The Collected Poems and Epigrams of J. V. Cunningham, Chicago, The Swallow Press, 1971.
Epigram 57
Here lies my wife. Eternal peace Be to us both with her decease.
Epigram 59
I married in my youth a wife. She was my own, my very first. She gave the best years of her life. I hope nobody gets the worst.
J. V. Cunningham is the model for John Williams' 1965 novel Stoner. An underappreciated and unfortunately titled masterpiece, it is about one William Stoner, an obscure professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia. At its publication in '65 it pretty much fell still-born from the press, but the years have been kind to it and it is now valued as the great novel that it is. Unfortunately, Williams, who died in 1994, did not live to see its success.
(4.) John Williams, Stoner (1965). Based on the life of J. V. Cunningham and especially his disastrous marriage to Barbara Gibbs. Easily the best novel ever written about the determined renunciations and quiet joys of the scholarly life. Stoner suffers reversal after reversal—a bad marriage, persecution at the hands of his department chair, the forced breakup of a brief and fulfilling love affair with a younger scholar—but he endures because of two things: his love for his daughter, who wants nothing more than to spend time with her father while he writes his scholarship, and his work on the English Renaissance. His end is tragic, but Stoner does not experience it that way. A genuinely unforgettable reading experience.
"Genuinely unforgettable" sounds like hype, but this is one novel I, for one, will not forget. For more by Myers on Stoner, see here.
My copy of the novel sports a blurb by Myers: "It will remind you of why you started reading novels: to get inside the mystery of other people's lives." Yes.
According to Sonya Roberts on Merton, "we can readily identify with his journey of faith."
Oh can we just? Well, I, for one, most certainly do not identify with anyone displaying Merton's level of mental confusion and sheer erotomania.
This is a bozo who, at the age of 51 and sworn to monastic vows, got the blathering hots for a nurse half his age (with whom he almost certainly had full sexual relations: why else did he destroy the correspondence that passed between him and her?). He'd already fathered an illegitimate child. And perhaps worst of all: by the time he had his Close Encounter of The Electric Fan Kind, he seems to have had only the vaguest awareness that Catholicism might differ from Buddhism.
There'll probably always be a market for Merton, just as there's notoriously always a market for Che Guevara T-shirts. But Holy Church in 2015 needs Merton (and Che) about as much as She needs the proverbial hole in the head.
As nasty and uncharitable as this comment is, Reeves is right that Merton often in his writings displays very little understanding of Catholic doctrine and how it differs from that of Buddhism and other religions.
At Gorgias 492, tr. Helmbold, the divine Plato puts the following words into the mouth of Callicles: A man who is going to live a full life must allow his desires to become as mighty as may be and never repress them. When his passions have come to full maturity, he must be able to serve them through his courage and intelligence and gratify every fleeting desire as it comes into his heart.
[. . .]
The truth, which you claim to pursue, Socrates, is really this: luxury, license, and liberty, when they have the upper hand, are really virtue, and happiness as well; everything else is a set of fine terms, man-made conventions, warped against nature, a pack of stuff and nonsense!
Now let us consider what the decidedly undivine Marquis de Sade has Mme. Delbene say in Julliette or Vice Amply Rewarded:
. . . I am going to dismiss this equally absurd and childish obligation which enjoins us not to do unto others that which unto us we would not have done. It is the precise contrary Nature recommends, since Nature's single precept is to enjoy oneself, at the expense of no matter whom. But at our leisure we shall return to these subjects; for the nonce, let's now put our theories into practice and, after having demonstrated that you can do everything without committing a crime, let's commit a villainy or two to convince ourselves that everything can be done. (p. 30, emphasis in original, tr. Casavini)
From the cover: "abridged but unexpurgated from the original five-volume work especially for the adult reader." In other other words, the good stuff, i.e., the philosophy, has been cut, but the 'adult matter' remains. I get a kick out of this use of 'adult' — but that's another post.
The natural man, in the grip of his lusts, is a natural sophist: what can be done is eo ipso permissible to do. Reason in a philosopher without God easily becomes unhinged.
