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The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Tag Archives: Julian Barnes

Understanding Time

31 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

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Fiction, Julian Barnes, literature, The Sense of an Ending, Time

Julian Barnes

“We live in time — it holds us and molds us — but I never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing…

I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.”

__________

The opening paragraph (and a later reflection) from Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending.

Happy new year. Have a good time tonight, everyone.

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The Question of Nostalgia

24 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

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Fiction, Julian Barnes, literature, memory, Nostalgia, novel, past, School, School Days, The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes

“I’m not very interested in my schooldays, and don’t feel any nostalgia for them. But school is where it all began…

Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior. None of this, of course, was ever stated.

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when that moment came, our lives – and time itself – would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible. […]

But I’ve ben turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. I certainly don’t get soggy at the memory of some childhood knickknack; nor do I want to deceive myself sentimentally about something that wasn’t even true at the time — love of the old school, and so on. But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions — and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives — then I plead guilty… And if we’re talking about strong feelings that will never come again, I suppose it’s possible to be nostalgic about remembered pain as well as remembered pleasure.”

__________

Julian Barnes, writing in his Booker Prize winning novella The Sense of an Ending.

Go on:

  • Donna Tart on the intoxicating power of a teacher who believes in you
  • Barnes describes how and why printed books will survive
  • John Updike’s stirring remembrance of girls in fall

Julian Barnes and Kavanaugh

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Shostakovich and Music as a Protest against Death

12 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

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Afterlife, Alan Lightman, Beethoven Quartet, Classical Music, Composer, Dies Irae, Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich, Dmitri Shostakovich, Einstein's Dreams, Fear, Immortality, Julian Barnes, Life, Mark Wigglesworth, Mortality, Music, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Saul Bellow, Symphony

Dmitri Shostakovich

“Shostakovich knew that death — unless it came in the form of heroic martyrdom — was not an appropriate subject for Soviet art, that it was ‘tantamount to wiping your nose on your sleeve in company.’ He could not have the Dies Irae blaze from his scores; he had to be musically covert. But increasingly, the cautious composer found the courage to draw his sleeve across his nostrils, especially in his chamber music. His last works often contain long, slow, meditative invocations of mortality. The violist of the Beethoven Quartet was once given the following advice about the first movement of the fifteenth quartet by its composer: ‘Play it so that the flies drop dead in mid-air.'”

“At the premiere, Shostakovich overcame his usual shyness to explain to the audience that, ‘Life is man’s dearest possession. It is given to him only once and he should live so as not to experience acute pain at the thought of the years wasted aimlessly or feel searing shame for his petty and inglorious past, but be able to say, at the moment of death, that he has given all his life and energies to the noblest cause in the world – to fight for the liberation of humanity. I want listeners to this symphony to realize that ‘life’ is truly beautiful. My symphony is an impassioned protest against death, a reminder to the living that they should live honestly, conscientiously, nobly, never committing a base act. This is very important for much time will pass before scientists have succeeded in ensuring immortality. Death is in store for all of us and I for one do not see any good in the end of our lives. Death is terrifying. There is nothing beyond it.’ … [Shostakovich] disagreed with all the composers who had portrayed death with music that was beautiful, radiant and ecstatic. For him, death really was the end and he took that as an inspiration to make sure that he lived his life to its full.”

__________

Paragraphs excerpted from Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of and the meticulous notes of composer Mark Wigglesworth. A fly-stunning version of Shostakovich’s fifteenth quartet is here.

Both writers cite a further, clarifying reflection from Shostakovich, which MW describes, “In the disputed memoirs… [Shostakovich] talks revealingly about death:

Fear of death may be the most intense emotion of all. I sometimes think that there is no deeper feeling. The irony lies in the fact that under the influence of that fear people create poetry, prose and music; that is they try to strengthen their ties with the living and increase their influence on them. How can you not fear death? […] We should think more about it and accustom ourselves to it. We can’t allow the fear of death to creep up on us unexpectedly. I think that if people began thinking about death sooner, they would make fewer mistakes.

Shostakovich makes the common though deeply misguided assumption that death serves no purpose — that there is not “any good in the end of our lives.” Of course there are individual tragedies which aren’t, in any sense, “good.” But death does the essential business of lending life a clarity and urgency it otherwise would not have. Saul Bellow’s brilliant metaphor, that death is “the dark backing a mirror needs before we can see ourselves,” sets the idea in place: without an ending, albeit an opague one, there is no way to focus on ourselves.

In case that metaphor hasn’t fully absorbed, Alan Lightman’s short story collection Einstein’s Dreams features a fictional world in which people live forever. He characterizes the tragedy of these immortal inhabitants:

[T]hey can do all they can imagine. They will have an infinite number of careers, they will marry an infinite number of times, they will change their politics infinitely. Each person will be a lawyer, a bricklayer, a writer, an accountant, a painter, a physician, a farmer…

With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great-aunts and great-uncles, great-great-aunts, and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their father. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own.

Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.

