Friday, January 29, 2010

Essay: "Speed." Max Beerbohm

Ten-second review: Reflections on the thrill of speed, whether mental speed or machine speed as in a car. Speed causes many emotions, and we all know that we should slow down, even if slowing down results in even more accidents. But don’t forget: all of us are, every day we are on earth, traveling at 1,110 miles a minute on the earth as it spins in the universe.


Ideas:

“…in a world that has succumbed so meekly to the idea of speed—speed everywhere and at all times, produced by means of machinery and regarded as an end in itself.”


“Nor do I dispute the proposition that speed in itself is no danger. A cannon ball fired from a cannon is not itself dangerous. It is dangerous only if you happen to be in the way of it.”


“But here is heartening fact for you. We are all of us traveling at a tremendous rate, and we shall always continue to do so. We shall not, it is true, be able to get rid of our speed limit. But it is a very liberal one: 1,110 miles a minute….”


“Our planet is not truly progressing, of course: it is back at its starting-point every year. But it never for an instant pauses in its passage through space. Nor will it do so even when, some billions of years hence, it shall have become too cold for us human beings: to exist upon its surface. It will still be proceeding at its present pace: 1,110 miles a minute.” [If we have not blown it out of the universe. RayS.]


Great Essays. Ed. Houston Peterson. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc. 1960.

What is an essay? “They are all prefaces. A preface is nothing but a talk with the reader; and they [essays] do nothing else.” Charles Lamb.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Essay: "Eight Days--From an Almanac for Moderns."

Donald Culross Peattie.


One-minute review: A meditation on living things and the wonder of life, from bacteria to people. Compares the simple bacterium to an inanimate object like a carbon atom: “The gulf between a bacterium and a carbon atom, even with all the latter’s complexity, is greater than that between bacteria and men.” This essay causes readers to look more carefully at the life around them.


Ideas:

“…when mankind has quite thoroughly shattered and eaten and debauched himself with his own follies, that voice [of the croaking frog] may still be ringing out in the marshes….”


“No picture of life today is ever worth a glance that does not show the bacteria as the foundation of life itself, the broad base of the pyramid on which all the rest is erected.”


“As the fire glances from the burning log around the room it falls upon the faces of the people seated round the hearth with you What do you really know of them, your own children, and the wife who bore them to you? All are locked mysteriously away in their individuality.”


“…in the end the most absolute answers concerning every problem of matter, energy, time and life, will be found to be philosophical.”


Great Essays. Ed. Houston Peterson. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc. 1960.

What is an essay? “They are all prefaces. A preface is nothing but a talk with the reader; and they [essays] do nothing else.” Charles Lamb.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Essay: "How Should One Read a Book?" Virginia Woolf.

10-second review: No one can tell you how to read a book. With that in mind, Woolf makes some suggestions. She sees reading books in two parts: the first is to receive impressions with the utmost understanding. The second part is to compare books.


Ideas:

“Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices.”


“But we tire of rubbish-reading in the long run. We tire of searching for what is needed to complete the half-truth….”


“The poet is always our contemporary.”


“…we learn through feeling….”


“Are there not some pursuits that we practice because they are good in themselves…?”


And this final idea, one often quoted: “I have sometimes dreamt…that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards—their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble—the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, ‘Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.’ ”


Great Essays. Ed. Houston Peterson. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc. 1960.

What is an essay? “They are all prefaces. A preface is nothing but a talk with the reader; and they [essays] do nothing else.” Charles Lamb.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Essay: "Accidie." Aldous Huxley.

10-second review: There exists today, in the modern world (1927), a spirit of boredom, black depths of despair and hopeless unbelief. Why? Disillusionment. And rapid change. Industrial society. It paralyzes human will, a universal futility.


Idea:

“Other epochs have witnessed disasters, have had to suffer disillusionment, but in no century have the disillusionments followed on one another’s heels with such unintermitted rapidity as in nineteenth and twentieth, for the good reason that in no centuries has change been so rapid and so profound. The mal du siĆ©cle was an inevitable evil.”


Great Essays. Ed. Houston Peterson. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc. 1960.

What is an essay? “They are all prefaces. A preface is nothing but a talk with the reader; and they [essays] do nothing else.” Charles Lamb.

Monday, January 25, 2010

Essay: "The Sahara of the Bozart." H.L. Mencken

10-second review: The Post-Civil-War South represents “a drying up of a civilization,” an intellectual desert.


