Alan Jacobs

If I had another lifetime at my disposal, here’s a book I’d like to write.

Special Relationships: British Sages in America

A history of American infatuation with wise men from Great Britain, structured by changes in technology. In all cases the book trade is essential, but it forms alliances with other technologies: first the lecture tour, then (thanks especially to the Luce empire) the magazine, and finally television. It’s possible that radio would need a chapter, but at the moment my sense is that radio was always more important as a way for Brits to understand America, e.g. Alastair Cooke’s “Letter from America.”

General outline with key figures:

Part 1: The Age of the Lecture

• Charles Dickens
• Oscar Wilde
• G. K. Chesterton

Part 2: The Age of the Magazine

• C. S. Lewis
• Arnold Toynbee

Part 3: The Age of Television

• Kenneth Clark
• J. Bronowski
• James Burke

Afterword: The End of an Era

• Christopher Hitchens

FYI: I am doing Big Blogging again, and if you want to support that you can buy me a dragon.

It was 80º here an hour ago – tomorrow morning it’ll be 22º.

If you look to the top of this page, you’ll see something new: a Buy Me a Dragon link. Now, before we go any further, let me just say that I do not actually plan to buy a dragon, unless, of course, you are more likely to support my writing if you think I am going to buy a dragon, in which case, yes, I will definitely buy a dragon or two, or three … once I have enough coin. (Then perhaps I can poll my supporters on which city to destroy first.)

Anyway, let me explain: The self-suspension of my blog last month had two major results. First, it showed me how much blogging helps me to think – to order my ideas, to see them in relation to my earlier writings and the writings of others. Second, I got so many lovely responses from people who like the blog that I was encouraged to think that my work here has some value to people other than me.

But, you know, I don’t get paid for this. And that does affect my decisions about what and where to write, largely because – I need to be vague about this – certain members of my family need my support. Writing essays for publication rather than blogging would at least give me the chance to earn some money, but at the cost of depriving me of this little Thought Lab. (This is something I will say more about in a later post.)

So I have decided to turn to you, my readers. The Buy Me a Coffee service allows you to contribute to this curious online project, and, ideally, make it permanently sustainable. I could of course start a Substack, but that’s not a good fit for the kind of writing I plan to do. (If you want to know more about why I say that, read this.) And Patreon doesn’t seem like the right fit either, for someone who’s not doing a job full-time – if I were a musician or a painter or even a freelance journalist, then maybe; but I’m none of those things.

Buy Me a Coffee allows you to support this blog whenever you feel like it, in smaller or larger amounts. It feels low-pressure, for you and for me. But of course, the more support I get through that conduit the easier it will be for me to focus on the kind of writing I do here, which I enjoy so much. I am especially eager to resume work on my Invitation and Repair project.

Please help me out if you can, and if you can’t or choose not to, thank you for reading. This will continue to be on the open web for all to see.

Oh, and I will keep writing books, and my Snakes & Ladders newsletter too.

Glenn Gould had a famously complex and dynamic personality; Sviatoslav Richter was, by contrast, notoriously silent and private, giving no interviews and making almost no public comment about himself and his work. Yet as I reflect on their versions of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (recordings I know quite well) I realize that when I listen to Gould I only hear Bach; when I listen to Richter I only hear Richter. 

Cheers, London. Wish I were visiting you right about now.

I have decided that I want 2022 to be a Year of Re-Reading — it would be rash for me to say that I won’t read any new books, but I really want to focus on returning to books that I want to know better. (I realized some years ago that I don’t really know the value and use of a book until I read it three times.)

But I decided, before the new regimen begins, to read Our Mutual Friend — one of the three Dickens novels (the other two being The Old Curiosity Shop and Martin Chuzzlewit) that I had never read. Having now completed it, I find that it’s one of the most complex and profound of Dickens’s novels but also surely the least enjoyable.

I was therefore taken aback when I saw what Chesterton said about it:

Our Mutual Friend marks a happy return to the earlier manner of Dickens at the end of Dickens’s life. One might call it a sort of Indian summer of his farce. Those who most truly love Dickens love the earlier Dickens; and any return to his farce must be welcomed, like a young man come back from the dead.