More:

  • Barnes looks at how his understanding of mortality changed as he entered adulthood
  • Sam Harris puts a fine point on the tragedy of wasted time
  • Neurologist David Eagleman explains how consciousness may transcend the physical brain

Dmitri Shostakovich

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How and Why Printed Books Will Survive

23 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

A Writer's Room, books, Julian Barnes, literature, Logan Pearsall Smith, New York Times Magazine, Oliver Goldsmith, reading, Through the Window, Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story, William Butler Yeats, Writing

Julian Barnes

“I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books… I have no Luddite prejudice against new technology; it’s just that books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information. My father’s school prizes are nowadays on my shelves, ninety years after he first won them. I’d rather read Goldsmith’s poems in this form than online.

The American writer and dilettante Logan Pearsall Smith once said: ‘Some people think that life is the thing; but I prefer reading.’ When I first came across this, I thought it witty; now I find it—as I do many aphorisms—a slick untruth. Life and reading are not separate activities. The distinction is false (as it is when Yeats imagines the writer’s choice between ‘perfection of the life, or of the work’). When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape—into different countries, mores, speech patterns—but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.”

__________

From the prefacing essay “A Life with Books” from Julian Barnes’s collection Through the Window.

“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books.” – Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot 

Several months ago, The New York Times Magazine did a series of portraits, called “A Writer’s Room”, which chronicled authors at their desks. Barnes’s North London study is below, which was included with this description:

I have worked in this room for 30 years. It is on the first floor, overlooking the tops of two prunus trees… The room itself has always been painted the same color, a bright, almost Chinese, yellow, giving the effect of sunlight even on the darkest day… I use the computer for e-mail and shopping; the I.B.M. 196c — 30 years old itself — for writing (or rather, second drafting: nowadays I generally first draft by hand). It is getting increasingly difficult to find ribbons and lift-off tape, but I shall use the machine until it drops. It hums quietly, as if urging me on — whereas the computer is inert, silent, indifferent. The room is usually very untidy: like many writers, I aspire to be a clean-desk person, but admit the daily reality is very dirty. So I have to walk carefully as I enter my study; but am always happy to be here.

Julian Barnes in His Study

Read on:

  • Barnes on the question of whether life is a narrative
  • Barnes on modern, secular notions of happiness
  • Yours truly wrote a few words on why novels will never completely fade

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Does the Beauty of the Gospel Story Attest to Its Truth? (Einstein, C.S. Lewis, and Others Answer)

18 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein: His Life and Universe, Alistair McGrath, beauty, Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, C.S. Lewis, Caravaggio, Christian Apologetics, doubt, Faith, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, Julian Barnes, Luke, Mark, Matthew, Narrative, Nothing to Be Frighted Of, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, religion, Resurrection, Storytelling, The Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus, the gospels, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, Thomas Cahill, truth, Walter Isaacson

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio

Does the aesthetic splendor of the four Gospels, when considered like works of literature, emit the ineffable whiff of something genuine? Is there a patina of truth — truth endorsed by beauty — coating the Biblical account of the Nazarene? Cahill explained the concept; Einstein flirted with the idea; C.S. Lewis, through his buddy Tolkien, was converted by it; and Julian Barnes paid it some provocative thoughts. You can decide for yourself.

From the pen of Thomas Cahill, writing in his even-handed historical survey The Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus:

What especially makes the gospels — from a literary point of view — works like no others is that they are about a good human being. As every writer knows, such a creature is all but impossible to capture on the page, and there are exceedingly few figures in all literature who are both good and memorable. Yet the evangelists, who left no juvenilia behind them — no failed novels, rhythmless poems, or other early works by which we might judge their progress as writers — whose Greek was often odd or imprecise, and who were not practiced writers of any sort, these four succeeded where almost all others have failed. To a writer’s eyes, this feat is a miracle just short of raising the dead.

As retold in Walter Isaacson’s biography, Albert Einstein had grappled with the question, too:

Shortly after his fiftieth birthday, Einstein gave a remarkable interview in which he was more revealing than he had ever been about his religious thinking. It was with a pompous but ingratiating poet and propagandist named George Sylvester Viereck… For reasons not quite clear, Einstein assumed Viereck was Jewish…

Viereck began by asking Einstein whether he considered himself a German or a Jew. ‘It’s possible to be both,’ replied Einstein. ‘Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.’

Should Jews try to assimilate? ‘We Jews have been too eager to sacrifice our idiosyncrasies in order to conform.’

To what extent are you influenced by Christianity? ‘As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.’

You accept the historical existence of Jesus? ‘Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.’

In Alistair McGrath’s biography of C.S. Lewis, there is an account of how, ultimately, the great medievalist don was swayed after studying the Gospels according to J.R.R. Tolkien’s conception of them as “True Myths”.

To understand how Lewis passed from theism to Christianity, we need to reflect further on the ideas of J. R. R. Tolkien. For it was he, more than anyone else, who helped Lewis along in the final stage of what the medieval writer Bonaventure of Bagnoregio describes as the ‘journey of the mind to God.’…

Tolkien argued that Lewis ought to approach the New Testament with the same sense of imaginative openness and expectation that he brought to the reading of pagan myths in his professional studies. But, as Tolkien emphasized, there was a decisive difference. As Lewis expressed in his second letter to Greeves, ‘The story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.‘

The reader must appreciate that the word myth is not being used here in the loose sense of a ‘fairy tale’ or the pejorative sense of a ‘deliberate lie told in order to deceive.’… For Tolkien, a myth is a story that conveys ‘fundamental things’—in other words, that tries to tell us about the deeper structure of things. The best myths, he argues, are not deliberately constructed falsehoods, but are rather tales woven by people to capture the echoes of deeper truths. They are like splintered fragments of the true light…

