Currently reading: A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling from The Readers’ Subscription and Mid-century Book Clubs. It’s odd to think that Auden and Barzun were born in the same year, two years after Trilling — and Barzun lived until 2012. 📚
I am reminded by the appearance of this delightful magazine that my own desultory education happened in large measure in the pages of periodicals. Many were the hours I sat at coffeeshops and bars, or in my little apartment over cheap dinners, reading the Times Literary Supplement, First Things, Commentary, the New Criterion, National Review, the Weekly Standard, the Atlantic and, in its latter days, Partisan Review. In those pages I learned how little I knew and what I might read to remedy my situation. There I also found lessons in putting words in the right order.
For every thousand pieces bemoaning the decline of book reading, there may be one (like this one) bemoaning the decline of the print periodical. For me too certain magazines that I subscribed to in my youth — the most important being the New Republic and the New York Review of Books — were foundational to the shaping of my intellectual sensibilities. Going straight to the URL of a single review or essay I’m interested in is great; but even better, I think, was reading a magazine from cover to cover and finding new interests, new matter for reflection.
I owe a special debt to the New Republic. In 1977 a young woman in Birmingham, Alabama read a review in those pages of Pablo Neruda’s Song of Protest, and was prompted to order that book. I worked at the bookstore from which she ordered it. Reader, I married her.
This announcement of Delays Ahead on Cosmos Malick — complete with an Albertina Walker shout-out — is relevant to readers of my other blogs also.
Finished reading: Twilight of Authority by Robert Nisbet (1975). Nisbet has long been an important writer for me, but this, the only one of his major books I hadn’t read, is a disappointment, vague and full of moot assertions. There’a a provocative point in the Preface, though: having made the familiar old-school conservative case that we suffer from a decline in civil society, in the various institutions that mediate between individuals and the state, he adds this:
Accompanying the decline of institutions and the decay of values in such ages [of decline as ours] is the cultivation of power that becomes increasingly military, or paramilitary, in shape. Such power exists in almost exact proportion to the decline of traditional social and moral authority. Representative and liberal institutions of government slip into patterns ever more imperial in character. Military symbols and constraints loom where civil values reigned before.
This is very much a book of the Vietnam era, so I’m sure it has no application to our own moment. 📚
One lawn down the street from us is filled this evening with fireflies! — or lightning bugs, as we called them in Alabama when I was growing up. It’s so wonderful to see them: they are rare now (I hadn’t seen any for years) but they filled the summer evenings of my childhood. Sitting cross-legged on the porch and watching the lightning bugs under the pecan trees was one of the defining experiences of my whole sensibility.
Gianni Benvenuti, illustration from Winny-Puh (the Italian translation of Winnie-the-Pooh).
British footy announcers identifying a player from the U.S. when he does something impressive: “the Fulham left-back,” “the Juventus midfielder,” etc.
British footy announcers identifying the same player when he does something wrong: “The American.”
From an earlier essay by Elizabeth on the alternative to thinking of every social/cultural political situation as a pitched battle:
Warriors are right that this world is certainly full of problems, and sometimes battles must be fought. Nobody can shrug them off or pretend that they don’t exist. But losers don’t in fact shun the active life. Instead, they are engaged in activity that takes place in a much deeper stratum of consciousness than political and journalistic warfare. They invest energy in existentially permanent activities, like loving and caring for other people: children, students, family, neighbors, colleagues. They work as musicians, educators, physicians, priests, and artists. Beautiful losers renew and pass on the art, literature, and manners that constitute the best of our culture.