Did he read the same book I read? “Farce”? The humor in this book — and there is of course a lot of it — is not farcical but savage. Insofar as the book marks a return to an earlier Dickens, it’s not a happy-go-lucky farceur but rather a bitterly angry social critic. Peter Ackroyd, in his great biography of Dickens — one of the finest biographies I have ever read — gets this right:

In fact this is the first novel in which he directly confronts and attacks contemporary English social behaviour (Little Dorrit had been much more concerned with its institutions and its bureaucracy), all the marriages, arranged or otherwise, all the dinner parties and Commons business now seeming quite false and unreal, in a world of morbid vacancy, stale routines and universal hypocrisy. Social events are depicted as occasions of torment and even the act of eating and drinking in company, so joyful a social ritual in Dickens's earlier novels, is now seen as no more than another twist of the knife. And the gossip, the dreadful gossip, the gossip of which Dickens was so often the subject and which he truly feared and hated, is also anatomised. There is here, then, a general hatred for society; a hatred which he had as a child and young man but which now returns in a savage attack upon the world in which he lived and moved and of which he was, indeed, a principal ornament. That is why his sympathies in Our Mutual Friend lie with the odd and the outcast; those who, as it were, are forced to clean up and live off the waste and detritus of the rich (such large dust heaps, in reality dominating the landscape of Battle Bridge and Liverpool Street!). And perhaps that is also why, in the figure of the distressed Betty Higden running from the spectre of the workhouse, he returns to the attack he had made upon the New Poor Laws twenty-seven years before in Oliver Twist. All the radicalism of his youth is returning again, in his last finished novel.

And:

If this was a man who could glance once at a row of shops and remember the details of every one, how could he do otherwise than instantaneously recognise and understand the contemporary life around him? Not just the filth and wretchedness which persisted in London through the years of reconstruction -- Hippolyte Taine said of Shadwell in this decade, “I have seen the lower quarters of Marseilles, Antwerp and Paris: they come nowhere near this.” But Dickens sensed and recognised something else as well; he sensed in the change of London a change in the nature of civilisation itself. A civilisation that he anatomised in Our Mutual Friend with the Veneerings and the Podsnaps. Speculation. Peculation. Overseas investment. Short-term money markets. Brokering. Joint stock banking. Discount companies. Limited liability. Credit. A world in which human identity was seen in terms of monetary value. A world of barter and exchange. And thus, in the houses of the middle-class and upper middle-class, the fake “marbling”. Veneer. Imitation wood. Chinoiserie. Exaggerated ornamentation. Blankets of fabric. Stifled silent rooms. Death. Gold. Filth. This is the world of his last completed novel.

What a troubling book. You laugh, but you laugh uneasily; you laugh to keep from raging. It’s a brilliant performance but one that I admire far more than I enjoy — as, I am sure, Dickens intended.

I think maybe it’s an especially apt book for our own moment. It does much of what what John Lanchester tried to do in his novel Capital but didn’t have the bitterness to pull off.

And with that … Happy New Year! A toast: Good health to local cultures and confusion to surveillance capitalism! 

Jacqueline Rose:

As Zaretsky points out, there is no one thread running through [Simone Weil’s] writings, a difficulty he responds to by picking out the five themes he considers most representative of her thought: affliction, attention, resistance, roots, and “the good, the bad, and the godly” (the last referring to her version of mysticism, in which spiritual apprehension was the one true source of a viable ethical life). This has the advantage of focus but, as he is aware, compartmentalizes her ideas, creating distinctions and separations whereas, more often than not, her concepts slide into and out of one another in a sometimes creative, sometimes tortured amalgam or blur…. Nonetheless, the absence of “justice” from the list strikes me as a strange omission in what I read for the most part as an informative and attentive book. Weil’s heart was set on justice. It was her refrain. A recurring principle in pretty much every stage of her writing from start to finish, the concept of justice renders futile any attempt — though many have tried — to separate Weil the mystic from Weil the activist, or Weil the lover of God from Weil the factory worker, who felt that the only way to understand the wrongs of the modern world was to share the brute indignities of manual labor, which reduced women and men to cogs in the machines they slaved for.

In a sense this is clearly true, and yet … it is odd how rarely Weil uses the word. It turns up occasionally but (to my recollection anyway) is never emphasized. She is much more likely to speak of “the needs of the soul,” the “obligations” we have to meet those needs when we see them in others, the affliction (malheur) that people experience when deprived of their most elementary needs. I think “justice” is too abstract a term for her, too denuded of relational human context, too bloodless.