A world-wide bestseller, apparently. A religious novel that emerges from the wasteland of Soviet atheism. God just won't stay dead.
One of the things that leftists and evangelical atheists never understand is that, even if religion is pure buncombe, wholly lacking in transcendent reference, it yet supplies people with immanent meaning. People want their lives to have meaning, a meaning that cannot be had by the pursuit of name and fame, loot and land, food and sex. Not everybody of course: there are 'human' robots among us. But most people at least some of the time in however confused and obscure a fashion.
The want and the need are not going away. How would a leftist or an evangelical atheist like Dawkins supply it? By the erection of an idol? The State? Science?
Me, I'm heading over to Amazon.com right now to order me up a copy. Wonderful company. So not all corporations are evil? Did it arise in some communist paradise? In North Korea? In Cuba? The service is astonishingly good. They promise me a book in two days and I'll sometimes get it a day early. Who built Amazon? Obama? The government? Imagine the government in charge of all book distribution . . . it's easy if you try . . . See link below.
Some think so. The following from Thomas Mann's Diaries 1918-1939, entry of August 5, 1934:
A cynical egotism, a selfish limitation of concern to one's personal welfare and one's reasonable survival in the face of the headstrong and voluptuous madness of 'history' is amply justified. One is a fool to take politics seriously, to care about it, to sacrifice one's moral and intellectual strength to it. All one can do is survive, and preserve one's personal freedom and dignity.
I don't endorse Mann's sentiment but I sympathize with it. Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. Imagine the effect that must have had on a man of Mann's sensitivity and spiritual depth. You witness your country, the land of Kant and Schiller, of Dichter und Denker, poets and thinkers, in Heinrich Heine's phrase, transformed into a land of Richter und Henker, judges and hangmen.
My response to Mann would be along these lines: It is precisely because men of the spirit must survive and must survive to create and enlighten that they must be concerned with politics and with those who can kill and suppress them. You escaped to the USA, but what if there were no such country to which to escape because all of the people of high quality practised your cynical egotism, your selfish limitation to the personal?
I will have to find the passage in Plato's Laws where he says that the good who refuse to get involved in politics will end up ruled by the evil.
. . . no construction should call attention to its own grammatical correctness. Finding no other formulation that could make the point in quite the way I wanted, I decided to be ungrammatical instead of pedantic.
A good rule, within limits. The forward momentum of a sentence may be be impeded if you do not split an infinitive or use a contraction. Your precision may distract; your use of 'one' may strike the reader as precious. Writing 'of which' instead of 'whose' may mark you as pedantic even if you have correct usage and logic on your side. We sometimes do well to thumb our noses at the strictures of the school marms while yet reverencing the old gals in our memories. But now my style is about to slide into the sentimental as my mind drifts back to the dear old ladies who taught me and my mates to read and write. So I take myself in hand, a bit too late perhaps.
A caveat, though, anent Scalia's rule. As the culture declines and writing with it, you may not be able to help your constructions' calling attention to their grammatical correctness. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with standing for what is correct among barbarians.
Two sentence fragments in a row. Nothing wrong with that with that either, in moderation.
'Anent,' 'caveat'? Who am I trying to impress? Well, not a barbarian like you, ignorant of his own tongue, whose literary intake is a Twitter feed.
Ferguson's "For a writer like Scalia, who prized the precise and the particular (and seldom succumbed to soupy alliteration) . . . ." both illustrates alliteration and puts me in mind of my own excessively alliterative style.
Laying down rules of style, however, is a risky game. It is easy to fall into one's own traps, as does the great Orwell.
I have spoken before, romantically no doubt, of the mother tongue as our alma mater, our dear mother to whom we owe honor. Mater and matrix of our thoughts, she is yet deeper and higher than our thoughts, their sacred Enabler.