In his somberly comic study of mortality, Nothing to Be Frighted Of, Julian Barnes imagines a moment in which some unnamed future generation could look back and evaluate the history of the now-disappeared Christian religion:

It lasted also because it was a beautiful story, because the characters, the plot, the various coups de théâtre, the over-arching struggle between Good and Evil, made up a great novel. The story of Jesus—high-minded mission, facing-down of the oppressor, persecution, betrayal, execution, resurrection—is the perfect example of that formula Hollywood famously and furiously seeks: a tragedy with a happy ending. Reading the Bible as ‘literature,’ as that puckish old schoolmaster was trying to point out to us, is not a patch on reading the Bible as truth, the truth endorsed by beauty.

__________

The painting is Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1602).

Explore on:

  • Eric Metaxas answers the droll question – Would Jesus be a Republican or a Democrat?
  • Lewis, Wittgenstein, and Updike address whether we can assume the existence of God
  • Cahill contrasts the Greek and Christian worldviews

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How to Live

24 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

Catholicism, Cicero, deism, Epicureanism, Essays, Fideism, How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne, Judaism, Julian Barnes, Life, Michel de Montaigne, Montaigne, Philosophy, Plato, Platonists, Renaissance, Sarah Bakewell, Socrates, stoicism, The Complete Essays of Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne

“When I dance, I dance. When I sleep, I sleep; and when I am strolling alone through a beautiful orchard, although part of the time my thoughts are occupied by other things, for part of the time too I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the delight in being alone there, and to me…

To enjoy life requires some husbandry. I enjoy it twice as much as others, since the measure of our joy depends on the greater or lesser degree of our attachment to it. Above all now, when I see my span so short, I want to give it more ballast; I want to arrest the swiftness of its passing by the swiftness of my capture, compensating for the speed with which it drains away by the intensity of my enjoyment. The shorter my lease of it, the deeper and fuller I must make it.”

__________

A section excerpted from “On Experience” by Michel de Montaigne, featured in his Complete Essays.

More and more recently, I see thinkers I admire cite Montaigne as one of those unassailable luminaries – like Augustine, Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, or Dr. Johnson – whose voice is wise enough, and work compendious enough, to cut through our frenetic cultural discourse with the weight of a primary source.

Julian Barnes calls Montaigne our philosophical link to the Ancient World. He was also the man who said “Philosopher, c’est apprendre à mourir,” or “To be a philosopher is to learn how to die” – a vital reflection that is also perhaps the most misunderstood sentence in philosophy (until Marx started to talk about religion as an opiate…).

The reflection is especially essential to the excerpt above, sourced from perhaps the most seminal of Montaigne’s many celebrated essays. Montaigne had imbibed the Platonists, and thus in linking the practice of philosophy to eventual peace with mortality, was not claiming that we can learn to feel comfortable with the fact of death if we simply muse enough on the subject. Rather, as a Catholic of Jewish origins who flirted with Deism, Montaigne was merely reframing a claim made by Socrates and later Cicero: namely, that in death you are finally unfettered from your corporeal chains, so you better get your mind – or, if you prefer, your soul – in shape because that’s all you’ll have when your star finally sets. Montaigne’s quasi-Deism (which consistently reads like Fideism to me) factors into this equation in an essential way. While a convinced Catholic may take his next existence for granted, brooders like Montaigne often struggle with a concept so uniquely divorced from empirical confirmation. Cicero was one of these thinkers; as an Epicurean he doubted a life-to-come, but as a devotee of Socrates, he thought that perhaps he would outlast his mortal coil. So a convenient compromise arose in his mind. We are heading towards either transcendence or nothingness, he thought, so why fret? Neither option is bad. And you can’t decide the course anyway.

In my reading, Montaigne replaces this rigid Stoicism with a penchant for falling into spectacular daydreams about issues of life and death. Perhaps his most stunning feature is how anti-melancholic he remains despite the weight of his preoccupations, as Ciceronian coolness gives way to warm reveries about the things we humans care about but cannot know for certain. This is not to say that Montaigne had some palpably intense joie de vivre (he didn’t), rather that as a Christian humanist he felt the force of life in a powerful way – a force catalyzed by contemplation, reflection, and an ability to perceive variances of light, even in the shades and shadows of existence. He is a thinker who is continually elated by the sunlight that silhouettes clouds.

I just finished Sarah Bakewell’s fantastic biography How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. I cannot recommend the book enough, especially to those who are, like me, interested in both the work and the life, as well as that looming question of how we should live.

Below: Montaigne’s chateau in Bordeaux. His study was in one of the towers.

