth or weight in them; they always possess charm, and they always keep to the point. All is colored by a ripe and steady judgment, blended with kindness, candor, gaiety, and friendship... I know my kind even by their silences and their smiles... Hippomachus said truly he that he knew a good wrestler simply by seeing him walk in the street."

I read this with a shock of recognition. Crikey, I said to myself, he's talking about Proust!

It is no good telling me that Proust and Montaigne live three centuries apart. Just imagine Montaigne and Proust in conversation! (I consider myself humbly fortunate to have friends who can follow my conversation at all.)

Neither it is any use telling me that Gide or Saint-Beuve could fit the bill. They do not. Saint-Beuve is Montaigne's disciple, not his mate; and Gide - his diminution.

Judging Proust's Book From An Aristotlean Point of View

Marcel Proust's failure to play well with others; his lack of prudential or practical wisdom; and his insistent cognitive games - these three factors eventually win a beautiful relationship with others through the massive confessional that is Proust's art. The Book of Proust is practical wisdom on a biblical scale, as revealed via Marcel's practical foolishness and refined via a practical skepticism on a par with Montaigne's.

And the prose? Virtuistic, supple, sinuous - instinct rebels against this new snake in the garden. Because Proust fails to shock, like so many of his French colleagues, he nevertheless does not fail to build a relationship (a single unitary friendship on a grand scale) with his readers which is shocking in the way it involves readers in his neurotic verbal-emotional-worldly games.

Does this reader want to bitchslap the author? Sometimes. But since Proust is basically innocent and silly (albeit in a shrewd and wise way) I would regret it.

New Insights on the Good Life of Aristotle and Adler

I've spent the afternoon in the state library reading Mortimer Adler's book 'Aristotle For Everybody'. I'm pretty excited about my reading: it demonstrates to me that I've discovered some new knowledge, something new under the sun.

Here's how: I informed Aristotle and Adler's views on the ethical and good life with the philosophical views of Vedanta, the teachings on skillful means in the Dhamma-Vinyana, and the basic view of not-self (Buddhist) or the non-linear Self (Hindu). The result is something new and pleasing, and to my mind a more accurate description of the constituents of the good life heretofore created. Sadly, it is not appropriate to go into it here. But I do love this stuff!

I also read two books on autodidacticism. From Adler's book on the topic (very slight!) I picked the following fruit: poetry and philosophy are the two transcendent Goods of life, because one has to do with making things to the ultimate degree (that is, poetry makes meaning), and the other has to do with knowing to the ultimate degree (that is, philosophy answers all valid questions, and refutes all invalid or pseudo-philosophical questions). Marvellous insight!

I found nothing new in Adler's 'Ten Philosophical Mistakes' beyond a moment of existential vertigo at reading the summary of the first philosophical error - the notion that the stuff of mind is a representation of mind, and mind is not accessible to consciousness. This staggered me for a second: I cannot know my own mind!

Then I remembered Freud, and Proust, and Jung, and I understood the need for this indirection, and the possibility of direct knowledge nevertheless through poetic means.

I learnt today that philosophy cannot disclose direct experience, but poetry can. Thus the great sages like Freud and Proust and Jung are best read as poet-shamans, conducing one into a realm which if not for their assistance would remain inaccessible - that is, into one's own self.

A Socratic dialog turns Proustian.

Tonight after the group meets I walk up to my favorite cafe with Samuel and we get a burger, look at girls, and discuss martial arts. On the last topic Samuel, with years more experience in the field, makes a very provocative comment:

“The secret of this type of martial arts is relaxation, plus connection, plus aiming,” he says.

I ask him to repeat it and when he does, I plunge into deep contemplation for a few minutes.

Samuel is as fascinating as a character from Proust. When we walk he directs our steps and expects I walk with him. We wander down Grenfell Street.

“I’m such a creature of habit,” I say. “Normally I walk along Rundle Mall and look at the menswear in the shop windows on the way to the Adelaide train station.”

“Listen to you, you’re such a faggot,” Samuel says.

“I’ve been doing it for years. I now own some of the menswear I used to wish for in the windows,” I say, not even bothering to defend myself. Samuel doesn’t care what you think of him, so any defence I can mount is a waste of our time and energy.

