Art and the Unexpected

“Comfort Ye My People”

From The Gospel Messiah (Too Hot to Handel)

George Friedrich Handel

Marin Alsop and the Colorado Symphony

Orchestrated by Bob Christianson and Gary Anderson

Art and the Unexpected

Painting, mostly in blue, of the Lights

Northern Lights

Anna Boberg,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Boberg#/media/File:Northern_Lights,_by_Anna_Boberg.jpg

Maria Popova wrote about John Cage in “Nothing: The Illustrated Story of How John Cage Revolutionized Music and the Art of Listening. “The essay focuses on Cage’s composition “4’33”. The composition was written for piano, but I have seen it performed on the violin as well. In this piece of music, the pianist sits down at the piano, or the violin, or whatever instrument the piece has been orchestrated for, and does nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The fact that the piece has been orchestrated for different instruments suggests that silence sounds different on different instruments as well as in different places. The article asks us to consider what is music and silence and if they can be the same. It asks, what is the nature of silence? The music of Cage’s piece is created by the place and the people in that place. As there is no perfect vacuum, no space totally devoid of air, is there a space totally devoid of sound? First “performed” by the “virtuoso pianist David Tudor in a barn-like concert hall in Woodstock, New York — four minutes and thirty-three seconds of pure silence, suddenly rendering musical the ambient sounds of ordinary life.” And those ambient sounds are everywhere different. One thing the history of this composition teaches us is that silence can be copyrighted. The rock composer Mike Batt of the rock group “The Planets” was sued for copyright infringement. His song “One Minute Silence,” it was alleged, was stolen from Cage’s 4’ 33”. Batt paid a pretty large sum of money to settle the suit; it would seem it is the idea behind the composition as much as the composition itself that is copyrighted. I have a Nitty Gritty Dirt Band CD that, as you might expect, goes silent after what was listed as the last song. But I was working while listening and I couldn’t put on another album right away and after a minute or two another song, “The Weight,” played that was in fact the last song. The “silent track” unfortunately was not listed on the albums list of songs, and neither was “The Weight,”, so how was one to know? Perhaps to list the silent track would cause copyright problems.

But silence is different everywhere. When I work, I work in silence because it is easier to concentrate. But I am never really in silence. I hear the sounds of my fingers on the keyboard. I hear birds in the yard. I hear the wind in the trees. Wallace Stevens captures this kind of silence in “The Idea of Order at Key West”:

If it was only the dark voice of the sea

That rose, or even colored by many waves;

If it was only the outer voice of sky

And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,

However clear, it would have been deep air,

The heaving speech of air, a summer sound

Repeated in a summer without end

And sound alone.

In the poem a woman is singing, but Stevens is describing the sounds absent the woman’s voice. He is dismissive of these sounds, suggests it is the woman’s voice that brings them into being. But the sound of the silence as described by Stevens is beautiful in itself. It might be what we would hear if Cage’s 4’33” were played at this beach in Key West. Sometimes we take the sounds of silence that surrounds us for granted, we are dismissive of them. If we think about Cage’s composition, it suggests there is more to most things than we realize when we think of them simply. The article said, “For Cage, the questions were always the important part, because the questions were more interesting than the answers. The questions often led to more questions, instead of answers.”

The music at the top illustrates another way music can take us by surprise. The song is from Handel’s oratorio The Messiah. It is a piece of music most are familiar with, and this vocal is one most have heard. But instead of the baroque orchestrations and vocals we expect to hear; it has been orchestrated for a gospel band with gospel choir and soloists. We hear saxophones, organs, trumpets, guitars and such instead of strings, woodwinds, and brass. The conductor, Marin Alsop, wanted to perform The Messiah in a way that would bring people to their feet the way the original performances did. She thought orchestrated for a gospel band and chorus the music would be more rousing to a modern audience. There is more to a piece of music than the notes.

Painting of men being shot by a firing squad

The Third of May

Francesco Goya

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Goya#/media/File:El_Tres_de_Mayo,_by_Francisco_de_Goya,_from_Prado_thin_black_margin.jpg

In “Art Isn’t Supposed to Make You Comfortable” Jen Silverman writes of a book she read in college:

When I was in college, I came across “The Sea and Poison,” a 1950s novel by Shusaku Endo. It tells the story of a doctor in postwar Japan who, as an intern years earlier, participated in a vivisection experiment on an American prisoner. Endo’s lens on the story is not the easiest one, ethically speaking; he doesn’t dwell on the suffering of the victim. Instead, he chooses to explore a more unsettling element: the humanity of the perpetrators.

This merits thought. We should care about victims and do all we can to alleviate their pain and to prevent the causes of that pain. But prevention probably requires us to pay some attention to the perpetrators, they are after all the ones that need to be changed if the world is to be improved. She goes on to say, “When I say ‘humanity’ I mean their confusion, self-justifications and willingness to lie to themselves. Atrocity doesn’t just come out of evil, Endo was saying, it emerges from self-interest, timidity, apathy and the desire for status.” What Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil.” She said this of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal. Arendt said he was a “normal man,” a “boring man” who was “only looking for advancement.”

Silverman goes on to talk about a visit she made to a web site that trashes books the contributors to the site do not like, books like Lolita, Paradise Lost, and Rabbit Run. The reviewers did not like the books because they revolved around characters the readers thought despicable and why do we need to read about such people. Silverman suggests why, “Here on my screen was the distillation of a peculiar American illness: namely, that we have a profound and dangerous inclination to confuse art with moral instruction, and vice versa.” Of course, there is a sense in which these books do provide moral instruction, in that they confront us with behaviors we as a culture need to address. It is in this sense that literature and art ought to work:

But what art offers us is crucial precisely because it is not a bland backdrop or a platform for simple directives. Our books, plays, films and TV shows can do the most for us when they don’t serve as moral instruction manuals, but rather allow us to glimpse our own hidden capacities, the slippery social contracts inside which we function, and the contradictions we all contain.

Literature opens our eyes to the world that is. Many, maybe most, Utopian books point out not what the best possible world looks like, but the shortcomings to the best possible worlds we imagine. This is an important function of all art, it challenges us, makes us think about things, to not take the good things, the beautiful things of our world for granted and consider ways to fix what is problematic. It also helps us understand that what is problematic for us may not be problematic, or harmful, for others. It helps us consider how we accommodate everyone.