Montaigne's Château

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John Updike on Falling Airplanes and His Faith in a Fallen World

21 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Archimedes, Autobiography, Biography, Christianity, Church Going, Donna Tartt, Ernest Hemingway, Experience, Faith, G.K. Chesterton, Hitch-22, John Updike, Joseph Conrad, Julian Barnes, Karl Barth, Life, memoir, Miguel de Unamuno, Mortality, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Philip Larkin, Proof of God, religion, Rudyard Kipling, Søren Kierkegaard, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, Speak Memory, T.S. Eliot, The Secret History

John Updike

“Early in my adolescence, trapped within the airtight case for atheism, I made this logical formulation:

1. If God does not exist, the world is a horror-show.
2. The world is not a horror-show.
3. Therefore, God exists.

The second premise, of course, is the weaker; newspapers and biology lessons daily suggest that it is a horror show, of landslides and plagues and massacres and falling airplanes and incessant carnivorousness… Yet this and all bad news merits reporting because our general expectation is for good: an instinctive vision of health and peace underlies our horror stories. Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we only have to be still to experience. Habit and accustomedness have painted over pure gold with a dull paint that can, however, be scratched away, to reveal the shining under-base. The world is good, our intuition is, confirming its Creator’s appraisal as reported in the first chapter of Genesis.

During that same adolescence, I reluctantly perceived of the Christian religion I had been born into that almost no one believed it, believed it really — not its ministers, nor its pillars like my father and his father before him. Though signs of belief (churches, public prayers, mottos on coins) existed everywhere, when you moved toward Christianity it disappeared, as fog solidly opaque in the distance thins to transparency when you walk into it. I decided I nevertheless would believe. I found a few authors, a very few — Chesterton, Eliot, Unamuno, Kierkegaard, Karl Barth — who helped me believe. Under the shelter that I improvised from their pages I have lived my life. I rarely read them now; my life is mostly lived. God is the God of the living, though His priests and executors, to keep order and to force the world into a convenient mould, will always want to make Him the God of the dead, the God who chastises life and forbids and says No. What I felt, in that basement Sunday school of Grace Lutheran Church in Shillington, was a clumsy attempt to extend a Yes, a blessing, and I accepted that blessing, offering in return only a nickel a week and my art, my poor little art…

My writing here about my religion feels forced — done at the behest of others, of hypothetical ‘autobiography’ readers. Done, I believe, in an attempt to comfort some younger reader as once I was comforted by Chesterton and Unamuno… But there seems, my having gone this unfortunately far, still this to say: One believes not merely to dismiss from one’s life a degrading and immobilizing fear of death but to possess that Archimedean point outside the world from which to move the world. The world cannot provide its own measure and standards; these must come, strangely, from outside, or a sorry hedonism and brute opportunism result — a greedy panicked heart and substance abuse. The world punishes us for taking it too seriously as well as for not taking it seriously enough.”

__________

From John Updike’s magisterial Self-Consciousness: Memoirs.

Well, it’s beautifully written. That’ll be your initial reaction to Self-Consciousness. No, let me rephrase: Wow, it’s beautifully written. Updike is a writer who pulls the sublime from effortless, conversational sentences, affirming his reflection that “to give the mundane its beautiful due” was the purpose of his writing style. And man, do you feel the power of that impulse in these memoirs.

Typically, a writer’s memoir is not really about his or her lived-life. Writers are not boring people, but they often do, when viewed from the outside, lead boring lives. Sure Conrad manned a steamer in the Congo and Kipling was deployed with a battalion in India and Hemingway drank his way through every bullring in Cuba. But that was a century ago. Nowadays, as writing has become largely professionalized, the pulse of a writer’s life has slowed significantly. A writer’s craft is a solitary and silent one, done with a pen and a pad, at the desk, day after day. So his memoir must concern matters beyond the workaday. Just to stick to some covered on this blog: Martin Amis’s memoir is about family; Christopher Hitchens’s is about friendship; Nabokov’s is about education. John Updike’s is about faith (and sex, as he could never avoid the subject).

At the conclusion of one of the finest contemporary novels I’ve read, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, the young protagonist Richard Papen wonders if he possesses a singular fatal flaw. “I have always mistaken beautiful or intelligent people for good” is his paragraph-long confession paraphrased, an admission which, upon reading, spurred within me a pang of recognition (“I’m busted”). And so too it is with writers. Beautiful prose can hide myriad sins of logic. So it’s essential when reading excerpts like the one above (found on pages 230-235) that you do not fall lazily into the ease of the prose, surrendering the critical faculties that such dense epistemology demands.

There is more to say here, but I will leave it for another day. Perhaps for when I post another section from Self-Consciousness. Still, there are two relevant sources concerning Updike’s final point about seriousness which may add some flavor to the discussion:

From Nothing to Be Frightened, Julian Barnes’s memoir about mortality (see: there’s always one unifying theme).

But if life is viewed as… something dependent on a greater reality elsewhere, then it becomes at the same time less valuable and more serious. Those parts of the world where religion has drained away and there is a general acknowledgement that this short stretch of time is all we have, are not, on the whole, more serious places than those where heads are still jerked by the cathedral’s bell… On the whole, they yield to a frenetic materialism. [emphasis mine]

There is also Philip Larkin’s exquisite poem “Church Going,” where the writer wanders into a church and in the final stanza muses on its perennial significance:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious

Not to put too fine a point on the issue, but I think the contemporary American Church, with its Hollywood aesthetic and prosperity gospel, has lost much of that crucial, validating seriousness.

Updike, who died in 2009, would have been 82 this week.

Read on:

  • G.K. Chesterton’s defends his faith from cynics
  • Updike and a host of other thinkers reflect on whether we can simply assume God’s existence
  • Philosopher Alvin Plantinga dissects how evolutionary psychology intersects with Christian docrine

John Updike and Family

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Is a Human Life a Narrative?

