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.
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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.
As I remarked, my current work concerns the development of folk horror, and in that process, the whole Margaret Murray phenomenon is critical. Crucially, the theory (which endured powerfully into the 1970s) allowed modern writers to imagine ancient pagan cults surviving today, and entrapping unwary urban visitors. Whatever he actually intended, Robert Kirk offered a superb manual for such literature, with his entrancing portrait of those fairies in the adjacent realm, into which modern people could easily slip. Adding witchcraft to the mix created a very tempting brew indeed. Kirk offered later writers almost a pre-written script.
I’m so glad Philip is turning to this — it’s something he’s thought about for years and years. It will be interesting to see how his work compares to that of Francis Young.
Hi.
PSA: I will post nothing further about AGI/machine learning. I will read nothing further on the topic (and am purging my RSS feed accordingly). I have other and better things on my mind and heart.