Cage draws attention to what silence sounds like and we should consider if this is what silence should sound like and if it is we ought to take an interest in preserving that sound. How has the sound of silence changed over the years since Cage composed 4’33”? There is an old Loving Spoonful song, “Summer in the City.” Part of the song’s accompaniment is jack hammers pounding in the background. If 4’33” were played in the city, jack hammers and police sirens and the like would be part of the ambient sound. Should those sounds be preserved? How would life in the city change if these sounds were eliminated? There are sounds that are unpleasant but are also important to the maintaining of a society. Spike Jones used to orchestrate pistol shots that fired in the key of the song his band was playing. He did this with other kinds of racket as well.  Noise can be musical. Not all background noise is as pleasant as the ambient sounds surrounding a barn or a concert hall. But they may be necessary none the less. Spike Jones’ band suggests there are few sounds that can not be made musical.

All the arts much of the time draw our attention to what should be preserved and what should be changed. And not all of what should be preserved is pleasant.

 What I find to be important in books is how they help me to see more clearly what human experience is made of. I enjoy Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, Ben Jonson, and others like them. They make us laugh, but, if we are paying attention, we realize the laugh is on us. The humor and jokes entertain us, the thoughts they provoke educate after a fashion. I think if the con artists in the film The Sting are placed alongside the con artists in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, they illustrate this point. In the film I find myself liking the con men, in part because they are conning someone who deserved conning. When we first encounter the King and the Duke in Huckleberry Finn, they are comic characters, and we laugh at what they do. Those that are conned are either foolish or cruel and, in a sense, deserve what they get. But they then con three young sisters who have been orphaned. These men try to con them out of everything they have and leave them to make their way in a world that offers them few ways of taking care of themselves. The kind of things the Duke and the King are doing are not unlike other things they have done, but in this instance, they are doing real harm. We are stopped up short if we are paying attention. What these men do to the sisters isn’t funny. I laughed when the harm being done was to people who deserved the harm. But these young girls did not deserve this. Twain forces us to consider if it is acceptable to cause suffering if it is to people we do not like; that hurting others is only a bad thing if the people being hurt, in our view, don’t deserve to suffer. But who are we to decide who does and does not deserve to suffer.

Perhaps reading, or viewing, this way, takes some of the fun out of it, but I believe Twain is inviting us to confront our behavior and the things we condone, if only by laughter. At the end of The Sting, I am on the side of the con artists and pleased they won. But what of the other people they con? Are those as deserving of what happens to them? At the beginning of the film a mobster, whose job it was to deliver the day’s take to the boss, is tricked out of the money he was supposed to deliver. As a result, he was killed. He was a gangster, he probably deserved it, but somehow, I am troubled by it. Also, they were going to con the first person they encountered, it only happened to be a gangster, but it could have been anyone. Perhaps the film maker wanted the audience to be troubled. But I don’t think so.

 Painting of a futuristic city that uses jet propulsion to hover over the surface of the land, as laputa did in "Gulliver's Travels.

The City of the Future

Frank R. Paul

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_cities_and_islands_in_fiction#/media/File:Science_and_Invention_Feb_1922_pg905_-_Cities_of_the_Future.jpg

In another book from another time, during the third voyage of Jonathan Swift’s book Gulliver’s Travels, “A Voyage to Laputa,” the wife of Laputa’s king runs away. Laputa is an island that floats above the surface of the land. The king, like most of the men on the island, is totally self absorbed. He treats his wife like a piece of furniture. So, she goes to the land below. She has a relationship with a footman who beats her. When she is captured and returned to her husband and the floating island, she runs away again to be with the footman who beats her. This is of course a very sexist joke, the woman is too stupid to stay where it is safe, even if it means being totally ignored.

But it could be argued that being treated like a piece of furniture is a kind of emotional, psychological abuse that denies her humanity. We all understand that physical abuse is abuse. But we can be dismissive of other kinds of abuse, like emotional and psychological abuse. Swift does not have to make a case that physical abuse is abuse, everyone knows and acknowledges that. But by seeing her return to the land where she is beaten, we are compelled to consider the emotional and psychological abuse she is trying to escape as abuse as well and that of the two she prefers the physical abuse. If she had stayed with the king, we would probably dismiss the form of abuse she suffers and think no more about it. We might accept that the abuse she suffers on the island is a valid reason for leaving the floating island, but why return to the footman. What else is she to do? On the island she lived an empty meaningless life where she was given nothing to do. When she reaches the land, she has no skills and no way to support herself. And even if she did have skills, at this time in history she may not have been given the freedom to put them into practice.

Swift, I am sure, was probably as sexist as most men of his time, and he probably intended the sexist joke as a sexist joke; he certainly wasn’t a feminist. It is not unlikely that I am reading all this into the text. But it is the text that suggests these thoughts, to me at least. Swift was a Humanist, and as a Humanist he may have considered thoughts like these; that people, men and women, need to do more than breath the air and take up space. Swift as a writer effectively used irony to provoke his readers. Maybe here he was being a bit provocative. These books entertain, but they can do more than that for the reader that is open to what the entertainment brings along with it.

Some years ago, Azar Nafisi wrote a book, The Republic of the Imagination. She is an immigrant from Iran. In the introduction she writes about a conversation she had with another émigré from Iran. He said American readers didn’t understand their own books. In Iran he did not have the freedom to read books Americans take them for granted, if they take them at all. He said, “These people are different from us – they’re from another world. They don’t care about books and such things. It’s not like Iran where we were crazy enough to xerox hundreds of pages of books like Madame Bovary and A Farewell to Arms.” Azari didn’t agree with the man, but perhaps there is something to what he says. Nafisi went on to point out that those that risk torture to read, listen to, or watch works of art “hold the whole enterprise in an entirely different light.”

In a place where the arts are available to anyone anytime they want to pursue them, for as long as they want to pursue them it may be easier to take the arts for granted. We are surrounded by them. People who do not like an artform, opera for example, may think those that like that artform odd, or elite, but no one’s right to indulge that artform is infringed. I can read Shakespeare or Marvel Comics, listen to classical or popular music, look at the paintings of Rembrandt or graffiti with no problems.