26 Wednesday Feb 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Autobiography, Biography, Experience, Experience: A Memoir, Jules Renard, Julian Barnes, Life, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Amis, memoir, Narrative, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Philosophy, Storytelling, Theodor Lessing, Wisdom

Julian Barnes“Perhaps because my professional days are spent considering what is narrative and what isn’t, I resist this line of thought. Lessing described history as putting accidents in order, and a human life strikes me as a reduced version of this: a span of consciousness during which certain things happen, some predictable, others not; where certain patterns repeat themselves, where the operations of chance and what we may as well for the moment call free will interact; where children on the whole grow up to bury their parents, and become parents in their turn; where, if we are lucky, we find someone to love, and with them a way to live, or, if not, a different way to live; where we do our work, take our pleasure, worship our god (or not), and watch history advance by a tiny cog or two. But this does not in my book constitute a narrative. Or, to adjust: it may be a narrative, but it doesn’t feel like one to me.

My mother, whenever exasperated by the non-arrival or malfeasance of some goofy handyman or cack-handed service engineer, would remark that she could ‘write a book’ about her experiences with workmen. So she could have done; and how very dull it would have been. It might have contained anecdotes, scenelets, character portraits, satire, even levity; but this would not add up to narrative. And so it is with our lives: one damn thing after another—a gutter replaced, a washing machine fixed—rather than a story…”

Julian Barnes, writing in his memoir about mortality Nothing to Be Frightened Of.

“Experience is the only thing we share equally, and everyone senses this… I am a novelist, trained to use experience for other ends. Why should I tell the story of my life?

I do it because I feel the same stirrings that everyone else feels. I want to set the record straight… The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctibly trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning; and the same ending … My organisational principles, therefore, derive from an inner urgency, and from the novelist’s addiction to seeing parallels and making connections.”

Martin Amis, in a section from the introductory chapter of his memoir Experience.

Martin Amis

__________

There’s something spurious about the metaphors we use as shorthands for life. Unsolicited advice-givers and glib bumper stickers will tell you life’s a race. It’s a game. A dance. A journey. A beach.

So could life also be a narrative?

As with other such comparisons, this seems to me to be a half-baked utterance of pseudo-philosophy – an indicator not of life’s simplicity or our grand comprehension, but of our simplicity and of life’s fundamental opaqueness. Life is a ______. There have been forests felled to produce libraries to try in vain to fill in this blank; still we want a noun. Barnes hits on le mot juste when he calls this impulse atavistic. It’s the same reason we call God a Father or a Shepard: without these metaphors we are as stupefied as children.

Though as quick fixes for men with metaphysical headaches, these metaphors do serve to obscure as much as clarify. In a stunning utterance scrawled in his journal in 1897, Jules Renard reprimanded himself at the moment of his father’s death. “I do not reproach myself for not having loved him enough,” Renard lamented, “I do reproach myself for not having understood him.” So too I fear will be our assessments as we look back on lives lived as jauntily as if they were dances: enjoyable, sure, but what kind of a party was it?

“I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves” was the response Wittgenstein gave to Renard’s quandary. Easy for a suicidal genius to say, but what about for the rest of us? Implicit in Wittgenstein is the assumption that we are here to discover truth about ourselves and the world before we leave it; after all, apart from the transcendental, what other “why” could we have? But notice Wittgenstein’s initial qualifier. That trepidation is compacted into the paragraphs from Barnes and Amis above, and maybe it’s actually the essential clause. Perhaps, next time you hear someone say “life’s a _____,” the proper response is to shrug and simply repeat that mad Austrian’s first three words.

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The Brilliant, Unread Journal of Jules Renard (Part I)

17 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

A Writer's Notebook, Diary, France, French Literature, French Novelists, Journal, Journals, Jules Renard, Julian Barnes, Life, literature, Musings, Novels, Reflections, W. Somerset Maugham, Wisdom

Jules Renard

No one ever talks about the journal of Jules Renard.

I hadn’t heard of it until I fell upon the work of Julian Barnes, who references it occasionally in his nonfiction. But I was so struck by these crisp, cited epigrams that I decided to pick up a copy of Renard’s journal several months ago — and now, having parsed through them, am sharing some of the highlights with you.

These words are nowhere else on the internet; TheBullyPulpit is the only site on the web with a substantial selection of this text. Yet it is only a fraction of Renard’s entire magisterial work, and I encourage you to pick up your own copy of this very readable, very witty, and very wise tome. Some scholars have made the astounding assertion that Renard’s journals make him unique in the annals of history: he is the only writer whose private jottings supersede in every respect his published work.

To give you some sense of their magnitude, Wikipedia describes his journal as, “a masterpiece of introspection, irony, humor and nostalgia.” W. Somerset Maugham was so moved after reading Renard’s journal that he decided to publish his own collection called A Writer’s Notebook. In the introduction, Maugham pays tribute to Renard’s masterpiece, calling it, “… wonderfully good reading. It is extremely amusing. It is witty and subtle and often wise…”

I think of it as a chronicle of life from a man who brimmed with humor and perspicacity, and grew in wisdom through the patient examination of both nature and human beings.

