Reading allowing this pass through life to continue in a state officially designated as acceptable sanity
1999
Private readers, reading purely for love of the book, would serve us by leaving each the shortest note of what he found--Ralph Waldo Emerson
January
Goethe - From My Life: Poetry and Truth (Parts One to Three). To me, (and probably me alone) it is a powerful historical fact that Goethe was born the same year my ancestors left Germany. This volume is the autobiography of the second greatest writer ever (behind Shakespeare) and the greatest to have parted company with his time. He also put autobiography on a new course. From Augustine to Goethe's time, it was about the straying man finding God. Goethe expressed his curiosity about the world and his optimism about his nature and human nature.I was surprised to find this father of German nationalism say such things as
the feeling was developed and strengthened in me that there is an equality, perhaps not of all human beings, but at least of all human conditions, with naked existence as the main requirement, and everything else unimportant and coincidental.His influence on Thoreau may have begun withSurely no divine worship is more beautiful than that which needs no image, which issues purely from a dialogue in our bosom with nature.And Mann withThis artless tale (speaking of Joseph) is extremely charming, but it seems too short and one feels a call to elaborate on it.He shared with our contemporary H. Bloom the notion of a public unsure of the reason for literature:The public cannot be expected to receive an intellectual work intellectually...the old prejudice arose again...that it has to have a didactic purpose. However, the true work of art has none. It neither approves nor censures, but instead develops sentiments and actions in sequence, and thereby illuminates and instructs.He touched on a debate that continues today on the conservative Christian definition of Christianity vs his liberal secularism view.Referring to Klopstock he says
people who have received extraordinary talents from nature but are placed by her into a narrow, or at least incommensurate, sphere of activity, usually lapse into odd forms of behavior and, because they cannot make any direct use of their gifts, try to show them off in extraordinary and curious ways.That may apply to me writing this and to you reading it!
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Perusal of Salt Lake City bookstores. I was favorably impressed with Sam Weller's. They are a party to the suit against B&N along with several other independent bookstores.Goethe - The Sorrows of Young Werther. Page 9 of my Vintage paperback contains a memorable phrase:
Most people toil during the greater part of their lives in order to live, and the slender span of free time that remains worries them so much that they try by every means to get rid of it. O Destiny of Man!Compare that, written in 1774 to this written around 1847 by a deep reader of Goethe:The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.Albert Camus - Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. The essays he thought ought to be preserved in English. Strong opposition to the death penalty in any form and the guillotine in particular.D.H. Lawrence - The Virgin and the Gypsy. Strong imagery.
Kaye Gibbons - Ellen Foster unabridged tape.
Eudora Welty Reads on audio tape
Perused Jackson Street Books in Athens, GA and Quigley's Books in Dahlonega, GA.
Bob, a short story by Lee Smith on tape while traveling the blue highways of west Georgia and east Alabama.
Henry David Thoreau: Modern Critical Views Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. Bloom is the most vocal proponent of the Western Canon in which he includes Thoreau, at least by list if not extensive text. His treatment of HDT in his introduction troubles me though. He views him as a re-writer of Emerson. Since he came to this opinion late, after a life of Thoreau appreciation, I cannot empathize since I am far less deep into Emerson than Thoreau. I will say that reading Thoreau awakens the soul and the body while Emerson generally puts me to sleep. I do not generally read a lot of literary criticism, but my career with Thoreau brings me to that plateau. I am glad for the experience.
-----------------If you are looking for my birthday present, try something along the Transcendental lines. Some Margaret Fuller (first editions, of course) would be fine as would Jones Very or the current series of individual volumes of Thoreau's journal.
John Hillaby: Journey Through Britain: By footpath & track. A unabridged Recorded Books. A most incredible tale of a simple walk through Britain from Cornwall to the tip of Scotland. It let me know that I had miles to go before I could say I understood British geography, but inspired me to do that. One always loves mentions of ancestral places: his mention for me the Quantock Hills.
Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern: Old Books, Rare Friends. I worked through most of this and may look up particular books yet, but I think it was their other books on rare books that I sought. This is too much of the autobiography of their friendship, which was of little interest to me. They did find some choice books though.
----------------Well, January draws to a close and I must say, I like the results. Some interesting travel, several good and a couple of great books, life with Betty. It doesn't get better than this. Well, perhaps a little more daylight would help!
February
Tony Hillerman: A Thief of Time. I have no idea how many times I have either read or listened to this book. This time I listened to the abridged version read by Hillerman himself. What a voice. What a book. Hillerman literally writes in color.Perry Miller: The American Transcendentalists, Their Prose and Poetry. Well, I'm still working on it with a few pages left to go here and there. The prose here is fine reading. For the poetry, see my thoughts elsewhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature. Until now I have avoided Emerson. Or at least finishing an Emerson essay. Many starts led to a few pages read, but I cannot remember a Nature or a Self Reliance finished.
Now that I have committed to read a goodly bit of Transcendentalism, I cannot demur further. As I start Nature on this fuzzy minded morning, a glimpse of understanding floats my way. Emerson cannot be read in the modern rapid way. It is not fodder for nonfiction book TV, although his biography might be. Each sentence, other than his transitions, is a distillation of of burning insight. I go to take a note here and there and I want to copy the entire first page! To separate parts of his text from the whole creates only more of the one liner calendar page aphorisms that form most people's sense of Emerson. As in the rest of the universe, the whole is greater than the parts.