He follows me into the literary bookstore, and listens in on my superficial conversation with the bookseller without adding a single disapproving word. But when we come to the local men’s fashion emporium he finally balks, refusing to look at the clothes. “I can’t stand the music,” he says of the dance music blaring from the store.

“Too much high culture for you,” I jeer. He doesn’t reply.

We walk down King William Street deep in conversation. Eventually the talk comes around to the person he had a phone text message dispute with over our dinner. A mutual friend, it appears. Apropos of the dispute Samuel begins to speak openly and with perfect naturalness about his character defects.

“It’s not that I mean to be arrogant. I am just being myself and other people take offence.”

“How do you know when you’re just being yourself and when you’re being arrogant?” I ask.

“Oh I know,” he says, with perfectly unconscious arrogance. “Even if I’m saying I’m not being arrogant I know deep inside when I am. I feel it.”

I watch his face carefully, fascinated by the notion that gut feelings might be any sort of reliable guide to social truth.

He talks at length about his defect and his natural personality. His view on personal responsibility is what inspires his legendary bluntness and impoliteness, he reveals:

“If I say something and you get offended, that’s your choice. You choose to be offended. Fine; no harm done. But if you get hurt and angry and cry at how I hurt your feelings because you took offence, then I have no time for you. You’re playing the victim when you think someone else can make you feel anything.”

“But isn’t offence an emotion?” I ask.

“Offence,” he says, “is a mental state. You don’t choose to be offended, but you do choose to feel the associated emotions with it. I speak bluntly to some people and they couldn’t care less, and I speak the same way with others and you’d think I’d taken their firstborn, they get so upset.”

“That is fascinating, Samuel. Thankyou for explaining that for me, now I understand what that behaviour’s all about,” I say. I had been wondering what motivates his bluntness for several weeks, and to have him simply explain himself to me without my asking is an unexpected boon.

But I do not speak my mind until the conversation has ostensibly moved on to other topics and I can bring up the subject of his vanity without fear of causing offense:

“I notice some people habitually take offence because of political correctness. That is to say, because I am a female, you can’t say that; because I am indigenous, you can’t say that. For such people, offence and emotion is one and the same thing.”

Samuel heartily agrees. So I continue:

“You know neurologists have found that being able to restrain your emotions is one of the last traits to appear in adulthood. It’s associated with the frontal lobes and generally finishes growing in the thirties, so many people either have brain damage or they haven’t grown the proper brain structures to be able to restrain themselves from getting upset,” I say. “So when a person without the ability to stop themselves reacting feels upset, would it not follow they would automatically be offended?”

But Samuel is not interested in examining his own views. He says: “Imagine what the world would be like if drinking alcohol was unpopular on a Saturday night.”

“People would be playing chess in the square,” I say. We are sitting at the bus stop in Victoria Square as I say this.

“Giant chess with human bodies,” Samuel adds whimsically.

“There would be comfortable couches in nightclubs, and they wouldn’t have to fear people ruining them by spilling alcohol all over them.”

“Nightclubs would be so different. Comfortable.”

“Quiet.”

“People would be playing instruments in cafes. Jazz, rock bands.”

“String quartets in nightclubs. And wouldn’t it be cool if you could go to a yoga class at 9.30 on a Saturday night!” I say.

He looks at me oddly, as if doing a yoga class on a Saturday night is just completely beyond the pale. His disturbed look just makes my night. I am delighted. Sometimes Samuel finds me very strange indeed, and this is one of those times.

“Here comes my bus,” he says, standing. “You’ve missed your tram.”

“I have, and I’ve had the compensation of a very interesting conversation,” I say warmly, and we part ways.

My behavior tonight was half-way between Proust and Socrates. The Socratic desire to cross-examine my friend’s absurd views on causing offense was overcome by the simple pleasure Marcel Proust takes in the gentle unconscious comedy that comes from enjoying the implaceable bad defects of those we hold in high affection.

Why Read Proust?

Why Read Proust?

There are many good reasons not to read Marcel Proust’s great novel A la Rechere du Temps Perdu.

It is uneventful. It can be boring. The narrator is a bitchy snob. It has too many outright lies in it to be autobiography, and too much tiresome bickering to be considered a novel. And it is too long.