What follows are my selected highlights from the first half of this collection (1887 to 1899). They should be read in the context of Renard’s life: he was a relatively well-known Parisian novelist as well as a statesman (the governor of his provincial French town), so his musings are not only gratuitous literary witticisms, but utilitarian, applicable, and sage reflections on the lived-life of a common man. I have bolded my personal favorites.

Renard began this journal in 1887, when he was 23. He kept writing it until his sudden death in 1910.

__________

1887

Work thinks; laziness muses.

She has a very mean way of being kind.

I have an almost incessant need of speaking evil of others; but no interest at all in doing evil to them.

It astounds us to come upon other egoists, as though we alone had the right to be selfish, and be filled with eagerness to live

We often wish we could exchange our natural family for a literary one of our choice, in order that we might call the author of a moving page “brother”.

Sometimes everything around me seems so diffuse, so tremulous, so little solid, that I imagine this world to be only the mirage of a world to come: its projection. We seem to be still far from the forest; and even though the great trees already cast their shadow over us, we still have a long journey to make before we walk under their branches.

It is in the heart of the city that one writes the most inspired pages about the country.

1888

A thought written down is dead. It was alive. It lives no longer. It was a flower. Writing it down has made it artificial, that is to say, immutable.

In order to do certain crazy things, it is necessary to behave like a coachman who has let go of the reins and fallen asleep.

1889

A peasant must be twice sure of a fact before he will bet on it.

The scholar generalizes, the artist individualizes.

The blackbird, that minuscule crow.

Men of nature, as they are called, do not spend much time talking about nature.

The ideal of calm exists in a sitting cat.

A simple man, a man who has the courage to have a legible signature.

To have a horror of the bourgeois is bourgeois.

The friendship of a talented man of letters would be a great benefaction. It is a pity that those whose good graces we yearn for are always dead.

I can’t get around this dilemma: I have a horror of troubles, but they whip me up, they make me talented. Peace and well-being, on the contrary, paralyze me. Either be a nobody, or everlastingly plagued. I must make a choice.

I prefer to be plagued. I am stating it.

I’ll be properly annoyed when I am taken at my word.

I read novel upon novel, I stuff myself with them, inflate myself with them, I’m full up to my throat with them, in order that I may be disgusted with their commonplaces, their repetitions, their conventions, their systematic methods of procedure; and that I may do otherwise

This evening, memories are using my brain as a tambourine.

1890

The annoyance of having to pass in front of a bench on which people are sitting. Because, in truth, sitting on a bench places a man at a great advantage. He can look people over, laugh if he pleases, think his thoughts. He knows that the passers-by can do nothing of the kind; they can neither stop, nor look, nor, in their turn, laugh.

Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it.

I have built such beautiful castles that I would be satisfied with their ruin

We are ignorant of The Beyond because this ignorance is the condition sine qua non of our own life. Just as ice cannot know fire except by melting, by vanishing. 

1891

To write in the manner that Rodin sculpts

When someone shows me a drawing, I look at it just long enough to prepare a comment.

Style is to forget all styles.

The critic is a botanist. I am a gardener. 

To seize the fleeing idea by the scruff of the neck and rub its nose on the paper.

I very humbly confess my pride. 

1892

We are all poor fools (of course I am speaking of myself), incapable of being either good or bad for two consecutive hours.

When he looked at himself in a mirror, he was always tempted to wipe the glass.

Oscar Wilde next to me at lunch. He has the oddity of being an Englishman. He gives you a cigarette, but he selects it himself. He does not walk around a table, he moves a table out of the way. His face is kneaded with tiny red worms, and he has long teeth, containing caves. He is enormous, and he carries an enormous can.

In art, never do as others do; in morals, act like everybody else.

At twenty, one thinks profoundly and badly.

There is in my heart something like the reflection of a beautiful dream that I no longer remember.

He is deaf in the left ear: he does not hear on the side of the heart.

The fear of boredom is the only excuse for working.

To be a boy, and to play alone, in full sunlight, in the square of a little town.

He had a fear of working, and was annoyed because he did not work.

He wept cats and dogs.

1893

When he praises anyone, he feels that he is slightly disparaging himself.

The more one reads, the less one imitates.

It is now the fashion, when one has completed someone’s portrait in the blackest of strokes, to add: “But he is very nice.”

To spend one’s life judging oneself is very entertaining, and, on the whole, not very difficult. 

I am moved by nature because, when I look at her, I need not worry about looking stupid.

If the word arse appears in a sentence, even in a sublime sentence, the public will hear only that one word.

And the brook murmurs without pause against the stones that try to prevent it from flowing.

A village where only the trees are capable of emotion.

How to describe the delicate thing that happens when a brilliant insect alights on a flower? Words, with their weight, fall upon the picture like birds of prey.

I am never bored anywhere: being bored is an insult to oneself. 

The clouds, their bellies swollen with rain, crawl over the woods like black spiders.

He has always encumbered himself with unnecessary friendships.

It is, when all is said and done, when faced with the subject of death that we feel most bookish.

The reward of great men is that, long after they have died, one is not quite sure that they are dead.

I don’t care about knowing many things: I want to know the things I care about. 

1894

As sad to watch as someone you love disappearing into the fog.