Perhaps this line of the essay lies at the core of Transcendentalism:
But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object from personal relations and see it in the light of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections, then will God go forth anew into the creation. (Emphasis mine.)Balthazar by Lawrence Durrell: An interleaving of the manuscript of a novel in form. What is this book in the normal sense of the term novel? A redux of Justine trying to correct and compensate using Balthazar's notes? I will not know until I have Mountolive and Clea under my belt. So, later.
-------------Spent the week in Selma, Alabama, my hotel veranda looking out over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. I could stare at that beautiful piece of engineering, architecture, and history and hear the faint echoes of "We shall overcome."
At a spare moment here and there, I was able to visit the Selma antique mall and another edifice or so with book racks. How does an American first of the Hobbit sound? Also American first of Mountolive; a Modern Library 1937 Walden. Plus a week of examining the history and prehistory of the Alabama River.
---------------Mountolive by Lawrence Durrell: Ditto above. Very fine writing. This is a little like Friends with political intrigue thrown into the mix.
The Death of Common Sense by Philip K. Howard. Whew! Does this book describe my workplace, or what. He illustrates the loss of common sense through the increasing force of law and the granting of "rights" by that law. Not completely a libertarian, he does offer frightening examples. In my government position, I too have seen how ridiculous the "process" has become and how little content matters today. His primary weakness is in the area of remedy. He offers no program or plan to take us back from the precipice of a system that is, to him, as rigidly unfree as a centrally planned economy. It may take us a generation to recover, but we had better start soon.
The Dialogues of Archibald MacLeish and Mark Van Doren edited by Warren V. Bush. An edited transcript of a 1962 CBS program of the same title. I wish I remembered it, but alas, I do not. Conversation and literati just don't get any better than this. Some excerpts:
MacLeish (AML): It [a poem] doesn't exist anywhere else except in the mind of the man who reads it at the moment he reads it.
Van Doren (MVD): An artist is a man writing for strangers, persons he will never know, but nevertheless persons whom he has faith in as being, after all, like himself.
They remind us that a person can experience the world without leaving their room, as in Emily Dickinson, and use that as the basis to lambaste the theory that William Shakespeare did not write his plays.
I breathed a sign of relief around page 158 to learn that neither AML nor MVD could sit down and just think. I felt I was somehow deficient in my similar inability. AML needed a typewriter and MVD needed to be talking with somebody.
AML: ...live a life of not quiet desperation, but quiet discipline.
They both strongly felt the pulse of America could not be divined through sampling.
In an address published elsewhere (Archibald MacLeish: A Continuing Journey: Essays and Addresses, HM 1968), AML predicts the longevity of MVD's poems "because he has been truly alive now." Yet 30 years later, we remember MVD as the father in a game show scandal and as the editor of Bartram's Travels. Time plays a fickle game with history.
I can envision Martha Tichenor doing a story on the two greats by way of introducing a rebroadcast of this program. If TCI ever devises true video on demand from the world's video databank, this program will be my first choice!
Paris Review: Sometimes I take a break from a book and pick up a sheaf of words--say an old Paris Review lying about. It is at these times I realize what reading is about (vs. writing). It is submersion into the orgy of words. An orgy of words staged by writers in touch with some unnamed, unfound component of humanity.
We have three kinds of word collections: visual, didactic, and aural, each traveling its own path from that as yet undiscovered center of humanity. Be it Thoreau's images, H. Bloom's didactic, or Poe's beautiful to the ear Annabel Lee, a poem--or any writing--can just be. It can be input for our thoughts, our educational development, to help work out a problem.
But perhaps its highest use and status is to be. As thoughts of a live oak tree do settle a seasick stomach, so to do beautiful collections of words restore compromised synapses.
From the Paris Review 121, Winter 1991: Donald Hall, Rocks and Whirlpools: Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters. Four Poems by Zbigniew Herbert. Two Poems by Charles Tomlimson. Learning the Planets by Len Roberts, The Forest Comes Down at Night by Georgi Belev. So many gems between these blue pages. I think I will keep it by the bedside.
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. Frankly, I would rather not know what I know about Fitzgerald from this book and from Bud Schulberg. There are times when a writer's work should speak for itself. This is an interesting book, however, about Paris. Shakespeare and Company by Sylvia Beach, which see January 1998 is of the same time and crowd and is nicer to the characters.
March
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. The model for novelization of one's family history. In technique, it is ancestral to Frazier's Family; in feeling LeGuin's A Home Concealed Woman.March 9th's sermon was in the wind blowing through Spanish moss heavily draped on waters oaks guarding an Indian site on the Chattahoochee River.
Esdaile's Manual of Bibliography. Revised Edition by Roy Stokes. George Allen & Unwin, London. 1967. Books about books! One of my treasure caves. From this text to A Gentle Madness by Basbanes to A History of Reading by Manguel to The Gutenberg Elegies by Birketts, wonderful all. My copy of this book is an ex libris from the US Army Aviation school library, never checked out. That institution purchased it in July 1969 from Barnes and Noble for $7.65. I paid $1 at an army/navy store in Ponce de Leon, Florida in 1999. I finished reading it in my parent's expanded mountain cabin during the wee hours of the beginning of their Fiftieth Wedding Anniversary.
A few tidbits of knowledge:
Copyright dates on the verse of the title page began in UK books in 1956. In the US in 1802.
Uncut means a deckle edge, unopened refers to the folds of leaves.
Morocco=goat skin, vellum=young calfskin. Persian morocco is from Indian goat or sheep and is of poor quality.