I read once of miners in Britain that maintained libraries on their work sites, libraries of Greek and Latin literature, as well as more contemporary thinkers and story tellers. Perhaps things are still a bit that way, that miners in this place and time are also stimulated by pursuits of the mind and imagination. Mind and imagination are wonderful things. Why did I find it surprising that miners once upon a time would value this when today the perception of miners is that their interests do not go far beyond sports and country music. This is not true of course, but popular culture likes to generalize and make it seem true. There is an old movie, The Corn is Green that revolves around a coal miner with an aptitude for scholarship who at the end of the film is sent off to college. The impression is that this miner is unlike all the others and all the others lack these intellectual gifts. Yet the miner’s libraries were prevalent at the time this film was set, which suggests these impressions may be inaccurate. The film does suggest that all miners’ children should have the opportunity to learn and prepare for college. That lack of training is not the same as the inability to be trained. These children did not turn their backs on education, they weren’t given the opportunity to get an education.

It seems at times we herd ourselves into our different “elites” and resist the crossing of elitist lines. Certain aspects of mind and imagination seem inappropriate, and we drive ourselves into our corners where we each pursue the avenues of thought that are open to our station. But St. Paul, who wrote two thirds of the New Testament was a tent maker. Grover Washington Carver began as a slave. Aphra Behn began as a spy who became a writer when the king refused to pay her for her work as a spy. The novelist Jack London began as the “prince of the Oyster pirates.” Charles Ives and Wallace Stevens were insurance salesmen when they weren’t composing music or writing poetry. Robert Frost was a farmer. The Bronte sisters were governesses, Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson were stay at home daughters. Zora Neale Hurston was n Anthropologist. Walt Whitman suggests we contain multitudes (or at least that he did) so why not explore more of those multitudes.

The Kingdom of the Fairies

George Méliès

Star Film

The film is from the silent era. Because color film had not yet been invented, each frame of the film had to be colored by hand. At 24 frames per second that must have been an arduous process. The film as originally presented was silent, there was not music playing behind it as there is in this video. If you want to experience the film as the original audience did, turn off the sound. Without the sound it takes on many of the characteristics of a ballet. Denis Villeneuve, the director of the most recent Dune movies, in an interview said he thought film should be viewed without sound, because the visuals for him are what is most important. He thought an earlier film version of Dune was brilliant when viewed as he viewed it without sound. It was the acting in the film that resulted in its poor reviews and ratings and perhaps if viewed visually, without sound, it is a more impressive film.

Perhaps, Cage in his 4’33” was trying to help audiences be more comfortable with silence.  Experienced in silence many may lose interest in this film and turn it off. But consider the color. It is not just that it was a difficult and time-consuming process to make this a color film, but that it is visually stunning. Remember, films are also called “movies” a word derived from what they were originally called “moving pictures,” because that is what they were, pictures that moved. I suppose being new, the magic of a moving picture, even if left in black and white, might be more engrossing for those that had never seen pictures move than they are for us. Imagine John Cage’s 4’33” playing for 16’44” as the soundtrack for the film; we can take Cage’s music into a new dimension. It might make it easier to watch with Cage’s music playing in the background. This may be an instance of art making us uncomfortable, but not because the subject matter is uncomfortable, but because the times and the form have changed. To view this, we need to look through the lens of the original audience. It is not the message but the medium that is uncomfortable. We have to grow accustomed to a different way of experiencing delight.

Painting of three men, a Renaissance European man, A Persian of Arab man, and a Greek man

Three Philosophers

Giorgione

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Philosophers#/media/File:Giorgione_-_Three_Philosophers_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

What I find interesting about this painting is that it is of three men who live lives of the mind, who think deeply and should have much to share. But each one is engrossed in his own thoughts and seems totally self-absorbed. They also look to come from different cultures and different times. The first, starting from the left, appears to be European and a Renaissance philosopher. The second appears to be from a Persian or Arab culture, that was responsible for preserving Classical philosophy, science, math and literature during the “Dark Ages.” The third appears to be a Greek holding a document in his hands that looks scientific or mathematical, representing classical thought. It also suggests the route Classical thought took back into Europe during the Renaissance. It was lost in Europe with the rise of Christianity. However, it flourished and was preserved in Arab culture. As a result of European trade Classical thought found its way back into Europe. Still, the philosophers are not talking to each other.

In the “Dark Ages” Classical art, literature, and culture was shut out (though not to the extent that we often imagine) and the focus of education was on theology. As a Christian I find this period rich in a kind of thought, but without competing points of view and ways of thinking, I think theology became, if not weaker, disengaged from the arguments of its time in the rest of the world. I appreciate that Augustine kept Plutonic thought, Plato’s way of thinking, alive, and it was Augustine’s classical education that made him a Platonist. But it was here perhaps that Liberal Arts education first came under attack. It created a different kind of silence, the silencing of views that stretch one’s thoughts by challenging them. It was worse than avoiding those that think differently, because different points of view were muted. But wherever there is silence, something will fill it, heresies of one kind or another.  The argument over making education focus on what we need and not on other “unnecessary things” began. We can also see how the definition of necessary things changes with time. Today necessary things are not theological, but the sciences and mathematics and other useful avenues of instruction. It is still Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture that are seen as unnecessary, at least for those whose profession does not require these areas of study. It goes beyond this a bit in that unnecessary things are defined as those things that are unnecessary for one’s planned profession, which assumes students know what their profession will be before they enter college.

Harun Kücük and Ezekial J. Emanuel, define liberal arts instruction in their essay “Higher Education Needs More Socrates and Plato”:

By liberal arts, we mean a broad-based education that aspires to send out into society an educated citizenry prepared to make its way responsibly in an ever-more complex and divided world. We worry that at many schools, students can fulfill all or most of their general education requirements and take any number of electives without having had a single meaningful discussion that is relevant to one’s political life as a citizen.

Over the past century, what made American higher education the best in the world is not its superiority in career training, but educating students for democratic citizenship, cultivating critical thinking and contributing to the personal growth of its students through self-creation. To revive American higher education, we need to reinvigorate these roots.

They contrast this with the kind of education found in other parts of the world and that some advocate for the United States, “In Europe and many countries elsewhere, colleges and universities have undergraduates specialize from Day 1, focusing on developing area-specific skills and knowledge. College students are trained to become doctors, lawyers or experts in international relations, English literature or computer science.” In America, “Historically, students arriving on American college campuses spent a majority of their first two years taking classes outside their projected majors. This exposed them to a common curriculum that had them engage with thoughtful writings of the past to develop the skills and capacity to form sound, independent judgments.” This produces graduates that can think deeply and converse eloquently. It is true that doctors need to know medicine and lawyers need to know law, but we all need to know the workings of a democratic society and its institutions and how to talk intelligently and respectfully with those we have differences on politics and policy and values.