There are no friends; only moments of friendship.

Life can do without logic; literature cannot.

Thirty years old! Now I am sure that I shall not escape death.

Who will tell, who will paint the strange things I see?

To think is to search for clearings in a wood.

Happy people have no talent.

All day, I was drugged with sadness.

I like rain that lasts all day, and don’t feel that I am really in the country until I am well caked with mud.

We spend our lives talking about this mystery: our life.

Lifting one’s head, one could see up there, between the top branches of the trees, a river of sky flowing.

What does the bird do in a tempest? It does not cling to the branch: it follows the storm.

When I have experienced great difficulty in writing a page, I consider it well written.

Suppose, instead of earning a lot of money in order to live, we should try to live on little money?

1895

The good that one expects does not come to pass, but unexpected good does. There is justice, but he who dispenses it is playful. He is a jovial judge, who laughs at us, plays tricks on us, but who, when all is weighed, never makes a mistake.

There are good writers and great ones. Let us be the good ones.

Toulouse-Lautrec. The oftener you see him, the taller he grows. He ends up by being taller than average.

In literature, the real is distinguishable from the false as fresh flowers are from artificial flowers: by a sort of inimitable scent.

With its purring, the cat accompanies the tick-tock of the clock; it is the only music in the room.

What pleases women most is gross flattery concerning their intelligence.

All our criticism consists of reproaching others with not having the qualities that we believe ourselves to have.

At work in the morning: at first, mist, sometimes impenetrable. And, gradually, clearing. It is like a small sun slowly rising in the brain.

The truly free man is the one who will turn down an invitation to dinner without giving an excuse.

Literature, a queer sort of occupation: the less one produces, the better it must be.

1896

To take notes is to play the scales of literature.

The little light existing in the mystery that surrounds us comes from ourselves: it is a false light. The mystery has never shown us its own.

There is in me a substratum of coarseness that allows me to understand peasants and to enter deeply into their lives.

It is cheating to try to be kind. You must be born kind or never meddle with it.

I am made only to listen to the earth and watch it live.

Put a little moon into what you write.

Incapable of sustained effort, I read here and there, and write here and there. But I do believe that this is the lot of the true artist.

We did not have the same thoughts, but we had thoughts of the same color.

A morning so gray that the birds went back to bed.

There is no paradise on earth, but there are pieces of it. What there is on earth is a broken paradise.

We are never happier than when our jokes have made the maid laugh.

It is in the cafés of small towns that one sees humanity at its most hideous.

1897

I have not renounced ambition. The fire still burns in me—a banked fire, but alive.

A man in love with truth need not be either great or a poet. He is both without trying.

Men like my father respect only those that get rich, and admire only those that die poor.

I am a realist bothered by reality.

Nothing adds to your age like the death of a father. What? So I am now father Renard, and Fantec, from being a grandson, becomes a son.

Half-past one. Death of my father.

One can say of him: “This was only a man, merely a mayor of a poor little village,” and yet speak of his death as though it were the death of Socrates. I do not reproach myself for not having loved him enough. I do reproach myself for not having understood him.

For a while, his death made me feel uprooted.

My father. The next day I had to leave the table in order to go away and weep. It was the first time, in the twenty hours that I had sat by him. Floods of tears came to my eyes; I had not been able to squeeze out one before.

He killed himself, not because he suffered too much, but because he did not want to live otherwise than in good health.

I read what I write as though I were my mortal enemy.

It is in the gentle climate of this woman that I should like to live and die.

1898

Failure is not our only punishment for laziness: there is also the success of others.

I was brought up by a library.

When I give a hundred-franc bill, I give the dirtiest one.

First you love nature. It is only much later that you reach man.

If you want to please women, tell them the things you would not want other men to tell your wife.

Inspiration is perhaps only the joy of writing; it does not precede writing.

Our egoism is so excessive that, in a storm, we believe the thunder to be directed only at us.

Death is comforting: it delivers us from the thought of death.

A stupid faith cannot but displease God.

Let us stay at home: there we are decent. Let us not go out: our defects wait for us at the door, like flies.

There is nothing like a disciple to show us our faults.

I turn home, my heart filled with anguish because I have watched the sun set and heard the birds sing, and because I shall have had so few days on this earth I love, and there are so many dead before me.

One could say of almost all literature that it is too long.

God does not believe in our God.

I always feel like saying to music: “It isn’t true! You lie!”

1899

I feel that someone guides me.

I was born with two wings, one of them broken.

Spiders draw plans of capital cities.

The cat is the life of furniture.

The gentle melancholy of working on Sunday, when the others are loafing.

I am not content with intermittent life: I must have life at each instant.

For a writer who has been working, to read is like getting into a carriage after a toilsome walk.

I am not content with intermittent life: I must have life at each instant.

In an instant, the mind travels over immense dream countries, while the eyes go over reality like tortoises.

At the bottom of all patriotism there is war: that is why I am no patriot.

The air, at midday, burns and hums.

To think is not enough; you must think of something.

Our life seems like a trial run. 

Meadows are meadows, but fields are earth.

Return to Paris. The setting sun is pink like the interior of a seashell.

One should have the courage to prefer the intelligent man to the very nice man.

Style is the habit, the second nature of thought.

Jules Renard

__________

The highlights of Jules Renard’s journal entries, 1887 to 1900.