Incunabula began to be of interest in the later 1600s. Cornelius a Beughem, a Dutch bibliographer, first used the term in 1688. In his usage, a direct translation would be: "swaddling clothes of the typographical art."A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder by Michael Pollan. Random House 1997. A Barnes & Noble remainder that was on my standing to buy list! His experience of building a study in the woods. A nice read with some fine architectural notions I will use for my study in the future. I was saddened by his failure to total the cost as Thoreau did for his.
The First Eagle by Tony Hillerman. Unabridged Book on Tape. A fine story as Hillerman's southwestern mysteries continue. Apparently his reading public will not let him, nor Joe Leaphorn, retire. Some elements of the plot derive from A Thief of Time. But that's OK. But were fun.
April
Two men of the 1840s thought and wrote about the human condition. Both men's legacy came to have immense effects on the organization of human social, economic, and legal structures. One man looked outward to society, one to the paradise within.Our thoughts of these men bring up images scarcely capable of being more different. One's thoughts ultimately led to the most amazing tyranny and mass murder in world history, the other's to the world's largest democracy and a method that helped former slaves move toward full integration into modern life.
Yet neither man intended these precise effects. The first sought to throw the heavy yoke of industrialized labor off the shoulders of the workers; the second sought to live deliberately and to record that life in a journal hoping thereby to achieve meaning.
These thoughts occurred to me as I simultaneously read Isaiah Berlin's Karl Marx and William Howarth's The Book of Concord.
Perhaps Marx succumbed to "the winds of philosophic despair that blew throughout the nineteenth century" [Mark Van Doren's 1916 Henry David Thoreau: A Critical Study] while Thoreau set his face against it.
Henry David Thoreau: A Critical Study by Mark Van Doren. A wonderful biography that stands above most of HDT.
I am now engaged in volume 1 of the Princeton Journal of Henry David Thoreau. Such joy from the reading of simple words.
May
Perused a wonderful neighborhood bookstore in Huntsville, Alabama: BookLegger. Bought a volume of Margaret Fuller for four bucks!Those of us who have written about keeping a journal feel chased out of the room by the Journal of Henry David Thoreau when he says:
My Journal is that of me which would else spill over and run to waste. --gleanings from the field which in action I reap. I must not live for it, but in it for the gods-- They are my correspondent to who daily I send off this sheet, post-paid. I am clerk in their counting room and at evening transfer the account from day book to ledger.I continue on the second volume of the Princeton edition of the Journal of Henry David Thoreau.If I am not I who will be?
[paraphrasing here:] Music is to sound what color is to matter.
My reading suffers this month since I am redoing my home library. Packing up books, taking down bookshelves, ripping up carpet, all in preparation for ceiling and wall painting and a new tile floor. Better bookcases to follow. Perhaps losing the carpet will lower this Mobile Bay humidity that seeks to infuse my books. Also, with a hint of reorganization in the air, I may be able to find the volume I seek! Good reading to you.
The Making of Walden by J. Lyndon Shanley. University of Chicago Press 1957. When I reached July 4, 1845 in Thoreau's journal (that day not marked so I guessed), I stopped with the journal and took up the subject of Walden again. Shanley takes various manuscripts (minus of course the 600 leaves tipped into the 1906 Manuscript Edition of Thoreau's works (what a bad idea, but oh to have one!)) and reconstructs HDT's method and technique of writing the book. Of course, I meant to type The Book. As you may remember, the first edition of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers contained an advertisement heralding the forthcoming publication of Walden. This was not to be for several years. That delay in publication, and subsequent rewriting, Shanley shows, led to movements of the future of which Thoreau could not even dream. Moral of the story? Be a harsh self-editor and rewrite until it is as you wish, without regard to artificiality of schedule.
Walden by Henry David Thoreau. If you have read any of these lines from 1998 or 1999, you know that Thoreau has great meaning for me. To be sure, as I have matured, his significance for me has grown but he began as a figure of great respect when I read an Armed Forces paperback edition of Walden (which I still have) at the age of 12 or 13. My compartmentalized memory of that reading recalls his cost list. Watermelons certainly have risen in price! My second reading of Walden came in 1990 when I and most of my office of archeologists traveled to Key West for three weeks in November to examine the old Army cemetery there. This, my third time, I read only a few pages at a time, mostly at the breakfast table, trying to incorporate each word and each sentence. Perhaps my reading will free those sentences from their parole. My three readings pale before my friend Bob Patterson of Franklin, Georgia, who has read Walden perhaps twenty times! Around every period is a new field for exploration.
Germany: A New History by Hazen Schulze. Translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider. Harvard University Press. 1998. I want to understand German history (and geography) at least up to the time my last ancestor from there -- Christoph Witte -- left in the, I think, early 1840s. He and his brother came from Hanover alone as teenagers to New York City. He anglicized his name to Christopher White and is the sole German on my mother's side. All of my father's ancestors came from the German speaking lands to Georgia between 1734 and 1749. German was the language of their church -- Jerusalem Lutheran in Ebenezer, Georgia -- until almost the Civil War. The group goes by the name of Salzburgers and true, my first paternal ancestor here was on the Purysburg, the first Salzburger (Austrian) transport, but the Seckingers mark this year, 1999, their 250th anniversary of their Georgia arrival. They were from SW Germany.