John Henry Cardinal Newman in The Idea of a University (first presented as lectures in 1852 and published in 1873) wrote, That the university “is a place of teaching universal knowledge. This implies that its object is, on the one hand, intellectual, not moral; and, on the other, that it is the diffusion and extension of knowledge rather than the advancement.”

But the urge is for education to be practical. President Obama suggested once that he found it difficult to understand why someone would pursue an advanced degree in Art History. He walked it back a bit, but this is a prevalent view in our society. Why pursue something so useless, at least in the economic sense anyway. The arts, to be appreciated, require us to look into art’s objects and consider their beauty and what they are trying to communicate, that, among other things, beauty has value. One of Thomas Aquinas’ proofs of the existence of God is “Gradation,” that there is a range to things. There is good and there is evil, there is beauty and there is ugliness, there is truth and there is falsity, and so on. There is also a range when these values are considered individually. Two things may be beautiful but one may be more beautiful than the other and we may not always agree as to which is the more beautiful. Also, what is true is different for an atheist than it is for a theist. These differences are not reconcilable but that does not mean we cannot talk respectfully and intelligently about how we each approach these differences.

Three Chinese men who have just crossed a bridge and are laughing.

Three Laughs at the Tiger Brook

Anonymous

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_laughs_at_Tiger_Brook#/media/File:Huxisanxiaotu.jpg

The painting is from China and is of three men who are laughing. There is a story behind this painting. One of the three men is a Buddhist, one is a Taoist, and one is a Confucian. They were vigorously debating their different views, each trying to convince the others of the superiority of his beliefs. When they cross the bridge, they realize they had been in a tiger infested bit of land. They laugh because their debate kept their attention off the danger they were in. They were discussing deeply held beliefs and they, being theologians of sorts, enjoyed talking about those beliefs. This made their trip across this land of tigers pleasant instead of terrifying. They were in mortal danger the whole time. But because their talk made them unaware of where they were they enjoyed the journey. In a sense, we are in dangerous times and if we could learn to talk to each other and enjoy talking about our differences, the time will feel, and as a result, perhaps be, less dangerous. While discussing our views as friends we are not beating up each other.

We see this the world over, not just in America, that people cannot talk to each other. We see forces that want to silence those whose views differ from theirs. We see people defining tyranny as not getting their own way. In America, presidents are declared incompetent by their opponents if they pursue an agenda that doesn’t advance the agendas of their opposition, if it isn’t conservative, liberal or moderate enough as the case may be, like suggesting George Bush (take your pick which one) was a failed president because he didn’t advance a liberal enough agenda or Joe Biden is a failed president for not pursuing a conservative enough agenda. We should enjoy our difference because, in fact, that is where our true strength lies. For a diverse nation to be safe and strong it must accommodate those diverse views. When a democratic republic cannot do that, it is marching towards autocracy. I was born when Truman was president. Between Truman and Biden there have been fourteen presidents, seven Republicans and seven Democrats, that is what democracy looks like.

Kücük and Emanuel end their article:

Liberal arts education is not value neutral. That is why it is indispensable today. Freedom of thought, critical reasoning, empathy for others and respectful disagreement are paramount for a flourishing democratic society. Without them, we get the unreasoned condemnations so pervasive in today’s malignant public discourse. With them, we have a hope of furthering the shared governance that is vital to America’s pluralistic society.

There are people whose opinions are radically different from my own that I talk to, whose company I enjoy, and views I respect, and this feeling is mutual. And remember “liberal” when speaking of liberal arts and liberal democracy is not political, but identifies a free society, one with “liberty” as opposed to totalitarian or monarchal societies that place limits on liberty. In American society all politics is, in this sense, liberal. We are all free to be politically liberal when the government is conservative and conservative when the government is liberal. A liberal education helps us realize that we do not truly know what we believe and why believe it if we do not understand the opposing views and why we do not agree with those. Much of this comes down to conscience and core beliefs that are not and ought not be easily changed. Part of the problem is that views rooted in conscience puts other views in an unconscionable light. And if we are all to live freely and peaceably with a clear conscience, we have to learn to bridge our difference.

As a Christian I have to realize that non-Christians will find my views untenable, in fact other Christians whose theology differs from mine may also find my views untenable. Jesus told His followers they had to love each other and if someone outside the faith did not see that love, the outsider is free to conclude Christianity is not real, is not true (By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” John 13:35). It might also be suggested that people will know we are a democracy by the love we have for one another. This is something we see in practice whenever there is a disaster of one kind or another, as when everyone rallied around New York City after 9/11 whatever their politics and when everyone rallied around Louisiana and the rest of the gulf states after Hurricane Katrina. We help our fellow citizens when they are in trouble. When storms come to Massachusetts, I see trucks from Kentucky and Tennessee helping us with the cleanup. Though we may talk disparagingly about one another much of the time, we are there for each other in our times of need. That is what love looks like much of the time. We can look at the Good Samaritan as a Conservative Republican helping a Liberal Democrat he found in trouble by the side of the road. In the Cotton Patch Gospel, the man on the road is a white man and the man who helps him is black. This version of the Gospels was published in 1957, as the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum. Martin Luther King, Jr’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” for example, was published in 1963. It was also, like many paintings of Gospel events from the Renaissance, set in the time it was written. “The Letter to the Romans” for example, is called “The Letter to the Washingtonians.” Cage’s 4’33” was about hearing silence differently, but there are many other things we need to hear and see and do differently

Painting of a man trying to put an injured man on a horse

The Good Samaritan

Vincent van Gogh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscience#/media/File:Vincent_Willem_van_Gogh_022.jpg

Our Books Ourselves

Teatime

Stackridge

 

Our Books Ourselves

 

A photograph of my book crammed library

My Library

J. D. Wilson, Jr.

 

There was an article in The New Republic, “Voluminous” by Leon Wieseltier that talks about how the books we read shape the people we become, about how some books will shape our biography. They do not just entertain us or move us, but become us, shape our memories and who we become, or as Wieseltier says “Many books are read but some books are lived, so that words and ideas lose their ethereality and become experiences, turning points in an insufficiently clarified existence and thereby acquire the almost mystical (but also fallible) intimacy of memory. In this sense one’s books are one’s biography.” A library is more than a collection of books, it contains those books with which we have established an intimacy; we have conversed with them, written in them and they have written upon us.