It is cynical: all human relationships except close family are false, fake; naked unconscious self-interest and vanity drive all social interactions; childhood habits once broken can never be recovered; insomnia, poor health, jealousy, sadomasochistic urges, ungovernable impulses – all of these completely overrule and overdetermine the individual’s sense of reason.

It is capricious: a huge cast of mostly irrelevant characters caper about uttering strange irrelevancies, whose total sum is some kind of mysterious calculus of snobbery cloaking intense animalistic urges, which Proust seldom deigns to explain to readers living in a less uptight culture. Cruelty is commonplace between characters that are considered friends, and sexual compulsions bind everyone together invisibly and inseparably.

It is disorganised: the tone changes from page to page, from book to book, without warning, guidance, or apparent reason. The paragraph divisions are completely useless, presenting the book messily. The chapter headings are either hopelessly irrelevant or simply nonexistent; the reader is left to impose his own structure on the book if he is to make sense of it.

So why read Proust? If the good is the enemy of the great, surely Proust’s book is its own worst enemy? But if you read merely good books, then you are condemned to mediocrity. And since Marcel Proust’s book is both bad AND great, it provides the most uniquely vulgar amusements in the midst of the most sublime art. I don’t dispute its greatness; its goodness I sincerely doubt.

So why read it? I can tell you must read Marcel Proust. I can tell you it is great. But I cannot tell you why. Harold Bloom blathers on about identity and memory; I don’t know about that. I can only tell you that I do, you must, it’s worth it – that is all I can say.

Addendum: Okay, okay, so Proust is funny, charming, insightful, sweet. His language is beautiful, delicate, tough, and sinewy. His ideas on love are shocking and wise in equal measure. And the badness of Proust’s book makes the great qualities all the more astonishing. It is as if it were discovered that Thomas Aquinas has been, in addition to writing his Summa Theologica, the author of some pornography – I kid you not: Proust is THAT shocking.

Proust:"Our social personality is a creation of the minds of others."

“Our social personality is a creation of the minds of others.

Even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go to look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament. Even the very simple act that we call ‘seeing a person we know’ is in part an intellectual act. We fill thephysical appearance of the individualwe see with all the notions we have about him, and in the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly have the greater part. In the end they swell his cheeks so perfectly, follow the line of his nose in adherence so exact, they do so well at nauncing the sonority o fhis voice as though the latter were only a transparent envelope that each time we see this face and hear this voice, it is these notions that we encounter again, that we hear.

…

The corporeal envelope of our friend had been so well stuffed… that this particular Swann had become a complete and living being, and I have the impression of leaving one person to go to another distinct from him, when in my memory, I pass from that first Swann in whom I rediscover the charming mistkes of my youth and who in fact resembles less the other Swann than he resembles the other people I knew at the time, as though it were the same in our life as in a museum where all the portraits from one period have a family look abut them, one tonality – to that first Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the smell of the tall chestnut tree, the baskets of raspberries and a sprig of tarragon.”

- The Way By Swann's, pages 22-23.

This must be my heaven.

It's 11 at night - I just got home - some basmati rice is cooking on the stove, and a Mozart violin concert is playing on the radio.

Ah. This must be my heaven.

I know every note of the Mozart concert, but the solo musician and director has filtered it through some utterly alien sensibility and produced something at once more subtle and oddly disturbing of the familiar tones. It is as if I hear the Mozart in a dream and wake and have it all at once present in waking experience, but with the echo of rememberance overlaid like the eerie moan of the ocean at midnight, a sound so like that of woman crying in pain or ecstacy that it reminds me in its resonance of the frightful and profundly disturbing moment of my own birth.

I have had Marcel Proust at hand all day, reading it in snatches of five to ten pages. His book brings me great happiness today.

These opening pages of Temps Perdu are a synctium of the whole work. It is as if the first 45 pages of The Way By Swann's are a homeopathic ticture giving the bittersweet curative and purgative flavor of the entire work. I will quote the most striking sentence in another entry, but for now I am content to let it settle deeper into my consciousness and fill me with pleasure at the insight of this master of human relationships.

This morning I heard the Pathetique Symphony of Tychaikovsky on the radio, movement one and two. This is what I wrote, somewhat in a hurry to go out:

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ON AUSTRALIAN CULTURE.