From an etymological perspective, all seem to agree the name originated in the town now known as Bad Sackingen (this application has no umlaut to place over the a). It lies on the Rhine opposite Switzerland. The first baptismal records found to date of my line are further north and date to 1654.
Some years ago, I joined the game of inputting one's surname into a web browser. The first time I did this I think 18 hits returned. Now hundreds do, many thanks to our distant cousin with the cookie company. My most interesting find that day was the webpage of a university student in Germany. After an exchange or two of email, he gave me his father's mailing address. My correspondence with Kurt Seckinger (pronounced of course with the German hard g vs my American soft one) blossomed to a lengthy close one so far resulting in one visit by him to my home. I must return the favor soon and visit his Black Forest home.
That wide curve brings me back to my point -- a desire to more fully understand German history and geography. My friendship with Kurt brought this home since we cannot see a common ancestor in my line reaching to 1654. So then, what and when was the disconnect?
I began to perceive a piece of the disconnect when I discovered that Kurt was Catholic. My family is, shall we say, deep Protestant and still after 250+ years, consider themselves as religious refugees. I assumed our families' split had something to do with Martin Luther. And now, back to the book.
It would seem to me that this dividing even is the Peace of Augsburg of 1555. This agreement gave the Lutheran territorial rulers equal footing with the Catholic rulers. Two provisions that I dare say sound troubling to us in today's ethnic cleansing environment are ius reformadi, the right of reformation to the ruler meaning he not you chooses your faith and ius emigrandi, your right to emigrate to a territory where your faith was established.
To us, the closing of Kurt Seckinger's hand in mine in 1998 closed a circle with friendship and commonality of origin kept separate for 443 years by ignorance, hate, and religious intolerance. I find the friendship immensely more satisfying and find that I now stand proud as a member of the human community first, an American second, and of German heritage third.
The home study is coming along fine. Betty and I (mostly her) have it all painted but for a spot in the closet and the tile man is expected back momentarily for that job's completion. Last night we went out to Furniture That Works to peruse bookshelves (empty ones, that is). We came away with three and a Mission style oak computer desk! No, not rich am I but in a ferocious home library updating mood. I think HDT would be saddened but while I love to hear his birds sing, I also love to hold the book and help it on its way to a long life shielded from the humidity of the Alabama Gulf Coast.
While working, HDT read light travel accounts. After the same and heavy reading of his works, I have found another Nevada Barr. Her Liberty Falling is open on my table now. Her writing has dramatically improved to a point I no longer feel guilty following Anna Pigeon on her quests for new National Park Service crime to solve.
June
One day before my older son graduated from Auburn University, I rode alone up I-65 and I-85 from Daphne, Alabama to Auburn. For company I had a few Books on Tape. The introductory essay to A Bully Father, the Letter of Theodore Roosevelt to His Children edited by Joan Paterson Kerr first kept me company. I did know his mother was a Bulloch from Georgia but not that one uncle designed the CSS Alabama and another uncle served on board her.After one tape of Teddy, I switched to 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff. I've read this book at least once, perhaps twice, listened to this tape before, and seen the most marvelous movie with Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins. Yet, I never tire of it. On this pass of the book, the words drove deep forcing my emotions to the surface. I suppose I constantly seek -- well, wish for -- such a deep friendship.
I finished my third trip to Walden. I read a different copy each time so to not be over-led by my previous marks. It seems new and fresh; I'm glad I have three more copies and am actively seeking Shanley's Princeton edition. It is the American book for the ages!
When I finished this third read, I understood why my friend has read it so often--I am just beginning to glimpse HDT's meaning. That meaning cannot, in any way not trite, summarize Walden. Perhaps my words, or the words of so many others from Emerson, Channing, Sanborn, Martin Luther King Jr, Bode, Richardson, ad gloriasum, will lead you to read the one thing surpassing all other things American, Walden. Just do it!
What a busy time early summer can be! The tile floor is in, new bookcases (from http://www.furniturethatworks.com/) are up, and as you might expect, many more boxes remain unpacked. I'm just back from a two-week trip that included St Louis and the DC area. In St Louis I finally made it to a bookshop just before the airport beckoned. At A Collector's Bookshop, actually almost on the line separating St Louis from its home in University City, MO, I bought Fred Kaplan's biography of Thomas Carlyle and Thoreau's Reading: A Study in Intellectual History with Bibliographical Catalogue by Robert Sattelmeyer that I promptly read. I just love that sort of thing. Imagine perusing the list of books he was known to have read, checked out of the Harvard library, or borrowed from Emerson, Channing, or others! Similar treatises exist for other great readers. Those that I know of are Emerson, Hemingway, Woolf, and hey! You are reading mine! Of course, traffic in the DC area kept me from attempting downtown, but in a strip mall, in a temporary remainder bookstore, I found The Natures of John and William Bartram by Thomas P. Slaughter.
As I finish the second volume of Thoreau's journal, I am unsure how to present that experience here. There is so much there that is so wonderful, or at least deeply thoughtful, that I do not wish to cheapen it for me or for you by some trite words or litanies of quotes. I think I will proceed by continuing to mention which volume I am in but within any essay until I reach the end of all I have, currently also all that are published in the Princeton series, five volumes.