So I was pleased to come across a similar, albeit more trenchant, observation in Karl Kraus' Beim Wort Genommen, Koesel Verlag, 1955, pp. 134-135:
Ich beherrsche die Sprache nicht; aber die Sprache beherrscht mich vollkommen. Sie ist mir nicht die Dienerin meiner Gedanken. Ich lebe in einer Verbindung mit ihr, aus der ich Gedanken empfange, und sie kann mit mir machen, was sie will. Ich pariere ihr aufs Wort. Denn aus dem Wort springt mir der junge Gedanke entgegen und formt rueckwirkend die Sprache, die ihn schuf. Solche Gnade der Gedankentraechtigkeit zwingt auf die Knie und macht allen Aufwand zitternder Sorgfalt zur Pflicht. Die Sprache ist eine Herrin der Gedanken, und wer das Verhaeltnis umzukehren vermag, dem macht sie sich im Hause nuetzlich, aber sie sperrt ihm der Schoss.
I do not dominate language; she dominates me completely. She is not the servant of my thoughts. I live in a relation with her from which I receive thoughts, and she can do with me what she will. I follow her orders. For from the word the fresh thought springs, forming retroactively the language that created it. The grace of language, pregnant with thought, forces me to my knees and makes a duty of my expenditure of trembling conscientiousness. Language is a mistress of thought. To anyone who would reverse the relationship, she makes herself useful but denies access to her womb.
I might have translated Herrin as dominatrix if I wanted to accentuate the masochistic tone of the passage. 'Mistress' is obviously to be read as the female counterpart of 'master.'
More than one. Here is one. And as old Chisholm used to say, you are not philosophizing unless you have a puzzle. So try on this aporetic triad for size:
1. Purely fictional objects do not exist.
2. There are true sentences about purely fictional objects, e.g., 'Sherlock Holmes is a detective' and 'Sherlock Holmes is purely fictional.'
3. If a sentence of the form Fa is true, then there exists an x such that 'a' refers to x.
The triad is logically inconsistent: any two limbs entail the negation of the remaining one. So the limbs cannot all be true despite the considerable plausibility of each. So one of the propositions must be rejected. But the first is nonnegotiable since it is true by definition. The leaves two options: reject (2) or reject (3).
I want to avoid truck with Meinong if at all possible. So I should like to adhere to (3). There are no true singular sentences about what does not exist.
Suppose we reject (2). One way to do this is by supplying a paraphrase in which the apparent reference to the nonexistent is replaced by real reference to the existent. For example, the apparent reference to Sherlock, who does not exist, is replaced by real reference to a story in which he figures, a story that, of course, exists. The elliptical approach is one way of implementing this paraphrastic strategy. Accordingly,
4. Sherlock Holmes is a detective
and
5. Sherlock Holmes is fictional
are elliptical for, respectively,
6. In the Conan Doyle stories, Sherlock Holmes is a detective
and
7. In the Conan Doyle stories, Sherlock Holmes is fictional.
But note that while (5) is plainly true, (7) is plainly false. The stroies represent the detective as a real individual, not a fictional individual! So (7) cannot be taken as elliptical for (5) This is a serious problem for the 'story operator' approach. Or consider the true
8. Sherlock Holmes does not exist.
(8) is surely not short for the false
9. In the Conan Doyle stories, Sherlock Holmes does not exist.
The point can be made with other 'extranuclear' predicates such as 'merely possible' and 'mythological.' If I say that Pegasus is mythological, I don't mean that, according to legend, Pegasus is mythological.
I'll end with a different challenge to the story operator approach. Consider
10. Pinocchio was less of a liar than Barack Obama.
Whether you consider (1) true or false, it is certainly not elliptical for
11. In Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), Pinocchio was less of a liar than Barack Obama.
To put it vaguely, one problem with the story operator approach is that it traps fictional characters within particular stories, songs, legends, tales, etc. so that (i) it becomes difficult to understand how they can show up in different different stories, songs, etc. as they obviously do in the cases of Faust and Pinocchio, and (ii) it becomes difficult to understand how they can show up in comparisons with nonfictional individuals.
Is there a tenable solution to my triad or is it a genuine aporia?
I have always been an admirer of your philosophical writing style–both in your published works and on your blog. Have you ever blogged about which writers and books have most influenced your philosophical writing style?
Yes, I have some posts on or near this topic. What follows is one from 21 September 2009, slightly revised.