The photograph above is of my library and it suggests a lot about who I am. It is very diverse everything from Proust to Dr. Seuss; from the earliest myths and folk tales to The Changing Light at Sandover. It is very disordered and serendipitous, with stacks in front of books put away in the more conventional fashion, standing up with their backs to us; with many that were purchased on a whim or because they addressed a topic that at the time fascinated, and probably still fascinates, me. They are hugely overstocked suggesting an appetite that it is impossible to satisfy in that few, and certainly not me, are capable of consuming so much. It suggests my curiosity on subjects ranging from the American West, to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, to astronomy, psychology, and “great” thinkers past and present. But mostly there are stories from Scheherazade to Chekhov, from the mighty walls of Priam to Toad Hall and the Misty Mountains. The song that started things is called Teatime by a group I discovered in 1973 while walking through the streets of Edinburgh and one of the universities there (St. Andrews I think). The song is there because tea is an important adjunct to reading. C. S. Lewis once said something about there not being a book long enough or a cup of tea large enough. He said it much more eloquently of course, but I endorse the sentiment.

 

Photograph of my cluttered desk

My Desk

J. D. Wilson, Jr.

 

The desk I work at in my library is uncluttered and more organized, though still surrounded by books that have significance for me, Shakespeare’s First Folio (a facsimile, not the original), Aubrey Beardsley’s edition of Le Mort d’Arthur, probably one of my favorite books and one of the books that drove me, in the sixth grade, towards serious literature. I could not read Malory’s and Caxton’s English, though I tried, but I had read one of the stories in my sixth grade reader at school, a modern adaptation, and so I wanted the “big book” the adaptation came from. I struggled with the opening chapters, but unlike some eleven year olds, the book was clearly beyond me. That said, though, any edition that does not open with the words “It came to pass in the days of Uther Pendragon, when he was king of all England, and so reigned, that there was a mighty duke in Cornwall that waged war against him a long time” is no edition for me. There is a sense that a library is a self-portrait of its owner and reveals a great deal about the person who possesses it, and is probably a good reason not to show one’s library to just anyone.

 

Illustration depicting a very large library for Borges' short story "The Library of Babel

Érik Desmazières: La Salle des planètes, from his series of illustrations for Jorge Luis Borges’s story ‘The Library of Babel,’ 1997–2001. A new volume of Desmazières’s catalogue raisonné will be published by the Fitch-Febvrel Gallery later this year. Illustration © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/how-we-know/?pagination=false

 

Of course the quintessential library is Jorge Luis Borges’ “Library of Babel.” If the library we have speaks to who we are what do the libraries we imagine say about us. The Library of Babel is essentially unusable in its size and complexity though more complete than any could hope for. But part of what makes a real library a real library is selection, a library that includes everything cannot say much about the collector of the library because the only criteria is that it be in print. Theoretically the Library of Congress is something of an accumulation of everything published in America. It represents the depth and breadth of writing in America but being a collection of everything it does not pass judgment, it does not by exclusion and inclusion suggest what is worth reading and what is not. The case could be made that a public library also does not pass judgment on books, that they merely collect, but their collections often represent the interests of the communities they serve, while also including titles that suggest where the librarian thinks the community should be. Where a personal library may be a self-portrait of the person to whom it belongs a public library in many ways is a self-portrait of the community to whom it belongs.

 

Pen and ink drawing of teenage boy with long hair

Self-Portrait at the age of thirteen

Albrecht Durer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Self-portrait_at_13_by_Albrecht_Dürer.jpg

 

The drawing above and the painting below are self-portraits of Albrecht Durer, one at thirteen and one at twenty-nine. What do these portraits tell us about the artist and how the artist changed over those sixteen years? The first is much simpler and the subject much younger. The painting shows the unique signature that Durer developed, his initials actually, the letter “D” embedded in the letter “A”. Though both are detailed the later painting captures details that are more complex and intricate. The most obvious difference is probably that of color, which is perhaps the primary difference between a drawing and a painting. I have been told that hands are often the most difficult for an artist to do well. The hands in both the painting and the drawing are very well drawn and suggest the thirteen year old Durer was already a master craftsman. For me the significant difference is in what the artist attempts, the painting revealing an artist who has grown in skill and maturity.

 

Painitng of a bearded man with long hair in a fur lined robe

Self-Portrait in a Fur-Collared Robe

Albrecht Durer

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Durer_selfporitrait.jpg

 

Where paintings are snapshots of sorts, they capture a moment in time and the way things were at that moment, a library is more of a living self-portrait, it evolves and grows as its “curator” evolves and grows, and though the painting suggests growth and an evolution of style over the drawing, the painting does not contain the drawing in the same way a library contains some of its earlier manifestations. Also, with the passage of time some things are discarded and others are added. The library reveals the librarian then in two ways. What is discarded suggests those things that are left behind or outgrown; they reveal a change in intellectual, spiritual, and cultural directions. My first library included many Batman and Superman comics that are now no more. My brother picked up for a dime or a quarter a copy of the first Superman comic. He found it in a junk shop when we were children in San Pedro, California. That comic book and many others from about the same period were purchased by my brother and I from an old thrift shop three or four blocks up the street from the old ferry building and the ferry that would take my brother and I to the shipyard on Terminal Island where our father worked. There was a table toward the front of the store where the comics were scattered in no particular order. There were many of them and we would rummage for the oldest Batman and Superman comics we could find. We had never read them so they were like new to us, and a little cheaper than the brand new ones we could purchase at the drug store.

When he threw that book away he threw away what would come to be worth over a million dollars (the copy of the same edition having sold for that much in a recent auction). What does this suggest about the value of books and what we choose to keep and what we choose to discard. Is my library better served by this Superman comic or by the old Skeat edition of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, with the navy blue bindings that identify it as one of the Standard Oxford Authors (they are roughly the same age, coming as they both do from the 1930’s)? I suppose how that question is answered says something as well about the keeper of the library and how he has grown as a person and a collector of literature.

