The Separation of the Learned from the conversible World seems to have been the great Defect of the last Age, and must have had a very bad Influence both on Books and Company: For what Possibility is there of finding Topics of Conversation fit for the Entertainment of rational Creatures, without having Recourse sometimes to History, Poetry, Politics, and the more obvious Principles, at least, of Philosophy? Must our whole Discourse be a continued Series of gossipping Stories and idle Remarks? Must the Mind never rise higher, but be perpetually “Stun'd and worn out with endless Chat / Of WILL did this, and NAN said that.” This would be to render the Time spent in Company the most unentertaining, as well as the most unprofitable Part of our Lives. […]
In this View, I cannot but consider myself as a Kind of Resident or Ambassador from the Dominions of Learning to those of Conversation; and shall think it my constant Duty to promote a good Correspondence betwixt these two States, which have so great a Dependence on each other. I shall give Intelligence to the Learned of whatever passes in Company, and shall endeavour to import into Company whatever Commodities I find in my native Country proper for their Use and Entertainment.
Currently reading: Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America by Douglas Brinkley. 📚 Brinkley reports that one Civilian Conservation Corps company in New Mexico had a newsletter called The Woodpecker in which this psalm was featured:
Roosevelt is my shepherd, I shall not want;
He maketh me lie down on straw mattresses,
he leadeth me inside a mess hall,
he restoreth to me a job.
He leadeth me in the paths of reforestation for his country’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of poison oak and ivy,
I will fear no evil, for he is for me.
His blankets and uniforms, they comfort me.
He prepareth a saw and ax before me in the presence of my commanding officer,
my shoes runneth over.
Surely beans and employment will follow me all the days of Roosevelt’s administration
and I shall dwell in a tent forever.
Currently reading: Anna Karenina, for the first time in some years. Endless joys here, and I’m reminded that there’s a certain kind of scene that Tolstoy does uniquely, and wonderfully. Here, for instance, a dinner party at which Levin finds himself encountering Kitty, who some months earlier had rejected his proposal of marriage. Several of the others are discussing Issues of the Day, especially the education of women, but Levin and Kitty are absorbed in a tête-à-tête, and Levin’s heart is not-so-strangely warmed. He tells Kitty about having seen her in a coach.
‘Wasn’t I all dishevelled?’ she thought; but seeing the rapturous smile these details evoked in his memory, she felt that the impression she had made must on the contrary have been a very good one. She blushed and laughed with happiness.
‘I honestly don’t remember.’
‘What a good laugh Turovtsyn has!’ said Levin, admiring his moist eyes and shaking body.
‘Have you known him long?’ asked Kitty.
‘Who doesn’t know him!’
‘And I see that you think he’s a bad person?’
‘Not bad, but worthless.’
‘That’s not true! And you must stop thinking that straight away!” said Kitty. ‘I used to have a low opinion of him too, but he — he is an exceedingly nice and remarkably kind man. He has a heart of gold.’
‘How did you manage to find out about his heart?’
‘We are great friends. I know him very well. Last winter, soon after … you came to see us,’ she said, with a guilty but at the same time trusting smile, ‘all Dolly’s children had scarlet fever, and he came to see her one day. And can you imagine,’ she said in a whisper, ‘he fel so sorry for her that he stayed on, and began helping her look after the children. Yes, and he went on living with them for three weeks, and looked after the children like a nanny.’
‘I am telling Konstantin Dmitrich about Turovtsyn during the scarlet fever,’ she said, leaning over to her sister.
‘Yes, it was remarkable, he was wonderful!’ said Dolly, glancing at Turovtsyn, who sensed he was being talked about, and smiling at him gently.
Levin cast Turovtsyn another glance, and was amazed he had not realized the extent of this man’s charm before.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’ll never think ill of people again!’ he said merrily, expressing what he genuinely now felt.
📚
Lionel Trilling (1963):
How far from our imagination is the idea of “peace” as the crown of spiritual struggle! The idea of bliss is even further removed. The two words propose to us a state of virtually infantile passivity which is the negation of the "more life" that we crave, the "more life" of spiritual militancy. We dread Eden, and of all the Christian concepts there is none which we understand so well as the felix culpa and the "fortunate fall"; not, of course, for the reason on which these Christian paradoxes were based, but because by means of sin and the fall we managed to get ourselves expelled from that place.
The Court of Honor, World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893 (Photograph by C. D. Arnold)
The Franke Reading Room at the Art Institute of Chicago
The CGI in The Magician’s Nephew, as we see it in the trailer, makes the movie look like an ad for Skittles.
This Leo Robson essay on Ralph Ellison is the single dumbest thing I have ever read in the LRB. Only a radically tone-deaf reader could make an assessment this triumphantly condescending: “Invisible Man, for all its intricacies and coiled ironies, has an element of stridency, and Ellison’s pronouncements leave little room for debate about his views.” Robson clearly thinks he’s much smarter than Ellison, and that arrogance makes him a disastrously bad reader of an endlessly complex book — and an endlessly complex person.
UPDATE: Coming back to this, I find myself wondering whether Robson grasps the difference between a strident book and a book with strident characters in it. I’ve taught Invisible Man several times over the years, and my most thoughtful and engaged students have had lengthy debates about how we should assess the invisible man’s account of his situation. If Ellison left “little room for debate about his views,” what have my students and I been debating?
Dorothea’s impetuous generosity, which would have leaped at once to the vindication of Lydgate from the suspicion of having accepted money as a bribe, underwent a melancholy check when she came to consider all the circumstances of the case by the light of Mr. Farebrother’s experience.
“It is a delicate matter to touch,” he said. “How can we begin to inquire into it? It must be either publicly by setting the magistrate and coroner to work, or privately by questioning Lydgate. As to the first proceeding there is no solid ground to go upon, else Hawley would have adopted it; and as to opening the subject with Lydgate, I confess I should shrink from it. He would probably take it as a deadly insult. I have more than once experienced the difficulty of speaking to him on personal matters. And — one should know the truth about his conduct beforehand, to feel very confident of a good result.”
“I feel convinced that his conduct has not been guilty: I believe that people are almost always better than their neighbors think they are,” said Dorothea. Some of her intensest experience in the last two years had set her mind strongly in opposition to any unfavorable construction of others; and for the first time she felt rather discontented with Mr. Farebrother. She disliked this cautious weighing of consequences, instead of an ardent faith in efforts of justice and mercy, which would conquer by their emotional force.
As Dorothea goes on to say, “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?” In fact Lydgate, though guilty of many things (the kinds of things that everyone else in Middlemarch is guilty of), is innocent of what he is suspected of doing. But he cannot prove it, and in Middlemarch one is always guilty except when proved innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt.
So much of our attention in this book goes to its flawed but lovable chief characters that readers tend to neglect Eliot’s slashing portrait of Middlemarch society as a whole: the town’s people are malicious gossips at best, vicious destroyers of reputations at worst. Even the eminently decent Farebrother turns to “this cautious weighing of consequences” in preference to defending those that Middlemarch has canceled. (He knows the rule: Defend the canceled, get canceled yourself.) By the end of the book, all of the major characters have left Middlemarch, even Fred and Mary, who live well outside of town at Stone Court. It is the nature of Middlemarch to drive all the interesting people away.