Ideas:

Of the state of Virginia: “It is years since an idea has come out of it.”


“As for the cause of this unanimous torpor and doltishness, this curious and almost pathological estrangement from everything that makes for a civilized culture…the South has simply been drained of all its best blood. The vast blood-letting of the Civil War has exterminated and wholly paralyzed the old aristocracy, and so left the land to the harsh mercies of the poor white trash.”


“Free inquiry is blocked by the idiotic certainties of ignorant men.”


“The philistinism of the new type of town-boomer Southerner is not only indifferent to the ideals of the Old South; it is positively antagonistic to them.”


Great Essays. Ed. Houston Peterson. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc. 1960.

What is an essay? “They are all prefaces. A preface is nothing but a talk with the reader; and they [essays] do nothing else.” Charles Lamb.

Friday, January 22, 2010

Essay: "Tipperary." George Santayana.

One-minute review: The First World War is over. The world breathes a sigh of relief. But Santayana warns that “they are hardly out of the fog of war when they are lost in the fog of peace.” Living is a continuing state of war. Life demands victory. If not on the battlefield, then in the war of love. “Only the dead are safe; only the dead have seen the end of war.”


Ideas:

“…the very sunlight and brisk autumnal air seemed to have heard the tidings, and to invite the world to begin to live again at ease. Certainly many a sad figure and many a broken soul must slink henceforth on crutches, a mere survival; but they, too, will die off gradually. The grass soon grows over a grave.”


“Their soldiering is over; they remember, with a strange, proud grief, their comrades who died to make this day possible, hardly believing that it would ever come. They are overjoyed, yet half ashamed, to be safe themselves; they forget their wounds; they see a green vista before them, a jolly, busy, sporting, loving life in the old familiar places. Everything will go on, they fancy, as if nothing had happened.”


“God—I mean the sum of all possible good—is immutable; to make our peace with him, it is we, not he, that must change.”


“It is the stupid obstinacy of our self-love that produces tragedy, and makes us angry with the world.”


“War is but resisted change; and change must needs be resisted so long as the organism it would destroy retains any vitality.”


“Certainly war is hell, as you, my fair friends, are fond of repeating; but so is rebellion against war. To live well, you must be victorious. It is with war as with the passion of love, which is a war of another kind.”


Great Essays. Ed. Houston Peterson. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc. 1960.

What is an essay? “They are all prefaces. A preface is nothing but a talk with the reader; and they [essays] do nothing else.” Charles Lamb.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Essay: "Confessions of a Gallomaniac." Frank Moore Colby

One-minute review: When the French attempt to speak English, they cannot master the idioms or avoid the malaprops and if they try to speak it, the result is a collection of sentences that make very little sense. They insist on using the literal dictionary definition of words. The same is true of Americans who try to speak French. Give it up.


Ideas:

“Her method of instruction, if it was one, was that of jealous, relentless, unbridled soliloquy.”


A conversation in English between a Frenchman and an American: “It calls to walk.” “It is good morning…better than I had extended.” “I was at you yesterday ze morning, but I deed not find.” “I was obliged to leap early…and I was busy standing up straight—all around the forenoon.” You get the idea.


“French people hate broken French worse than most of us hate broken English.”


“A word is not a definite thing susceptible of dictionary explanation. It is a cluster of associations….”


Great Essays. Ed. Houston Peterson. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc. 1960.

What is an essay? “They are all prefaces. A preface is nothing but a talk with the reader; and they [essays] do nothing else.” Charles Lamb.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Essay:: "The Moral Obligation To Be Intelligent." John Erskine.

One-minute review: Intelligence has been criticized as merely being clever or evil. However, Erskine says that intelligence leads to vision.


Ideas:

“Here is the causal assumption that a choice must be made between goodness and intelligence.”


“…but to establish the point that English literature voices a traditional distrust of the mind we must go to the masters. In Shakespeare’s plays there are some highly intelligent men, but they are either villains or tragic victims.”


In Paradise Lost Milton attributes intelligence of the highest order to the devil.”


“It is disconcerting to intelligence that it should be God’s angel who cautions Adam not to wander the earth, nor inquire concerning heaven’s causes and ends, but that it should be Satan meanwhile who questions and explores.”


“Those of us who frankly prefer character to intelligence….”