 

Illustration of a Martian war machine attacking a British war ship

Drawing for the novel The War of the Worlds, showing a Martian fighting-machine battling with the warship Thunder Child

Henrique Alvim Corrêa

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Correa-Martians_vs._Thunder_Child.jpg

 

There were a number of other articles about books and the kinds of stories people have been attracted to over the millennia. There was an article in the London Review of Books, “Homer Inc”, on The Iliad and why, despite what Matt Damon said in Goodwill Hunting, it has from the beginning always been more popular than The Odyssey, which on the surface seems to tell the better story. There was a review of a book on the illustrations done for The Thousand and One Arabian Nights, “Visions of the Arabian Nights”, and how they have changed over time. There was a third article on monsters and what makes them attractive to readers, “Monsters, magic and miracles”. Each of these articles touches on different aspects of what makes a story attractive and draws readers to it. There are monsters in the Arabian Nights, but there are no monsters in The Iliad though The Odyssey is populated with a healthy number of monsters. It might be said that it is the humans in The Iliad that are somewhat monstrous in their behavior. Perhaps that is what combat does to people or maybe it is just a snapshot of a more primitive people who do view human life in quite the same way we do. There is also, generally, something epic in the battle with monsters, whether it is the Martians in The War of the Worlds or dragons in Beowulf and other stories from medieval Europe.

 

IvanBilibinRussianDragon.jpgIllustration of a knight fighting a multi-headed dragon

Zmey Gorynych, the Russian three-headed dragon

Ivan Yakovlevich Bilibin

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Ivan_Bilibin_065.jpg

 

Monsters engage us perhaps because they are so different from us on one level, but on others not so different. We empathize at least as much with the monster in Frankenstein as we do with Frankenstein himself because we understand the monster’s loneliness and desire for companionship. I enjoy the scene in ET where ET and Eliot first see each other and each is terrified by the “monstrous” appearance of the other. ET needs help and Eliot empathizes with ET’s need, in this we see that they both share a common humanity in spite of their terrifying differences and their shared humanity enables each to befriend the other. This suggests that what makes a monster is relative. Polyphemus was not a monster in the eyes of the other Cyclopes with whom he lived. In my library there are many monsters and many monstrous acts depicted. There are monsters, like Frankenstein’s creature and Quasimodo that draw my empathy and others like Grendel and Wells’ extraterrestrial beings that evoke fear and terror. There are also many ghosts who evoke a different kind of terror. There is something in me that enjoys being horrified and seeks out terror in all its grisly forms.

My Immigration Story

Tan Le

TED Talk

 

The video tells another story of survival and acceptance. It is not a book; it is a video clip of the person telling their story. Oral histories have become more a part of our culture’s historical legacy. Of course there is nothing new in this. In The Last of the Mohicans we are introduced to Hawk-eye and Chingachgook as they discuss, among other things, the relative value of written versus oral history. Neither Hawk-eye nor Chingachgook trust written history, seeing them as shaped more by the interests of the historian than by giving an accurate account of what has occurred. I imagine the veracity of those telling the story, whether written down or spoken, has a lot to do with reliability of the narrative each presents. But how do we classify these stories, whether made up or stating facts? What do we do with films, recordings, photographs, all that other media that tell stories without writing anything down? Many libraries are film libraries or record (CD) libraries. What do these libraries reveal and should an honest “librarian” draw from all forms of story telling? I suppose this is a matter of taste, but Tan Le’s story has some of the qualities of Odysseus’s journey home. There are the predators, the overcoming of the odds, there are elements of fate and destiny. Stories, even true stories, are told after the fact, that is they are selective, events are included others are rejected, based on their relevance to the story being told. This suggests there is purpose to the story, that, even when the story is a true story, a memoir, that there is a kind of order to the events, the suggestion, perhaps, that the outcome was destined.

In the earliest of stories this was true, the Norns or the Fates cut the thread that wove the tapestry of a life when that life reached its end. No matter what the characters involved do, Oedipus will murder his father and will marry his mother. It will all happen inadvertently and no one is to blame for the way things go, but people are accountable nonetheless and all is foreordained. Today it is chance and serendipity that lead to these outcomes. Life is chaotic; there is no order or purpose. When I look at my library it has haphazardly come together the way it has, but there is also a guiding hand, my interests, my values, my tastes in literature; these are the “fates’ that guide my library’s destiny and shape the person my library has made. Perhaps these are the the fates that shape all our destinies. That said, when I look at my library I see the books I have read and collected and they have formed in many ways the person I have become, one can read in them all my strengths and failings, my inadequacies and redeeming qualities. It is where they first took breath.

 

Portrait of a bearded man in (mostly) shades of blue with hair and beard in shades of red

Self-Portrait

Vincent Van Gogh

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/SelbstPortrait_VG2.jpg

Living with Attitude


So What
Miles Davis

Living with Attitude

Illustration of Gulliver’s Travels.
Richard Redgrave
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gulliver.jpg

I enjoy this piece of music in part because of its attitude. The name of the song is “So What” and you can hear the piano come in saying “So What” followed by the trumpet joining in that sentiment and echoing the piano’s “So What.” Sometimes we take ourselves to seriously and respond to those around us with, if not a verbal an attitudinal “So What.” As a teacher there is rarely a day that goes by when at least one student does not express this sentiment. The picture above is of Gulliver, from Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels meeting a Brobdingnagian. Gulliver is of average height, about six feet, but he is traveling through a land where the people are 72 feet tall. Gulliver appears to be at his ease, making a friendly gesture to the surprised giant. As this part of the story progresses Gulliver will become more belligerent and respond to some of the inhabitants with the same insolent indifference expressed by the piano and trumpet in the song.

How important is attitude in our daily lives? Does attitude reveal the feelings that we harbor or is it a mask that conceals emotions we do not want those around us to know we are feeling, that is, does attitude reveal or conceal? If I were Gulliver in the picture above my attitude of “pleased to meet you” would be concealing my terror, while the attitude of the Brobdingnagian is probably genuine, revealing his actual feelings. It is probably safe to say that attitude reveals or conceals based on the situations in which we find ourselves.

Portrait of Dr. Gachet
Vincent van Gogh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_Dr._Gachet.jpg

Dr. Gachet was, in addition to being a doctor, an amateur painter who treated Van Gogh’s final illness. Van Gogh was not formally a patient of Dr. Gachet, they were friends and it just happened that one of the friends was sick and one of the friends was a doctor. Van Gogh said of the painting that he was trying to capture the Doctor’s melancholy. I am not sure if this melancholy lived more in the doctor or in the painter but the attitude of sadness can be seen in the painting. The flower the doctor holds is a foxglove, a plant that had medicinal value and may suggest the doctor’s melancholy is directed toward his profession. I think it is often the attitude of the subject captured by the artist that makes a painting interesting. Most photographic and, in Van Gogh’s day, many painted portraits do not reveal much in the way of attitude, or if they do, the attitude is posed to capture that which the subject wishes to project to the world and not necessarily the subjects true attitude toward the world.