And if I am right about this, then Weil by avoiding the language of justice makes an important point about how impoverished our usual understanding of justice is. It’s common today to think of justice (or the word that now often replaces it, “equity”) as a condition, a state of affairs, whereas Weil — despite the shocking anti-semitism that defaces her character, something I write about at some length in The Year of Our Lord 1943 — is clearly profoundly influenced by the Jewish understanding of justice (tzedek) and charity (tzedakah) as commandments. One must act justly and charitably. Similarly, in New Testament Greek dikaiosuné may be translated as “justice” but also as “righteousness” — a virtue, a divine virtue.

(It’s interesting that in common parlance today “equity” is treated as a synonym for justice, and is implicitly or explicitly contrasted with equality, which while giving the appearance of justice may in fact, so the argument goes, be a means of denying justice. In ancient Greek, equity [epieíkeia] is typically seen as a kind of moderation of the demands of justice [dikē] – in the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle says we need equity to judge individual cases rightly, because all laws are defective insofar as they are, necessarily, general and therefore not ideally matched to every individual case. In New Testament Greek to be epieikés is to exhibit mildness, gentleness. Paul instructs the Philippians to “Let your moderation [epieikés] be known unto all men.")

So maybe there are reasons why Weil doesn’t often speak of justice, but rather of our obligations, and the virtues or dispositions that make it possible to carry out those obligations; also of the guilt we ought to feel when we do not offer to people what they are owed — when we fail those who suffer. All of this is miles and miles away from how people speak of justice and equity today.

[caption id=”" align=“aligncenter” width=“1600”] One of Simone Weil’s notebooks, in the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris[/caption]

The Jesuit church, Mount Street Gardens, London (a few years ago). Looking through some of my London pictures this morning, wondering when I’ll be able to return.

The good folks at Plough have produced an e-book featuring two early Christian texts, and Rowan Williams has written an introduction to it that I believe essential reading for Christians in our moment. I love this kind of piece — a clear and patient exposition of ideas from the past that never once mentions current events but brilliantly illuminates the questions that face us. Please do read it all, but here are some choice nuggets: 

• “If you look at the eyewitness accounts of martyrdom in these early centuries – ­documents like the wonderful record of the martyrs of Scilli in North Africa in AD 180 – you can see what the real issue was. These Christians, most of them probably domestic slaves, had to explain to the magistrate that they were quite happy to pray for the imperial state, and even to pay taxes, but that they could not grant the state their absolute allegiance…. What made their demand new and shocking was that it was not made on the basis of ethnic identity, but on the bare fact of conviction and conscience. For the first time in human history, individuals claimed the liberty to define the limits of their political loyalty, and to test that loyalty by spiritual and ethical standards.”  
• “The early Christian movement … was not revolutionary in the sense that it was trying to change the government. Its challenge was more serious: it was the claim to hold any and every government to account, to test its integrity, and to give and withhold compliance accordingly. But it would be wrong to think of this, as we are tempted to do in our era, in terms of individual conscience. It was about the right of a community to set its own standards and to form its members in the light of what had been given to them by an authority higher than the empire. The early Christians believed that if Jesus of Nazareth was ‘Lord,’ no one else could be lord over him, and therefore no one could overrule his authority.” 
• “The theology of the early centuries thus comes very directly out of this one great central conviction about political authority: if Jesus is Lord, no one else ultimately is, and so those who belong with Jesus, who share his life through the common life of the worshiping community, have a solidarity and a loyalty that goes beyond the chance identity of national or political life…. Humans love largely because of fellow-feeling, but God’s love is such that it never depends on having something in common. The creator has in one sense nothing in common with his creation – how could he? But he is completely free to exercise his essential being, which is love, wherever he wills. And this teaches us that we too must learn to love beyond the boundaries of common interest and natural sympathy and, like God, love those who don’t seem to have anything in common with us.” 
• “One of the lasting legacies of the early church, then, is the recognition that doctrine, prayer, and ethics don’t exist in tidy separate compartments: each one shapes the others. And in the church in any age, we should not be surprised if we become hazy about our doctrine at a time when we are less clear about our priorities as a community, or if we become less passionate about service, forgiveness, and peace when we have stopped thinking clearly about the true and eternal character of God.” 

the design of time - by Sara Hendren:

The learner, whether student or reader, can come with you from their current zone, what they already know, to the next developmental place. But if you try to jump them further than that place — beyond [Lev Vygotsky’s] Zone of Proximal Development, too fast or too carelessly — you’re likely to lose them. Not because folks aren’t sophisticated or smart or even willing. It’s just a simple fact of cognitive load and scaffolding: To introduce a novel or surprising idea, you have to build the conceptual bridge from what’s provisionally shared to the new and unexpected.