July
Ditto as I read the third volume of Thoreau's journal in July. Reading this volume while sitting on the front porch of a house out from Hiawassee, Georgia, reading while (or should that be whilst?) looking at the moist green mountains and listening to the goldfinches, crows, and cows, I was driven deeply into the arms of Nature. That same week I proceeded to help my parents understand their email system, completing the round of both parents and all siblings now accessible via email. I do not have to guess what Thoreau would have thought of email.Cool Hand Luke by Donn Pearce. Luke is here. Getting your mind right is here. Even the parking meters are here. There is more--a couple more words in the phrase Git your mind right. As a reader, I--with one exception to date (Ragtime)--always consider the book the higher art form than the movie. This is a fine book, as was Ragtime. Yet the actors--and dare I say writers--in both movies transcended the medium and elevated the art. I am happy to note that Donn Pearce was also the senior screenwriter on the movie.
I spent my available reading time for a whole day coming to the conclusion Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon was not for me. Anyone want a Fine First Edition in a Fine Dust Jacket with an archival cover? I'm sure it will be a book for you!
I bought Chai's The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance in Fine condition for an amazing $8.50 from Willis Monie Books of Cooperstown, NY. Even though it was Hall of Fame Weekend, they got the book in the mail immediately and it was here in four days, bookrate, no less! Their catalog is listed on Bibliofind.Com, my favorite web used book resource.
Transcendentalism has become a subject of great interest to me as evidenced by my page on the subject.
Near the end of July I simultaneously read E.M. Forster's Aspect of the Novel and Van Wyck Brooks' The Flowering of New England 1815-1865. Brooks has an odd, conversational, mild surprise pedantic style, but the subject is the key for me. He thinks of Edward Tyrrel Channing--younger brother of Dr. Channing--as having
sowed more of the seeds that make a man of letters... than all the other teachers of composition and all the other writers of evginious text-books that have ever taught a much taught country.In this he was speaking of his students Emerson, Holmes, Dana, Motley, Parkman.I found Forster interesting but have nothing to report here.
August
Too much travel and not enough reading. But I tried to keep going. In mid month began Owen Chadwick's The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19th Century. A bit each day at breakfast.Also began the fourth volume of the Princeton edition of Thoreau's Journal. I emailed Princeton University Press wondering when Volume 6 was due. I was told next year and that each volume should take 2-3 years. At ten more to go, a lifetime of waiting.
September
At the Auburn Salvation Army I bought a 1963 book on satellite communications and a book of essays by E.B. White. At Clemens Books in Newnan, GA, a book on Greek architecture. I've been reading the wildly eclectic White. He ranges from Walden to the proper shape of the U.N. But I suppose a columnist must be all over the map. Take me, for instance.On tape, an abridged Lincoln by David Herbert Donald.
Ah, The Friends of the Daphne Library semi-annual booksale. I do love books. I do love the right price. A one volume Works of Sterne, dated 1864: $6. Bernd Heinrich's Ravens in Winter: In a bag during the $2 for a bag end of sale sale. But I paid for it with two days of working. One day was spent in the air conditioning overseeing the silent auction ( a Frank Leslie folio book on the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition went for $130!) but the second day spent in the sun, heat, and love bugs. Now to prepare for the spring 2000 booksale that will coincide with the Fairhope Arts and Crafts Festival.
Sing with Wolves by Edward Lee Amerson. Subtitled Reflections on Healing our Ailing Earth. A New Age sermon. I believe a lot of what he says about our responsibilities but his didactical style is not me. I agee
We must change practices to preserve earth.I disagree with his notion of the environmentally correct Native American. Indians probably helped species along to extinction as did Europeans. We feel differently about their impact on the landscape, IMHO, because their population was so low. Now there is another story. Six billion people on a planet designed for less than one billion.
Wilderness is good just to be without the necessity to visit.There is a most elegant passage in the book on a transcendental experience while watching an eagle soar over the Snake River canyon that rivals Edward Abbey's sense of the wildness in nature and in ourselves.
A self published book, I am sure he will accept your order.
October
The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19th Century by Owen Chadwick. 1975. As in real life, this book offered no concrete answers about the cause or even the meaning of secularization. Chadwick made many excellent points, some of which I will repeat here before attempting to summarize.In his introduction, he deals with the conflict between history and sociology. He calls Durkheim, influenced by Comte, the father of social science closely followed by Max Weber. Historians scoff at social scientists' historical statements (like Marx's) while accepting their sociological ones. In some sense, he immediately shoots down the thought behind the title by saying the notion of secularization requires the stage of religiosity that never existed. For that he cites the 18th century French illegitimate births at 1 in 4.
Christian conscience was the force which began to make Europe secular; that is, to allow many religions or no religion in a state, and repudiate any kind of pressure upon the man who rejected the accepted and inherited axioms of society. My conscience is my own.
Education became lay due to the numbers of students beyond the church's capabilities.
Debate, in and of itself, gives scepticism a victory.
He speaks of Marx's them of the incompatibility between religion and the freedom of a human being. "To make religion vanish, we need not science but social revolution."
"Marxism was the most powerful philosophy of secularization in the nineteenth century."
Marxist stream of thought fought hard against the comparison of early Christianity and socialism.
Bismark outlawed socialism in 1878. Legal again in 1891.
Trotsky said religion was a hindrance to revolutionary action.
God is part of authority.
God was moral code.
God meant resignation.
God was a bar to violent acts.
God on side of bourgeois or squires.
God comforted men who should be uncomfortable.G.J. Holyoake put the word secularism into the English language in 1851.
Those in Victorian Britain trying to separate church and state were trying to make society more Christian.
Both secularist leaders and the church spread their light by catering for men's leisure than be appealing to their minds.