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From the mail bag:
I've recently discovered your weblog and have enjoyed combing through its archives these past several days. Your writing is remarkably lucid and straightforward — quite a rarity both in philosophy and on the web these days. I was wondering if perhaps you had any advice to share for a young person, such as myself, on the subject of writing well.
To write well, read well. Read good books, which are often, but not always, old books. If you carefully read, say, William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, you will learn something of the expository potential of the English language from a master of thought and expression. If time is short, study one of his popular essays such as "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life." Here is a characteristic paragraph:
But this world of ours is made on an entirely different pattern, and the casuistic question here is most tragically practical. The actually possible in this world is vastly narrower than all that is demanded; and there is always a pinch between the ideal and the actual which can only be got through by leaving part of the ideal behind. There is hardly a good which we can imagine except as competing for the possession of the same bit of space and time with some other imagined good. Every end of desire that presents itself appears exclusive of some other end of desire. Shall a man drink and smoke, or keep his nerves in condition? — he cannot do both. Shall he follow his fancy for Amelia, or for Henrietta? — both cannot be the choice of his heart. Shall he have the dear old Republican party, or a spirit of unsophistication in public affairs? — he cannot have both, etc. So that the ethical philosopher's demand for the right scale of subordination in ideals is the fruit of an altogether practical need. Some part of the ideal must be butchered, and he needs to know which part. It is a tragic situation, and no mere speculative conundrum, with which he has to deal. (The Will to Believe, Dover 1956, pp. 202-203, emphases in original)
One who can appreciate that this is good writing is well on the way to becoming a good writer. The idea is not so much to imitate as to absorb and store away large swaths of such excellent writing. It is bound to have its effect. Immersion in specimens of good writing is perhaps the only way to learn what good style is. It cannot be reduced to rules and maxims. And even if it could, there would remain the problem of the application of the rules. The application of rules requires good judgment, and one can easily appreciate that there cannot be rules of good judgment. This for the reason that the application of said rules would presuppose the very thing — good judgment — that cannot be reduced to rules. Requiring as it does good judgment, good writing cannot be taught, which is why teaching composition is even worse in point of frustration than teaching philosophy. Trying to get a student to appreciate why a certain formulation is awkward is like trying to get a nerd to understand why pocket-protectors are sartorially substandard.
But what makes James' writing good? It has a property I call muscular elegance. The elegance has to do in good measure with the cadence, which rests in part on punctuation and sentence structure. Note the use of the semi-colon and the dash. These punctuation marks are falling into disuse, but I say we should dig in our heels and resist this decadence especially since it is perpetrated by many of the very same politically correct ignoramuses who are mangling the language in other ways I won't bother to list. There is no necessity that linguistic degeneration continue. We make the culture what it is, and we get the culture or unculture we deserve.
As for the muscularity of James' muscular elegance, it comes though in his vivid examples and his use of words like 'pinch' and 'butchered.' His is a magisterial weaving of the abstract and the concrete, the universal and the particular. Bare of flab, this is writing with pith and punch. And James is no slouch on content, either.
C. S. Lewis somewhere says something to the effect that reading one's prose out loud is a way to improve it. I would add to this Nietzsche's observation that
Good prose is written only face to face with poetry. For it is an uninterrupted, well-mannered war with poetry . . . (Gay Science, Book II, Section 92, tr. Kaufmann)
A well-mannered war, a loving polemic. There is a poetic quality to the James passage quoted above, but the lovely goddess of poetry is given to understand that truth trumps beauty and that she is but a handmaiden to the ultimate dominatrix, Philosophia. Or to coin a Latin phrase, ars ancilla philosophiae.
Finally, a corollary to the point that one must read good books to become a good writer: watch your consumption of media dreck. Avoid bad writing, and when you cannot, imbibe it critically.
Christopher Hitchens died on this date in 2011. Herewith, a meditation composed in August 2010, slightly revised.