I was listening to Tychaikovsy on ABC radio today. Listening to the first part of his Pathetique, it is so obvious to me now how the view of life as essential a tragic drama of spiritual redemption underlies the Russian worldview. The feeling-water element and the intuition-fire element meet and ahniallate one another in the first part of this symphony, creating thereby a world of ideas and sensations - that is, of air and earth. What I am not prepared for, however, is the insight this casts into the Australian psyche.

The Australian weltanschauung would have to be optimistic and naive comedy of commercial imitation turning out better than imagined. Think Balzac's Cesar Birotteau set in a milliner's in Brunswick, Melbourne.

Australia has no historical figures whose names end with the suffix "the Great", and Russia has perhaps too many. Australia's defining catastrophe, the failed storming of Anzac Cove during the Great War, is small scale in comparison to two and a half century string of Russian disasters.

Australia's psyche might be made-for-televsion miniseries about two competing wealthy families, a protestant outback mob and a catholic inner city suburban clan, who over three generations from the first world war to the start of the Vietnam war protests intermarry first with each other, city breeding with country, then with new Australian Italians, then emigrant Singaporean Chinese, and for whom the political and social viccissitudes of their day mean nothing so much as a chance to sneer at the fussy Europeans and make more money from the Americans.

The consciousness of the Australian psyche is characterised by materialism and naivete. The unconscious shadow of the Australian psyche is expressed in physical overcompensation and intellectual self-sabotage. That is to say, Australian's worship sport as a compensation for our consistent failure to pay appropriate attention and funding to independent intellectual discoveries. Bluntly put, Australia bleeds innovation to other nations, resulting in an unfounded goodwill to Australians based not on our actual hard-won cultural eminence, but on our naive and scandalous mismanagement of our own intellectual resources.

The superior function, so to speak, of the Australian consciousness is earth or sensation, and the inferior or supporting function is fire and intuition.

As a result the current and the currency of the life of feeling and intellectualism flows unconsciously to more sophisticated elder nations, who under the pretense of patronage play the role of enabling Australia to remain unaware of itself as an individual culture. This accounts for the strange sense of ill-defined cultural identity in the Australian people. In a nation whose goodwill is based on concealing emotional and intellectual realities, prosperity is dependent on keeping everything undefined and vague.

The lack of definition in the Australian psyche is the main aspect of our shadow. Our shadow side is water, feeling function. Australians are the famed military who die with a quiet "Aw geez!" on the battlefield; Australians are the intellectuals who are valued for their ability to lie low and worship football; Australians are the people who will call you "mate" but steadfastly refuse to define exactly what obligations and responsibilities to one another said mateship might entail; and Australians are the people who make out as if the word "laconic" actually describes a personality trait worth having.

Beneath the shadowy realm of the poorly articulated feeling life of the Australian culture and people lies the hidden gift of Australia to the world. The unobserved and unnoticed treasure of Australian culture is intellectual liberty the likes of which I have seen nowhere else on earth.

This is where Australia's greatest strength lies, then: as a greenhouse to foster intellectual achievement. And instead of daring to define ourselves and expose the overcompensating vulgarity of Australian sporting excellence for the frightened sham it really is, Australia has been a nursery to endless suburban breeding hives since the mid-1940s. Instead of building a vibrant intellectual public life, Australians have managed to fostering only an endless blob of materialistic and naive adults whose entitlement to the fruits of individual intellectual labor and whose unprecedented liberty to explore the life of the mind is taken for granted not simply as a given privilege, but arrogantly as a natural endowment as a result of having been born in Australia. Such is the naive shortsightedness of the average Australian as to their privileges and blessings they are born into. For lack of intellectual and emotional excellence, the mob of opinionated Australians shout out any attempt to clarify the messy shadow qualities of Australian culture with a chorus of ill-informed and vulgar views. And from lacking a clear sense of collective public life, Australians have expressed the need for genuine intellectual excellence by reducing emotional and intellectual development to a materialistic outcome.

To sum up, in Australia the question "What did you learn today?" brings mockery, while the question "How much did you earn today?" inspires respect.

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That is all I wrote this morning.

On re-reading it I would add that it is actually really rude to disrespect the younger culture of Australia from the vantage point of the Old West which I am most familiar with. It is a delicate balance between vaunting the obvious superiority of Western Culture in general, while accepting and valuing the fresh energy of the New West. A criticism is only as effective as it is also kind.