Intellectual argument had little effect on the worker. He was not articulate and did not read books. Marx was hard; he had to be made crude.
"Men in the mass live by simple objectives."
In the late 19th century the political right in France was Catholic and Catholics were politically right. Anticlerical and anti-God in the platform of the left as a political move, not necessarily an irreligious one.
Virchow invented the word Kulturkampf to mean struggle for civilization against obscurantism.
Nationalism became fully established between 1815 and 1848. Its enemies were racial minorities, international socialism and the church, especially the Papacy.
Hegel said that war was like a cleansing current for the international order.
Enlightenment as a word is first in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1865. It was previously called Auflärung. The term "Age of Enlightenment" appears in Edward Caird's study of Kant's philosophy.
Chadwick uses the phrase "sterile and vapouring transcendentalism." The link will show that I disagree. It, transcendentalism, requires of each a full consideration of all about one rather than placing all in the context of a theory.
That human nature is good is the key that secularizes the world according to Morley.
The onslaught upon Christianity owed its force not to science but to an ethical basis. Justice and freedom, not knowledge. In Chadwick's words "We keep running, suddenly and in unexpected by-ways, into the idea that secularization is a religious process instead of an irreligious."
Voltaire said "I am not a Christian, but that is to love thee the better.
Victor Hugo one of the leaders of the canonization of Voltaire. Hugo buried at his death (22 May 1885) with the redeposited Voltaire and Rousseau at the Pantheon, variously call the Church of St Geneviève.
"History seeks to find out 'what really happened.' But it must start from a mind, which is set in history."
"Truth led away from the Christ; not away from Jesus."
Ernest Renan's The Life of Jesus the most famous book of 19th century France and its author the most famous there until 1900. It is a biography even though the historical evidence is not there for a biography without the supernatural. Renan was an imaginative heir of the romantics.
The Christ we have received stands outside of history and he who stands outside of history is not a man. Renan said "Philosophy does not suffice for the multitude. They must have sanctity."
The emotive content of the word evolution has changed since this book was written. Chadwick says it is neutral.
Nietzsche: Does "good" allow us "a narcotic drug enabling the present to live at the expense of the future?"
Comte: experimental science the only path to truth. To me: What is truth? Many would have us define it as one thing with one meaning. I am certainly with Comte on material things. If I want to improve a light bulb or an atomic submarine, experiment is the way to go. Perhaps even in the search for patterns of meaningful human behavior. But my sense of well being, which I, inconveniently for some call truth, comes from within me—my thoughts and intuition derived from being in society and nature. Then following his statement on Comte's experimentalism, Chadwick follows saying Comte was not simple on the issue and says about what I just did!
Renan: Happy is the man who believe like St Augustine in a City of God and can die comforted.
Another Renan saying:
I won't tell you how to make your fortunes...But, being near the end of my life, I will tell you something about the art of being happy, because I have succeeded...There is only one recipe: do not look for happiness, but follow a selfless object, knowledge, art, the good of our neighbour, the service of the country...Our happiness is in our power. That is my experience...I've always enjoyed life, I shall not be sad when the end comes, because I've enjoyed it to the full...Life is an excellent thing.OK, a lot of sayings, quotes, thoughts. But how do they add up to a summary of Chadwick's ideas about secularization? I think what he is saying is that the diminution of the role of the church was a battle carried out not from an immoral or irreligious cadre, but quite the opposite. Those in the movement to remove the church from control of society and morals felt a more personal accountability would further morality and even religion. That is, all but Marx and his followers.Reporting Vietnam. Library of America. 1998. I saw the Booknotes on C-SPAN about this two volume set and just had to read it. It finally arrived at the Daphne Library and I began.
Wow! To read these articles now. I am keenly aware of the clarity of hindsight, but how, how could we and our "leaders" not see the future?
Apparently McNamara did and lied.
I could not finish even the first volume. Waves of a vision of young fat white boys (like I would have been then) being cut in half by a machine gun and the black wall of names washed over me. It is too soon for me--one who was not there. I would like to hear a review from one who was there in combat.
Volume 4 of Thoreau's Journal. I will essay on this once I have finished the 5th. But you really need to go there.
Beyond Black Bear Lake: Life at the Edge of Wilderness by Anne LaBastille. WW Norton 1988 paperback. More Mother Earth than Thoreau even though she quotes and thinks of him often. One nice passage from pages 229-30. Lying on the ice one night she writes:
A satellite went wandering past, blinking regularly. In my mind I leaped up beside it and looked down at myself lying on this thin layer of frozen water, sustained only by the thin layer of oxygen between ice and stars. I made no more impression on this frozen surface than a water strider resting on the lake in summer. It took so little to buoy us up, yet both ice and air were perilously thin compared to the vastness of space about us.Life of Henry David Thoreau by Henry S. Salt. Third Edition. Edited by George Hendrick, Willene Hendrick, and Fritz Oehlschlaeger from the unpublished 1908 manuscript. University of Illinois Press 1993.Salt, an English socialist and vegetarian activist (1851-1939), may be due as much credit as any overlapping Thoreau's life for his current status. Perhaps more. It was through Salt that Ghandi learned of Thoreau and his message of vicil disobedience. The rest, as they say, is history.
As I began this book, I assumed it was hagiography yet I found it not to that level but more nearly balanced, if not quite well balanced. The editors did a fine job of correcting the few errors of facts and dates. They had 85 years and Walter Harding to draw on.