Be on the lookout for highlights from the second half of his journals, which I’ll hopefully post in the next few weeks.

If you liked these, read more reflections from a variety of thinkers on the quotes page.

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The Great Tragedy Is Not that Men Perish

05 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Age, General Philosophy, Julian Barnes, Life, literature, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Of Human Bondage, The Summing Up, Time, W. Somerset Maugham, Wisdom

Julian Patrick Barnes by Jillian Edelstein

“In my early twenties, I kept a box of green index cards, onto which I copied epigrams, witticisms, scraps of dialogue, and pieces of wisdom worth preserving. Some of them strike me now as the meretricious generalizations that youth endorses (but then they would); though they do include this, from a French source: ‘The advice of the old is like the winter sun: it sheds light but it does not warm us.’ Given that I have reached my advice-giving years, I think this may be profoundly true. And there were also two pieces of wisdom from Somerset Maugham that echoed with me for years, possibly because I kept arguing with them. The first was the claim that ‘Beauty is a bore.’ The second, from chapter 77 of The Summing Up (a green index card informs me), ran: ‘The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.’ I cannot remember my response to this at the time, though I suspect it might have been: Speak for yourself, old man…

A friend who occasionally seeks my ear nicknames me ‘The Advice Center’—a tag which, even allowing for irony, gives me absurd pleasure… But I was too quick to judgement on Somerset Maugham. ‘The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.’ Mine was a young man’s objection: yes, I love this person, and believe it will last, but even if it doesn’t there will be someone else for me, and for her. We shall both love again, and perhaps, schooled by unhappiness, do better next time. But Maugham was not denying this; he was looking beyond it…

I have always mistrusted the idea that old age brings serenity, suspecting that many of the old were just as emotionally tormented as the young, yet socially forbidden to acknowledge it. But what if I was wrong—doubly so—and this required appearance of serenity masked not a roil of feelings but its opposite: indifference? At sixty, I look around at my many friendships, and can recognize that some of them are not so much friendships any more as memories of friendships. (There is still pleasure in memory, but even so.) New friendships come, of course, but not so many as to deflect the fear that some terrible cooling-off—the emotional equivalent of planet death—might lie in wait.”

__________

From chapters 24 and 50 of Julian Barnes’s illuminating book Nothing to Be Frightened Of.

This site is my box of green index cards, although I hope that these posts will be revealed, in future years, to be more than merely meretricious.

Something else from Maugham:

W. Somerset Maugham

Of Human Bondage

Some more from Nothing:

Julian Barnes

It All Adds Up to Happiness… Doesn’t It?

Julian Barnes

Identity is Memory

Julian Barnes

Mere Human Love

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Sehnsucht

12 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

C.S. Lewis, Julian Barnes, language, Levels of Life, loss, Love

Julian Barnes“There are two essential kinds of loneliness: that of not having found someone to love, and that of having been deprived of the one you did love. The first kind is worse. Nothing can compare to the loneliness of the soul in adolescence. I remember my first visit to Paris in 1964; I was eighteen. Each day I did my cultural duty — galleries, museums, churches; I even bought the cheapest seat available at the Opéra Comique (and remember the impossible heat up there, the impossible sightlines, and the impossible-to-comprehend opera). I was lonely in the Métro, on the streets, and in the public parks where I would sit on a bench by myself reading a Sartre novel, which was probably about existential isolation. I was lonely even among those who befriended me. Remembering those weeks now, I realize that I never went upwards — the Eiffel Tower seemed an absurd, and absurdly popular, structure — but I did go down. I visited the Paris sewers, entering from somewhere near the Pont de l’Alma for a guided boat tour; and from the Place Denfert-Rochereau I descended into the catacombs, my candle lighting up the neat banks of femurs and solid cubes of skulls.

There is a German word, Sehnsucht, which has no English equivalent; it means ‘the longing for something’. It has Romantic and mystical connotations; C.S. Lewis defined it as the ‘inconsolable longing’ in the human heart for ‘we know not what’. It seems rather German to be able to specify the unspecifiable. The longing for something — or, in our case, for someone. Sehnsucht describes the first kind of loneliness. But the second kind comes from the opposite condition: the absence of a very specific someone. Not so much loneliness as her-lessness.”

__________

From the new book Levels of Lifeby Julian Barnes.

As any fairly consistent reader of this blog will know, one of the books I’ve enjoyed most recently has been Barnes’s meditation on mortality Nothing to Be Frightened Of. It’s an almost preternaturally honest and self-flagellating look at what death means to someone who doubts both the existence of a personal god and the prospect of an eternal life to come.

Nothing is a darkly philosophical examination of death, bearing all its considerable weight on the cerebellum. (And do your brain a favor by reading it.) But Levels, which Barnes wrote after experiencing the most intimate deprivation of his life, is a story of the heart. The text is part history, part literature, and part memoir — a memoir about the collision between what you know and what you feel when you have been devastated, when your knees have hit the earth, when you have been leveled by life. The final third of the book (that memoir part) is probably the heaviest piece of writing I’ve ever read. Yet its final two pages, and especially its closing thought, are somehow so spiritually resilient, even buoyant, that you’ll turn the final page, glance up, and feel reoriented somewhat positively towards existence.

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