Desiderius Erasmus
Hans Holbein the Younger
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holbein-erasmus.jpg

This is a more formal painting of the Dutch Humanist Erasmus. But, like the Van Gogh portrait of Dr. Gachet, this portrait of Erasmus conveys an attitude and not a pose. The facial expression suggests an attitude of resignation, perhaps towards what he finds in the world. His most famous book is a satire called In Praise of Folly. The title is a Greek pun. The actual title of the book is Moriae Encomium. “Encomium” just refers to a literary work whose purpose is to praise and “moriae” in Greek means fool. However, “More” was also Erasmus’s best friend’s last name, his friend was Sir Thomas More. “Moriae” could also be Thomas More’s last name rendered into Greek. So the title could mean “In Praise of More” or “In Praise of Foolishness or Folly.” The contents of the book, though, suggest the latter. The book mocks the foolishness Erasmus found in the world and the look of resignation may reflect the need to tolerate what one cannot change.

There are also the books that he has surrounded himself with. They were an important part of his life. He once said that when he had money he bought books and if there was any left over he bought food and clothes. This reveals an attitude towards books and learning that some think is being lost today. I am not so sure. But I read over the last few weeks of the closing of some famous bookstores. A blog I visit, The Elegant Variation, lamented the closing of the LIbrairie de France. The blog’s author, Mark Sarvas, grew up with this bookstore and it was an important landmark in his growing up. My brother told me recently of the 100th anniversary of the bookstore I grew up with in San Pedro, Williams Books, and even though I no longer live in San Pedro I know the sadness I would feel if that bookstore were to close.

I also read a few weeks ago of the closing of a bookstore in London’s Charing Cross Road bookstore district. The article included a map of Charing Cross Road that showed the locations of the bookstores than and now. The bookstore that closed was devoted to mystery novels and was called “Murder One.” I enjoy mysteries and am saddened I will not be able to visit this shop. I remember visiting this section of London in the 1970’s and I visited many of the bookstores on the map, many of which are no longer in operation. I am especially fond of second hand bookstores because I enjoy handling books that have been read before in which previous readers have made notes in the margins about what moved them or made them think.

There is an attitude towards books and learning that we carry with us throughout our lives. Some think books and learning are being valued less, but perhaps it is just the kind of books and the kind of learning that is valued today is a bit different from what was valued when I was growing up. It may also be that those that make this assertion have an agenda that is served by people thinking attitudes are changing. I do not think books and scholarship have ever really held a place of true esteem in our culture and preserving them has always been a bit of a battle.

But to get back to attitudes and the paintings, Mark Twain once said “Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of other persons.” I think a good painting, on the other hand, is one that captures what the subject thinks of himself and those around him. The paintings of both Dr. Gachet and Erasmus suggest that though they view the world in a certain light that is not entirely positive they maintain a sense of equanimity towards the world. Erasmus seems amused by what he sees while there is a gentleness and sensitivity to the doctor’s expression that softens his melancholy a bit.

From Captains Courageous
Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer

This film clip reveals a number of different attitudes some of them positive and some of them negative. Lionel Barrymore as the ship’s captain Disko Troop reveals an attitude towards the captain of an approaching ship that seems on the surface somewhat hostile. And that other captain’s attitude seems to reflect a similar hostility. But those that know both men realize that these attitudes are something of an act that proceeds from the competitive spirit of each and from the friendship that each feels for the other. On shore they are good friends while at sea they are competitors. There is a genuine desire on the part of both these men to outdo the other, but there is also a genuine affection that they share for each other. Both these attitudes live side by side in these men and both are true.

Freddy Bartholomew plays a boy named Harvey Cheyne. He on the other hand is insufferable. He is rich kid who thinks the world of himself and much, much less of everyone else. In part this is because of the treatment he has received from his father. His father genuinely cares for the boy, but he is a man of business and his business keeps him away from home and largely uninvolved in the son’s life. The boy has become a bully and has been able to get away with being a bully in part because his father is not involved enough in the boy’s life to curb this behavior.

The character played by Spencer Tracy, Manuel Fidello, is a fisherman on the boat who takes the boy in and tries to be something of a father figure. Manuel is a man who was loved by his father and who is in turn kind to most of the people he encounters. He is proud of what he does and of who he is and has little patience for those like the boy, that think too highly of themselves and too little of others. His pride comes from what he is able to accomplish. His kindness from the kindness he received growing up. His attitude towards the boy’s behavior is not positive, he does not like the boy’s arrogance and selfishness. But he likes the boy. He chooses to listen to the feelings he has for the boy and in listening to those feelings he eventually succeeds in changing the boy’s attitude.

So what is the proper role of attitude and what does it reveal about us and what we think of those around us? Most have approached the world with a variety of different attitudes at different times in their lives. We have probably been as insufferable as the boy and as compassionate as the fisherman. We have probably have friends that those around us that do not know us well think are our enemies. Most have seen friends go on to become enemies.

I think that the attitudes that get us in the most trouble in life are the same attitudes that make us successful. That a good part of learning to live well is learning to discipline our attitudes so that we are perhaps as Mr. Twain advises; that we conceal how much we think of ourselves and our abilities and how little we think of others. Perhaps the wisdom in cultivating this attitude is that over time we can look more realistically at ourselves and those around us without losing our confidence in our own talents or our ability to compete with those whose skills we truly respect.


Walking in Beauty with the Night

Variations On “Ein Mädchen Oder Weibchen”, Op. 66
Ludwig Van Beethoven
András Schiff, Miklós Perényi

Walking in Beauty with the Night

Painiting of Queen of NIght descending against Night Sky

The arrival of the Queen of the Night. Stage set by Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841) for an 1815 production
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mozart_magic_flute.jpg

There is an article by Laura Miller in this week’s (11/30/08) New York Times “Sunday Book Review”. The article is called The Well-Tended Bookshelf and is about getting rid of books, of thinning the bookshelves in one’s private library. In addition to a discussion of the criteria different people use for getting rid of books she talks a bit about why people collect books in the first place. Among other things she talks about books as a way of signaling to those you find attractive your tastes and interests so that both parties can learn something about potential compatibility before things go too far (the article links to another article by Rachel Donadio that explores this topic in greater detail).