“…Matthew Arnold’s famous plea for culture. The purpose of culture, he said, is ‘to make reason and the will of God prevail.’ ”


“So we forget the shocking blunder of the charge of the Light Brigade, and proudly sing the heroism of the victims…. The reading of stupidity in terms of the tragic courage that endures its results….”


“…we curse the obstacles of life as though they were devils. But they are not devils. They are obstacles.”


“Yet, if intelligence begins in a pang, it proceeds to a vision.”


“But all that intelligence has accomplished dwindles in comparison with the vision it suggests and warrants.”


Great Essays. Ed. Houston Peterson. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc. 1960.

What is an essay? “They are all prefaces. A preface is nothing but a talk with the reader; and they [essays] do nothing else.” Charles Lamb.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Essay: "A Defence of Nonsense." GK Chesterton.

Essay: “A Defence of Nonsense.” GK Chesterton.


One-minute review: Nonsense and faith. In neither is there total reason. In both there is wonder. Faith is something too big for our senses. Nonsense is a new way of looking—a different way of looking at a commonplace.


Quotes:

“There are two equal and eternal ways of looking at this twilight world of ours: we may see it as the twilight of evening or the twilight of morning; we may think of anything, down to a fallen acorn, as a descendant or as an ancestor.”


“…the idea that lies at the back of nonsense—the idea of escape, of escape into a world where things are not fixed…in an eternal appropriateness, where apples grow on pear trees and any odd man you meet may have three legs.”


“Every great literature has always been allegorical—allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, the Odyssey because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle.”


“…the world must not only be tragic, romantic, and religious, it must be nonsensical also.”


“Religion has for centuries been trying to make men exult in the ‘wonder’ of creation, but it has forgotten that a thing cannot be completely wonderful so long as it remains sensible.”


“…the Book of Job…is not…of the ordered beneficence of the creation; but, on the contrary, a picture of the huge and undecipherable unreason of it.”


“The well-meaning person who, by merely studying the logical side of things, has decided that ‘faith is nonsense,’ does not know how truly he speaks; later it may come back to him in the form that nonsense is faith.”


Great Essays. Ed. Houston Peterson. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc. 1960.

What is an essay? “They are all prefaces. A preface is nothing but a talk with the reader; and they [essays] do nothing else.” Charles Lamb.

Friday, January 15, 2010

Essay: "On Running After One's Hat." GK Chesterton.

One-minute review: Battersea, his home in London, has been flooded. But what seems to be a disaster to some is a romantic adventure to others. True also for running after one’s hat. Don’t be irritated by little bothers and discomforts, inconveniences. Turn them into adventures.


Quotes:

“There is an idea that it is humiliating to run after one’s hat, and when people say it is humiliating they mean that it is comic. It certainly is comic, but man is a very comic creature, and most of the things he does are comic—eating, for instance. And the most comic things of all are exactly the things that are most worth doing—such as making love. A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a wife.”


“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”


Great Essays. Ed. Houston Peterson. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc. 1960.

What is an essay? “They are all prefaces. A preface is nothing but a talk with the reader; and they [essays] do nothing else.” Charles Lamb.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Essay: "The Energies of Men." William James

One-minute review: How do individuals tap into their energies? What gives us a “second wind”? “Either some unusual stimulus fills them with emotional excitement, or some unusual idea…induces them to make an extra effort of will. Excitements, ideas and efforts, in a word are what carry us over the dam.” “The stimuli of those who successfully respond and undergo the transformation here, are duty, the example of others, and crowd-pressure and contagion.”


Ideas:

“Writing is higher than walking, thinking is higher than writing, deciding higher than thinking, deciding ‘no’ higher than deciding ‘yes’….”


“Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days.”


“…the human individual… possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum.”


“Despair lames most people, but it wakes others fully up.”


“The normal opener of deeper and deeper levels of energy is the will.”


“In general, whether a given idea shall be a live idea depends more on the person into whose mind it is injected than on the idea itself.”


“ ‘Fatherland,’ ‘the Flag,’ ‘the Union,’ ‘Holy Church,’ … ‘Truth,’ ‘Science,’ ‘Liberty’ … are so many examples of energy-releasing ideas.”


“Conscience makes cowards of us all.”


Great Essays. Ed. Houston Peterson. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc. 1960.

What is an essay? “They are all prefaces. A preface is nothing but a talk with the reader; and they [essays] do nothing else.” Charles Lamb.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Essay: "Landfalls and Departures." Joseph Conrad.

