Readings: A Footnote to All-Too-Humanity

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The final editorial footnote to William Empson’s unfinished novel The Royal Beasts: A Fable, has something interesting to say about the human condition. I quote it here in full:

“14. Cf. Empson’s unpublished essay, on Buddhism and Death (1933): ‘the special Buddhist version of a deathwish…is that no sort of temporal life whatever can satisfy the human spirit, and therefore we must work for an existence outside time on whatever terms.’ This concept is not a psychological perversion, Empson goes on to insist, but ‘at the back, I believe, of all the grand examples in the aesthetic of the deathwishes. Shakespeare makes Lear hint at an odd and interesting reflection on this topic when faced with the despair of Glouscester: “Thou must be patient. We came crying hither. Thou knowest, the first time that we smell the air, we waul and cry.” Alone among the young of the mammals the human infant is subject to blind fits of fury at finding itself thrust into the world; it is nasty, he feels, to the point of mysticism, and I suppose Freud could hardly disagree…the desires for absence of stimulus and return to the womb are the obviously Buddhist deathwishes, and are clearly a large element anyway in all but the most primitive religions’ (Empson Papers.)”

In terms of human exceptionalism, this goes along, I guess, with the need to blush…
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Reflections: Travel Tips

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Yesterday I received in the mail some very nice photographs, taken by my good friend, Jim, on a trip he recently took to sub-Saharan Africa. The beauty of two of them especially—a scene of women washing clothes in a stream; and a scene of women carrying sheaves of newly-cut hay through the fields—almost made me envious of his trip. Almost. Not quite.

In my late twenties and early thirties, I had several opportunities to do some serious traveling. I went to Italy first, and saw Florence, Ravenna, Rome. On my next two major excursions abroad, I visited many of the other capitals and major cities of Europe—London, Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, Athens, Cologne, Brussels, and more. The Middle East was a component of one of these trips—Cairo, Jerusalem, Amman.

I have also been across Canada by car, as far east as Montreal, and as far West as Vancouver, British Columbia. I have seen the Great Plains of both Calgary and Kansas. I have traveled through the Canadian Rockies in the breathtakingly beautiful Banff national park, and the American Rockies in the area of Boulder and Denver. I have seen Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills, and I have visited William Randolph Hearst’s castle at San Simeon, overlooking the Pacific.

I wouldn’t give any of that up. The memories are golden. Yet, when I read the following words of William Empson in the introduction to the book The Royal Beasts, I understood precisely what he was getting at. In a letter, written to a friend back in England, as Empson was traveling in the Far East, he wrote:

“Always rather embarrassing to wonder what one gets out of travel to make up for its privations; except that it requires so much imagination to stay at home.”

These sentiments hit me from two different angles; high and low, so to speak. In my traveling days, I found that I had a very low tolerance for those “privations” of travel. While standing in front of the Mona Lisa, or the magnificent cathedral in Cologne, or the pyramid of Cheops; or while riding on horseback through the narrow defile leading into the "lost city" of Petra, I would not have wanted to be anywhere else. Getting there, however, was another story. The struggle with luggage; the chaos of airports and train terminals; the money-changing; the passport presenting, and the stamping of visas; the waiting; the hurrying; the deadlines and the timetables; the decisions about food and lodging; the general hassle of it all always made me very glad to be back home; made me even to dread the outset of the next wonderful journey.

But the more subtle, and more interesting, aspect of Empson’s quote is the part about the amount of imagination required to stay at home. This, I believe, refers to the constant human struggle against boredom and ennui. If we aren’t doing, we don’t feel that we are really being. If we cannot distract ourselves from ourselves by means of travel, or work, or by consuming mass quantities of entertainment—if, in short, we are left alone, with nothing but our own minds for company—that is, with only our imaginations to lend a sense of ontological worth to our time, as it passes—we suffer.

Today, I am content to say, although I am pretty much a stay-at-home, boredom is seldom an issue for me. I am able to traverse that universe inside my skull—without luggage, chaotic airports, or the inevitable bouts with traveler’s diarrhea.

The time may grow long, but that is time for prayer and contemplation. Or time to blog.
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Readings: Second-hand Prose

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Sometimes it is good to read an author not in quest any major theme or system of thought, but only because he writes well and says interesting things. Thus it was that, having been directed by Paula Fredriksen’s footnote to Frank Kermode’s The Genesis of Secrecy, of which I which I posted below, I went back to the stacks for more Kermode.

I came away with a book of articles, the majority of which had been previously published in The London Review of Books, entitled, Pleasing Myself – from Beowulf to Phillip Roth. The two excerpts below are from “Empson the Poet”:

The radical contradiction is between the hope human happiness, for which, at least at certain moments, we feel our selves so wonderfully suited, and the power of the world as it inescapably is to frustrate or even ridicule that feeling. Hence Empson’s endorsement of the Buddhist position that ‘no sort of temporal life whatever can satisfy the human spirit’. Yet Buddhism also takes account of the fact that ‘birth has a human being is an opportunity of inestimable value. He who is so born has at least a chance of hearing the truth and acquiring merit.’

And,

A much quoted remark occurs in Empson’s notes to the poem ‘Bacchus’: ‘life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis’.

Although I’ve never read much, if any, of William Empson’s poetry, he has provided me with food for thought via the medium of Kermode’s journalism.
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