What does what we read reveal about us, are the titles on our shelves that revelatory? Do they necessarily reveal anything at all? Jay Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s book The Great Gatsby has an extensive library. However, as soon as any book in that library is removed from the shelf it is clear they serve only a decorative purpose, that they were selected to convey an image perhaps but the books themselves were never read nor were they purchased with any intent to read them. The Great Gatsby is set in a time when the pages of a book had to be cut before they could be read and the fact that the pages are uncut tells anyone looking at them that they are only for show. I know of people who go to library book sales and buy books based on how well the bindings blend with the interior decorating. Leather bound law books are especially popular, unreadable but impressive looking on any bookshelf.

Being one who accumulates books I can understand the desire some would have for getting rid of a few. I often go through my stacks (in the literal not the library sense) looking for things that might be discarded but am always flummoxed by the process. They all have an attraction. Time being what it is it is not likely they can all be re-read, though some may be rummaged for information. Still they represent a relationship of sorts, with ideas, characters, and evocative bits of language, not to mention the sentimental links to times and places in my personal biography. Somewhere I have a book that I got through The Weekly Reader when I was in the seventh grade. It is an old paperback edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

Henry David Thoreau devotes a chapter of his book Walden to reading books of value. He does not have much patience for the light reading that fills the reading time, such as it is, of his contemporaries.  He thinks it unfortunate that so many spend so little time reading anything of consequence. He sees little value in reading the popular novels of the day or, even worse, the daily newspapers. He says at one point:

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically. Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to.

He believes reading should stretch the mind and the imagination. He said he went to the woods in the first place to live deeply. Reading as he understands it is a part of the process of living deeply. I do not know if it is necessary to be a great poet to read great poetry but it certainly exercises the mind and imagination much more than the daily paper.

Thoreau was especially drawn to the classical literature, not just that of Greece and Rome, but the literature that formed the cultural foundations of most nations. He rates the classical literature of India and China at least as highly as that of Western Europe. Being associated with pacifist views his praise for a book like Homer’s Iliad might surprise some in that it is for the most part about men at war. But this book, as most national epics, is infused with the culture’s mythology and beliefs about the value of life and how it ought to be lived.

The music at the beginning is from a sonata for piano and cello by Beethoven. The theme of the concerto is taken from an opera by Mozart, The Magic Flute. It is a story revolving around love and enlightenment. There are birds, villains, and musical instruments with magical powers. Mozart got himself in a bit of trouble because it is said the opera reveals some of the secrets of the Masonic Order, of which Mozart was a member. But it also has at its heart the mythology of an ancient culture, Egypt.

The story involves princesses and princes but it also involves the ancient Egyptian deities, Isis and Osiris. They are associated with agriculture, which would have pleased Thoreau. The story of Isis and Osiris is a love story, as is the story of The Magic Flute. As with many quests for love and enlightenment it contains elements not only of the beautiful but of the horrific as well. The opera uses ancient Egyptian mythology to communicate Enlightenment ideas. What is horrific is intended to frighten us away from the irrational. As a rhetorical device this works well, but it is ironic that the “rhetoric” exploits our emotions in order to dissuade us from trusting them.

Painting of caged man screaming

Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) desmoinesregister.com
Francis Bacon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Study_after_Velazquez%27s_Portrait_of_Pope_Innocent_X.jpg

Horror has always been popular in literature. Odysseus and his crew battle the Cyclops and Circe, one a monster the other a sorceress of awesome power. The 1001 Arabian Nights provide a generous array of monsters and villains. The epic literature of most nations have monsters of one kind or another in them and events that are truly terrifying. This tradition has been kept alive through the work of Edgar Allen Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Steven King. Horror films take the genre a step further perhaps by giving us the opportunity to see the mayhem, though, if the imagination has been properly trained no film can equal the horror of our own minds’ making. This is not because my imagination is better than that of the filmmakers but because my imagination tailors the horror to my own psyche not only by feeding the terrors that haunt me the most but by dressing those terrors in the colors that best amplify my fears.

Joseph Campbell on the Sublime

The painting by Francis Bacon captures what Campbell means by the sublime, that aspect of the ugly and the horrific that inspires awe. The painting does not attempt to be beautiful in the conventional sense, though some may find a degree of conventional beauty in the colors that are used. Sublime is a more useful term for that in art that moves us, inspires us, fills us with awe. The sublime can be beautiful but it can also be ugliness that achieves a kind of perfection. As Campbell points out, the sublime can be found in things of great beauty like the temple and its gardens in Kyoto. But is also seen in the horror of the atom bomb. It is beauty or dread that is so overwhelming that it confronts us with our own mortality and smallness. When Campbell talks about the sublime he often takes on religious overtones. But I think that is because the nature of the sublime is so overpowering.

I think we read to experience the sublime to a degree, to escape the bonds of our own ego and experience and to sample a world that is larger than ourselves. Whether enlightenment follows or not does not alter the fact that we have been moved and if we are not enlightened we are in some way altered. As Thoreau says the things we read should be large enough that they somehow enlarge us; that we have to stand on tippy-toes to get a glimpse of the world the book contains.

Required reading as it is practiced in school is always problematic. No one can be coerced into the sublime. A student made to read a book will at best read the book to fulfill the assignment and then forget it, unless the book, in spite of the circumstances under which it has been read, captures the student’s imagination. On the other hand if the imagination is never challenged, if students are never exposed to literature that rises to the level of the sublime, they may never know that it is out there to be found or fail to appreciate its significance when it is found. Our teachers often present great literature as if it is a thing of unspeakable beauty, something very fragile that must be handled delicately and with reverence. But this demeans great literature.

There is nothing “beautiful” as most understand beauty, in the tales Chaucer has the Summoner and the Miller tell us, or in many of the adventures of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantegruel. These stories are gross, vulgar, and unsuited to mixed company, but they nonetheless capture something that is sublime in human experience. To grasp this aspect in the things we read, at least in those things we read that contain this quality, requires a bit of work. When we are told we must work at what we read in order to get this benefit it seems undesirable to many of us. But as Thoreau also pointed out, this kind of reading exercises the mind in the same way working out at a gym exercises the body. But this aside, what is it that repels us about work, as though work and enjoyment and pleasure are all unrelated? We have coupled, I think, work with tedium. Work can be tedious and sheer drudgery, but it does not have to be. In fact those things that are most satisfying and most enduring challenge us and require some effort on our part if their benefits are to be enjoyed in all their fullness.