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I just caught the last third of an interview of Christopher Hitchens by Charlie Rose. Hitchens looks bad, the chemotherapy having done a nasty tonsorial number on him. But his trademark intellectual incandescence appears undiminished. 'Brilliant' is a word I don't toss around lightly, but Hitch is one to whom it unarguably applies. Public intellectuals of his caliber are rare and it will be sad to see him go. Agree or disagree with him, it is discourse at his level that justifies the high regard we place on free speech.
In the teeth of death the man remains intransigent in his unbelief. And why not? He lived in unbelief and so it is only fitting that he should die in it as well. He lived for this life alone; it is fitting that he should die without hope. God and the soul were never Jamesian live options for him. To cop out now as debility and death approach must appear to him to be utterly contemptible, a grasping at straws, a fooling himself into a palliative illusion to ease the horror of annihilation.
For what he takes to be the illusion of immortality, Hitchens substitutes literary immortality. "As an adult whose hopes lay assuredly in the intellect, not in the hereafter, he concluded, 'Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and — since there is no other metaphor — also the soul.'" (Here)
But to the clearheaded, literary immortality is little more than a joke, and itself an illusion. Only a few read Hitchens now, and soon enough he will be unread, his books remaindered, put into storage, forgotten. This is a fate that awaits all scribblers but a tiny few. And even they will drink the dust of oblivion in the fullness of time.
To live on in one's books is a paltry substitute for immortality, especially when one recalls Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's aphorism: Ein Buch ist ein Spiegel, aus dem kein Apostel herausgucken kann, wenn ein Affe hineinguckt. "A book is a mirror: if an ape peers in, no apostle will look out." Most readers are more apish than apostolic. The fame they confer cannot be worth much, given that they confer it.
To live on in one's books is only marginally better than to live on in the flickering and mainly indifferent memories of a few friends and relatives. And how can reduction to the status of a merely intentional object count as living on?
The besetting sin of powerful intellects is pride. Lucifer, as his name indicates, is or was the light-bearer. Blinded by his own light, he could see nothing beyond himself. Such is the peril of intellectual incandescence. Otherworldly light simply can't get through. One thinks of Nietzsche, Russell, Sartre, and to a lesser extent Hitchens. A mortal man with a huge ego — one which is soon to pop like an over-inflated balloon.
The contemplation of death must be horrifying for those who pin all on the frail reed of the ego. The dimming of the light, the loss of control, the feeling of helplessly and hopelessly slipping away into an abyss of non-being. And all of this without the trust of the child who ceases his struggling to be borne by Another. "Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven." But this of course is what the Luciferian intellect cannot do. It cannot relax, it must hold on and stay in control. It must struggle helplessly as the ego implodes in upon itself. The ego, having gone supernova, collapses into a black hole. What we fear when we fear death is not so much the destruction of the body, but the dissolution of the ego. That is the true horror and evil of death. And without religion you are going to have to take it straight.
What would Hitchens lose by believing? Of course, he can't bring himself to believe, it is not a Jamesian live option, but suppose he could. Would he lose 'the truth'? But nobody knows what the truth is about death and the hereafter. People only think they do. They bluster and whistle in the dark. But suppose 'the truth' is that we are nothing but complex physical systems slated for annihilation. Why would knowing this 'truth' be a value? Even if one is facing reality by believing that death is the utter end of the self, what is the good of facing reality in a situation in which one is but a material system? How could truth be a value in a purely material world?
If materialism is true, then I think Nietzsche is right: truth is not a value; life-enhancing illusions are to be preferred. If truth is out of all relation to human flourishing, why should we value it? And if materialism is true, could truth even exist? It is not a physical thing or property. It is not empirically detectable. It is inherently mind-involving.
If there is divine light, sexual indulgence prevents it from streaming in. Herein lies the best argument for continence. The sex monkey may not be as destructive of the body as the booze monkey, but he may be even more destructive of the spirit. You may dismiss what I am saying here either by denying that there is any divine light or by denying that sexual indulgence impedes its influx, or both. But if you are in the grip of either monkey I will dismiss your dismissal. Why should I listen to a man with a monkey on his back? How do I know it is the man speaking and not the monkey?
Poor Kerouac got the holy hell beaten out of him by the simian tag-team. The Ellis Amburn biography goes into the greatest detail regarding Kerouac's homo- and hetero-erotic sexual excesses. His fatal fondness for the sauce, for the devil in liquid form, is documented in all the biographies.