In this book, I first read the quote my father, a retired United Methodist minister, would recite upon hearing the name Thoreau--when Emerson visited Thoreau during his night in jail for refusing to pay the unjust tax, Emerson asked what he was doing in there. Henry retorted "Why are you out there?"
Talking God by Tony Hillerman. On unabridged Recorded Books. I thought I had read this book but if so, I'm forgetting more than I should. Its premise was well known to me since I have some responsibility in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation (NAGPRA) arena. So the return of human skeletal remains of Indian origin is a familiar refrain to me.
Joe Leaphorn does not believe in coincidences. Several in this book almost stretch veracity but Hillerman brings them back around to a denouement worthy of a very fine mystery writer.
November
On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Recorded Books - unabridged. My reading of this book in print last year reaffirmed my love the the road and told me Kerouac had been a fine--albeit at times experimental--writer. He wrote the original of On The Road as one paragraph with no punctuation on a 250 foot long roll of paper! To me, that carries the metaphor of the road almost to a simile.Listening to this book being read to me, I began a drive from the north Georgia mountains awash in fall color. We motored on through Atlanta, U-Haul trailer and all, listening to this classic that I realized had been written to read aloud. It is a 250 foot long free verse beat poem!
The Powers of Poetry by Gilbert Highet. Oxford University Press. 1960. Highet was professor of Latin language and literature at Columbia University. And a Scot. He died in 1978. He was married to the spy novelist Helen Macinnes.
Highet wrote three basic classes of books: Latin scholarship, appreciation of teaching, and poplar essays on literature and culture. Many of the last first saw light in his radio broadcasts.
In a September 1999 NPR interview, Frank McCourt responded to a question about regrets by citing his lack of a classical education. To remedy this lack, he was reading Highet.
While in my view, a classical education requires that you remember what you've "learned," I too derive immense pleasure from reading Highet. His The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (1949) is a masterpiece of the history of literature. Poets in a Landscape (1957), which I have only scanned, continues that thread. I truly awoke to Highet upon reading his The Art of Teaching (1950) which I pray remains a required text for every student of every college of education. But I doubt that to be true.
Highet's name was set in stone via his radio broadcasts and their re-preparation as collections of essays: People, Places, and Books (1953) (my first Highet purchase at Atlantic Books, Charleston, SC in the $1 bin), A Clerk of Oxenford (1954) (which my younger son thankfully convinced me to buy a signed presentation copy of the first edition), and the ostensible subject of this minisay: The Powers of Poetry (1960).
Of the latter, I would simply say he covers the territory, espousing his views on the concept of poetry, poets, the poem itself, and poetry's value. A poet or appreciator of poetry should not omit this book from his or her library. I pity the poor people of Coshocton, Ohio, whose library discarded the copy I now proudly own.
A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell being the first part of the First Movement of A Dance to the Music of Time. In a University of chicago Press paperback containing the first movement bought at The Friends of the Daphne Library Booksale. Tis a slice of life of English students between the wars. The cover is a nice detail from A Dance to the Music of Time painted by Nicolas Poussin 1639-40.
It was a realisation, in a moment of time, not only of her own possibilities, far from inconsiderable ones, but also of other possibilities that life might hold; and my chief emotion was surprise.The Winged Life: The Poetic Voice of Henry David Thoreau edited by Robert Bly, wood engravings by Michael McCurdy. By including many journal passages, Bly nearly apologizes for HDT's poetry. Would that he left the prose to Princeton and he displayed more poetry. He did not even include HDT's best poem:Sic VitaA Thief of Time by Tony Hillerman. This time on an unabridged books on tape. Does this sound like a rut? What a wonderful rut. Hillerman writes in color. Take me to the Four Corners. Now!
I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide,
Methinks,
For milder weather.A bunch of violets without their roots,
And sorrel intermixed,
Encircled by a wisp of straw
Once coiled about their shoots.
The law
By which I'm fixed.A nosegay which Time clutched from out
Those fair Elysian fields,
With weeks and broken stems, in haste,
Doth make the rabble rout
That waste
The day he yields.And here I bloom for a short hours unseen,
Drinking my juices up,
With no root in the land
To keep my branches green,
But stand
In a bare cup.Some tender buds were left upon my stem
In mimicry of life,
But ah! the children will not know
Till time has withered them,
The woe
With which they're rife.But now I see I was not plucked for naught,
And after in life's vase
Of glass set while I might survive,
But by a kind hand brought
Alive
To a strange place.That stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours,
And by another year,
Such as God knows, with freer air,
More fruits and fair flowers
Will bear,
While I droop here.
(Text from The American Transcendentalists edited by Perry Miller)They Went: The Art and Craft of Travel Writing. 1991. Edited by William Zinsser. Bought at Publishers' Outlet, Opelika, AL. Originally given as talks at the New York Public Library.
Like Thoreau, I cannot stay away from travel writing. These essays are less how to than how I did it. Vivian Gosnick's phrase "I must silence the noise within" says much to me. Ian Frazier - Carving You Name on the Rock - perhaps spoke the most to me.
One difference between these writings and mine is most of them focus on the people while I focus on the place and my reaction to it.
Puritans and Pragmatists: Eight Eminent American Thinkers by Paul K. Conkin. Indiana University Press. 1968. Read the introductory chapter entitled The Puritan Prelude and the chapter on Emerson. I am afraid that much of the Puritan information was new to me. I will have to go deeper into this fountain of original American thought.