One-minute review: The effects of landfalls and departures on the commander of a ship. The ultimate landfall and departure come together at the moment of death.


Ideas:

“Some commanders of ships take their departure from the home coast sadly, in the spirit of grief and discontent. They have a wife, children perhaps, some affection at any rate…that must be left behind for a year or more.”


“…no sailor is really good-tempered during the first few days of a voyage. There are regrets, memories, the instinctive longing for the departed idleness, the instinctive hate of all work. Besides, things have a knack of going wrong at the start, especially in the matter if irritating trifles. And there is the abiding thought of a whole year of more or less hard life before one….”


“It is a great doctor for sore hearts, too, your ship’s routine, which I have seen soothe—at least for a time—the most turbulent of spirits.”


“Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks and months fall away quicker into the past.”


“If you happen to be in want of employment, remember that as long as I have a ship you have a ship too.”


“…the quiet, watchful care of the elderly, gentle woman who had borne him five children, and had not, perhaps, lived with him more than five full years out of the thirty or so of their married life.”


“…for in that voyage from which no man returns landfall and departure are instantaneous, merging together into one moment of supreme and final attention.”


Great Essays. Ed. Houston Peterson. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc. 1960.

What is an essay? “They are all prefaces. A preface is nothing but a talk with the reader; and they [essays] do nothing else.” Charles Lamb.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Essay: "Valedictory." George Bernard Shaw.

One-minute review: Apparently on his death bed, Shaw rebukes the rest of the world “…and a stupid public” for failing to appreciate what he has done for the theater. It is true he has been admired for doing clever things by the English who “…do not know what to think until they are coached, laboriously and insistently for years, in the proper and becoming opinion.” His reputation is “built up fast and solid, like Shakespeare’s, on an impregnable basis of dogmatic reiteration.” “I am off duty forever, and am going to sleep.”


Great Essays. Ed. Houston Peterson. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc. 1960.

What is an essay? “They are all prefaces. A preface is nothing but a talk with the reader; and they [essays] do nothing else.” Charles Lamb.

Monday, January 11, 2010

"Better than Shakespeare." George Bernard Shaw.

“Better than Shakespeare.” George Bernard Shaw.


One-minute review: Compares Shakespeare to John Bunyan (The Pilgrim’s Progress), and Bunyan comes out the winner because he believed in life and danger and fighting until he reached the Celestial City. Shakespeare believed in nothing. In his thirty-six plays there are no heroes—except one—Falstaff who believed in life. Shakespeare’s characters are “futile pessimists.”


Ideas:

“Only one man in them all [Shakespeare’s plays] who believes in life, enjoys life, thinks life worth living, and has a sincere, unrhetorical tear dropped over his deathbed and that man—Falstaff.”


“…futile pessimists who imagine they are confronting a barren and unmeaning world when they are only contemplating their own worthlessness, self-seekers of all kinds….”


“All that you miss in Shakespeare you find in Bunyan….”


John Bunyan’s Pilgrim: “My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get them.”


“Here is how Bunyan does it: ‘I fought till my sword did cleave to my hand; and when they were joined together as if the sword grew out of my arm; and when the blood ran through my fingers, then I fought with most courage.’ ”


Great Essays. Ed. Houston Peterson. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc. 1960.

What is an essay? “They are all prefaces. A preface is nothing but a talk with the reader; and they [essays] do nothing else.” Charles Lamb.

Friday, January 8, 2010

Essay: "Mrs Johnson." Alice Meynell.

One-minute review: A tribute to Dr. Samuel Johnson’s wife, the often ridiculed “Tetty,” his pet name for her. She has become a caricature because of Dr. Johnson’s awkward love-making, overheard by his students. But he loved her for twenty years and was “solitary” for the thirty-two years he lived after she was gone. She was his only friend.


Ideas:

“ ‘The lover,’ says Macaulay, ‘continued to be under the illusions of the wedding day till the lady died.’ ”


“I have called her his only friend. So indeed she was, though he had followers, disciples, rivals, competitors, and companions, many degrees of admirers, a biographer, a patron and a public.”


“He was ‘solitary’ from the day she died.”


“But her epitaph, that does not name her, is in the greatest of English prose…. ‘I am indifferent… I am known… I am solitary, and cannot impart it.’ ”


Great Essays. Ed. Houston Peterson. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc. 1960.

What is an essay? “They are all prefaces. A preface is nothing but a talk with the reader; and they [essays] do nothing else.” Charles Lamb.