It is not that the lovable dharma lush did not struggle mightily in his jihad against his lower self. He did, in his Buddhist phase in the mid-fifties, before the 1957 success of On the Road and the blandishments of fame did him in. (Worldly $ucce$$/Suckcess is an ambiguous good.) I've already pulled some quotations from Some of the Dharma which offers the best documentation of Jack's attempt to tread the straight path to the narrow gate.
One lesson, perhaps, is that we cannot be lamps unto ourselves even if the Tathagata succeeded in pulling himself up into Nirvana by his samsaric sandalstraps. To the vast run of us ordinary "poor suffering fucks" a religion of self-help is no help at all. The help we need, if help there be, must come from Elsewhere.
Attributed to Gustave Flaubert: "To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless."
Witty, but false. Comparable and less cynical is this saying which I found attributed to Albert Schweitzer on a greeting card: Happiness is nothing more than good health and a poor memory. (Whether the good Schweitzer ever said any such thing is a further question; hence my omission of quotation marks.)
I am inclined to agree with both gentlemen that good health is a necessary condition of happiness, at least for most of us. But happiness does not require a poor memory, it requires the ability to control one's memory, and the ability to control one's mind generally. I am happy and I have an excellent memory; but I have learned how to distance myself from any unpleasant memories that may arise.
An unhappy intellectual may think that stupidity is necessary for happiness, but then he is the stupid one. A keen awareness of the undeniable ills of this world is consistent with being happy if one can control his response to those ills. There is simply no necessity that one dwell on the negative if this dwelling destroys one's equanimity. But this non-dwelling is not ignorance. It is mind control.
As for selfishness, it is probably true that its opposite is more likely to lead to happiness than it.
The temptation to wit among the literary often leads them astray.
And no better way to kick off Kerouac month than with 'sweet gone Jack' reading from "October in Railroad Earth" from Lonesome Traveler, 1960. Steve Allen provides the wonderful piano accompaniment. I have the Grove Press Black Cat 1970 paperback edition. Bought it on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, 12 April 1973. I was travelling East by thumb to check out East Coast graduate schools where I had been accepted, but mostly I 'rode the dog' (Greyhound bus), a mode of transport I wouldn't put up with today: two guys behind me chain-smoked and talked all the way from Los Angeles to Phoenix. New Orleans proved to be memorable, including the flophouse on Carondelet I stayed in for $2. It was there that Lonesome Traveler joined On the Road in my rucksack. I never before had seen Tabasco bottles so big as on the tables of the Bourbon Street bars and eateries. Exulting in the beat quiddity of the scene, I couldn't help but share my enthusiasm for Nawlins with a lady of the evening, not sampling her wares, but just talking to her on the street, she thinking me naive, and I was.
Here is a long excerpt (7:10), which contains the whole of the first two sections of the piece, pp. 37-40, of the Black Cat edition.
Here is an interesting passage from André Gide's last work, written shortly before his death in 1951, So Be It or The Chips Are Down, tr. Justin O'Brien, Alfred Knopf, 1959, pp. 145-146, bolding added, italics in original. Brief commentary follows.
It is certain that the man who wonders as he takes up his pen: what service can be performed by what I am about to write? is not a born writer, and would do better to give up producing at once. Verse or prose, one's work is born of a sort of imperative one cannot elude. It results (I am now speaking only of the authentic writer) from an artesian gushing-forth, almost unintentional, on which reason, critical spirit, and art operate only as regulators. But once the page is written, he may wonder: what's the use? . . . And when I turn to myself, I think that what above all urged me to write is an urgent need of understanding. This is the need that now prompts the ratiocinations with which I am filling this notebook and makes me banish all bombast from them. I hope the young man who may read me will feel on an equal footing with me. I don't bring any doctrine; I resist giving advice; and in a discussion I beat a hasty retreat. But I know that today many seek their way gropingly and don't know in whom to trust. To them I say: believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it; doubt everything, but don't doubt of yourself. There is more light in Christ's words than in any other human word. This is not enough, it seems, to be a Christian: in addition, one must believe. Well, I do not believe. Having said this, I am your brother.