Ravens in Winter by Bernd Heinrich. 1989. Summit Books. Another book gleaned from The Friends of the Daphne Library Booksale. As with his Year in the Maine Woods, this is a hymn to Nature. Comparing him to Thoreau, you have to go to the late Henry, the naturalist. Heinrich here exhibits the patience of Job, the eye of Thoreau.
December
1066: The Year of the Conquest by David Howarth. 1977. Recorded Books. Charlotte Hall, MD. Read by Tony Barbour on an unabridged tape, 6 1/2 hours. From The Daphne Public Library. I did not know of the nearly simultaneous Norse invasion. The blood and gore of history puts any movie to shame.While in Tuscaloosa, I was able to peruse Lodowick Adams Bookseller. A nice shoppe with real people. Those who think the bookseller is an endangered species have not visited here. Even since the onset of the internet, their book search service has grown. I bought 1846 by DeVoto. At $6, the right price!
I was able to peruse a couple of Charleston bookstores. Boomer's Books has a wonderful selection of classics, art, scholarly texts, and philosophy. The shoppe is run by not only real, but nice people. There I bought a volume of Catullus and one of Margaret Fuller. Atlantic Books has two shoppes, one on King and one on East Bay. At the East Bay location (the most bookstorish shoppe I know in the South and my second time there) I causally asked the proprietor the cost of the Byron Herbert Reece first edition of Ballad of the Bones. He asked why my interest in Reece and I replied I attended the same junior college where he taught. The bookseller looked up and said so did he! Tis a wonderful and small world. There I bought The Life of the Mind in America by Perry Miller.
Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert D. Richardson Jr. University of California Press, 1995. So much to say about this book and about Emerson, the father of American Transcendentalism. So as to not go long, and to leave you something to read, I will limit myself (for now) to his statements of belief:
The days are gods. That is, everything is divine.
Creation is continuous. There is no other world; this one is all there is.
Every day is the day of judgment.
The purpose of life is individual self-cultivation, self-expression, and fulfillment.
Poetry liberates. Thought is also free.
The powers of the soul are commensurate with its needs; each new day challenges us with
its adequacy and our own.
Fundamental perceptions are intuitive and inarguable; all important truths, whether of physics
or ethics, must at least be self-evident.
Nothing great is ever accomplished without enthusiasm.
Life is an ecstasy; Thoreau has it right when he says, "Surely joy is the condition of life."
Criticism and commentary, if they are not in the service of enthusiasm and ecstasy, are idle at
best, destructive at worst. Your work, as Ruskin says, should be the praise of what you
love.Journal by Henry D. Thoreau, Volume 5: 1852-1853, Edited by Patrick F. O'Connell, Princeton University Press, 1997. It is appropriate to begin reading this volume--the last in this series so far published--as the century and millennium draw to a close. Thoreau reminds us of what is important and of the nature of beauty by his description of full moon light, of the singing sparrow, of looking down upon society from Fair Haven Hill.
Poachers by Tom Franklin. Morrow. 1999. South Alabama. Hunting. Deer blood. Abandoned tractors. Covered in kudzu. Game wardens. This book will not supplant Faulkner's The Bear as the finest hunting story, but Larry Brown, Watch Out! In particular, the opening essay and the closing story evoke an Alabama of myth, memory, and a surreal truth. A fine book and a writer to read.
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston on unabridged tape. Other Harlem renaissance writers ignored her black realism. Don't you make the same mistake. Few recite it and she hid it but she was born in Notasulga, Alabama.
Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems by Robinson Jeffers. Modern Library. Orginals 1924 and 1925. Something about Jeffers draws me into him and back to poetry like few others.
To the Rock that will be a Cornerstone of the HouseA fragment of another poem:
Old garden of grayish and ochre lichen,
How long a time since the brown people who have vanished from here
Built fires beside you and nestled by you
Out of the ranging sea-wind? A hundred years, two hundred,
You have been dissevered from humanity
And only known the stubble squirrels and the headland rabbits,
Or the long-fetlocked plowhorses
Breaking the hilltop in December, sea-gulls following,
Screaming in the black furrow; no one
Touched you with love, the gray hawk and the red hawk touched you
Where my hand now lies. So I have brought you
Wine and white milk and honey for the hundred years of famine
And the hundred cold ages of sea-wind.I did not dream the taste of wine could bind with granite,
Nor honey and milk please you; but sweetly
They mingle down the storm-worn cracks among the mosses,
Interpenetrating the silent
Wind-prints of ancient weathers long at peace, and the older
Scars of primal fire, and the stone
Endurance that is waiting millions of years to carry
A corner of the house, this also destined
Lend me the stone strength of the past and I will lend you
The wings of the future, for I have them.
How dear you will be to me when
I too grow old, old comrade.
-----------------...corruptionTo me, Jeffers is the poetic equivalent of Edward Weston. In all, human foibles are temporary; the rock continues on.
Never has been compulsory.
--------Transcendental Ethos: A Study of Thoreau's Social Philosophy and Its Consistency in Relation to Antebellum Reform by Michael J. Federick. MLA Thesis, Harvard University. Downloaded 11/23/1999 from Walden.org. Through it all, HDT stayed with Transcendentalist theories, was not a hermit, and, peaceful or otherwise, believed in resistance to bad government. His view of nature, solitude, self-culture, civil disobedience, and John Brown all fit well within his transcendental ethos.
________________________________________________________________________May the force, however you describe and name it, be with you as we change the calendar.
Ernest W. Seckinger Jr
"Ernie"