I think about this all the time. Who are my readers, and what assumptions might already be in their minds, and what’s the next possible leap we could make together? I didn’t think the audience for an article about time and design in a pandemic could travel all the way with me to crip time. It’s there in the disability literature for folks who want to go deeper but couldn’t be seamlessly reached in my piece.

It’s not as if all reading is teaching in a unidirectional, condescending way, from writer to reader — far from it. Every writer is writing precisely to think through and try to understand some set of ideas better, for her own sake as well as the reader. But the Zone should still be in one’s mind, no matter your narrative medium. And too often writers get tied up in an inside-baseball version of their topic, because the tacit reader in their mind’s eye is their peers: the people they speak to in professional development contexts, or the other books in their field, or their various social circles. But the scaffolding for a wider audience requires a much more rigorous attention to the Zone of PD — if, that is, you want to reach the reader who’s not already with you.

I love this whole post from Sara. But it occurs to me that there really aren’t very many writers who are interested in reaching the reader who’s not already with them — maybe, even, fewer today than in the past. When you (consciously or unconsciously) perceive the business of writing and reading as the consolidation of group identity, then reaching out to the unconvinced is not only difficult but perhaps undesirable.

from Caught by the River

Edward Mendelson: 

Many academics are far too sophisticated to take seriously the thought that literature is a special form of intimacy. Academic discourse tends to think of literature in impersonal, collective terms, typically as something that almost everyone, it seems, calls ‘cultural production’. It is of course true that works of literature are artefacts of cultural production, but true in the same trivial way that persons are artefacts of genetic production. It omits everything that makes a work interesting in itself, everything that makes it matter. The whole idea of literature as impersonal production rather than as a form of intimacy seems intellectually self-defeating. 

Well, my abandonment of this blog lasted less than a month. Here’s why, in a word: tags. When I decided to move quotes and links, as well as photos, to my micro.blog page, I forgot that I have been tagging my posts here for a long time, and that anything I post to micro.blog, where that tagging system doesn’t exist, will certainly be forgotten and will probably become effectively irretrievable. And anything worth posting is worth finding. So I am going to be posting quotes and links here where I can read and use them later. I’ll continue to use micro.blog for photos. 

I still plan to take an extended break from blogging as such, that is, from using this site to develop my own thoughts. But I now think that someday I will return to real blogging here. That’s largely because of all the kind messages I got after I announced my hiatus. It turns out that people read what I write here and profit from it. Who knew? (Certainly not me! I estimate that 95% of the messages I have received about the site over the years have been significantly or harshly critical. I really didn’t think that more than a dozen people read this site and liked it.) 

I have reposted here on this site a number of my essays and reviews, originally published elsewhere, that I’d like to preserve:

• “Reverting to Type” (a long autobiographical essay)
• “Choose Life” (about what church might be)
• “Raising Kael” (on Pauline Kael and Citizen Kane)
• “From the Abundance of the Heart”
• “The Devil’s Bargain” (a groping-my-way-forward essay I still think about)
• “On Loren Eiseley”
• A review of Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road 
• “Against Stupidity”
• Reviews of the sixth and seventh Harry Potter books
• “The Re-invention of Love” (on Anne Carson and Sappho)
• A review of Michel Houellebecq’s Submission
• An assessment of evolutionary accounts of literary art
• An essay on the greatness of Les Murray
• An outline of an anthology I wasn’t allowed to edit
• A review of a delightful book on maps of imaginary worlds 
• An essay-review on dictionaries 
• An essay-review on Auden’s prose
• “Giving Up on Baseball”
• An essay on literary executors
• The introduction to a collection of my essays, in which I think about what the essay is and does
• “The Thrilla In Manila And The End Of Boxing”
• “London Letters” — written by Brett Foster and me
• “Beyond the Wild Wood” — an essay-review on two editions of The Wind in the Willows 

I’ll update this post whenever I add more essays, which I expect to do from time to time.

Here’s a terrific conversation at The New Atlantis about whether it’s possible to write good fiction about climate change.