1. Writers are born, not made. For the born writer, doubts about the value of writing are insufficient to impede the process of putting words on paper. Something similar goes for the born philosopher. Doubts about philosophy are just more grist for the philosophical mill and have no tendency to impede the thinker's inquiry. No real philosopher is put off by doubts and objections of the sort cataloged and refuted in Philosophy Under Attack. You are either driven by a need to understand the world or you are not. If you are driven by that need you will gravitate toward philosophy whether or not you call it 'philosophy.'
2. The writer writes to satisfy a pressing need, the need to understand himself and the world. Driven by that need, he scribbles away, well or poorly, with or without a readership, under gusts of inspiration or in the horse-latitudes of the spirit, and whether it fills or depletes his belly.
3. The truth-seekers are to be trusted, the truth-finders doubted. Makes a good aphorism!
4. Unlike Bertrand Russell and others, Gide discerned truth in Christ's words, but was unable to believe. This shows that the discerning of truth is insufficient for belief. So much the worse for doxastic involuntarism. Belief requires something more, an act of will. There is something voluntary about belief. In many cases, not all, we decide what to believe and what to disbelieve. Josef Pieper who, in his Belief and Faith, p. 26, refers to the last of the Gide lines just quoted, remarks, "A free assent of will must be performed. Belief rests upon volition." (p. 27) See here for more on doxastic voluntarism.
5. Memo to BV: Get hold of the André Gide-Paul Claudel correspondence and explore why Claudel but not Gide embraced the Church of Rome.
Whatever you think of his message, you have to admit that Philip Larkin is a very good poet. "Continuing to Live" was written in April, 1954, and was published in Collected Poems 2003. First the poem and then a bit of commentary.
Continuing to live — that is, repeat A habit formed to get necessaries — Is nearly always losing, or going without. It varies.
This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise — Ah, if the game were poker, yes, You might discard them, draw a full house! But it's chess.
And once you have walked the length of your mind, what You command is clear as a lading-list. Anything else must not, for you, be thought To exist.
And what's the profit? Only that, in time, We half-identify the blind impress All our behavings bear, may trace it home. But to confess,
On that green evening when our death begins, Just what it was, is hardly satisfying, Since it applied only to one man once, And that one dying.
One can see that Larkin is a very good poet indeed. And like most good poets, he knows enough not to send a poem on a prose errand, to borrow an apt phrase from John Ciardi. So one will look in vain for a clearly stated philosophical thesis packaged poetically.
There is nonetheless philosophical content here. I read Larkin as expressing the futility of life. We are in the habit of living, despite the losses that pile up day by day. Like nervous chess players eyeing the clock, we are in time-trouble as our positions deteriorate move by move. We know what is coming and its inevitability. Life's a series of checks culminating in mate.
What one is sure of, what we command, is as clear as a lading-list and as boring and inconsequential: an inventory of events, mostly failures. Beyond these mundane particulars we are sure of nothing, and our intellectual honesty does not permit us to entertain dreams of transcendence. Anything else, anything more, must not be thought to exist.
So what's the use? The use of a life is to identify or half-identify the unique upshot of our varied behavings, an upshot and deposit unforeseen. The mark we make is blindly made and no providential power foresees or provides.
But this paltry result hardly satisfies. I've spent a life making a mark, leaving a trace, making a dent unlike anyone else's, and now appreciating it. But I will soon pass from the scene and be forgotten. So any uniqueness achieved is as good as nonexistent. It pertains only to me and I am soon not to be.
A poem of despair by a 20th century atheist.
But does Larkin have good reasons for his atheism? That is a question that, for a poet qua poet, 'does not compute.'
This philosopher asks: what's the ultimate good of suggesting momentous theses with nary an attempt at justification? Of smuggling them into our minds under cover of delectable wordcraft? Poetry is a delightful adjunct to a civilized life, but philosophy rules. It would be very foolish, however, to try to convince any poet of this unless he were also a philosopher.
