Thursday, April 29, 2010

Essay: "The Solitude of the Country." Samuel Johnson.



Review: People often desire to retire to the country for a variety of reasons. It’s all specious. For example, “…though learning may be conferred by solitude, its applications must be attained by general converse.” In other words, although you can gain knowledge by going off to the country to read, you can only use that knowledge in society. The joys of going off to the country to rusticate are pipe dreams.

The Art of the Personal Essay: An anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A division of Random House, Inc. 1995.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Essay: "The Boarding House." Samuel Johnson.


Review: History of people who had occupied the upstairs garret, five flights up, in the boarding house. The first was a tailor; the second a young lady of the night whose reputation was tarnished by too many visits from a cousin in Cheapside; followed by a counterfeiter who had a visit from the constable; and then an author who was the most annoying of all with his outbursts in the dead of night. No more authors, please. Finally, two sisters inherited the garret, and followed each other into their graves.

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Essay: "Love-Letters." Richard Steele.



Review: “Women of spirit are not to be won by mourners”: The theme of this essay on the success of love letters. John Careless is brash. Colonel Constant is –well—constant. Both men die in battle the next day. Asked which she would have chosen if they had survived, she said, “I know I should have chosen Colonel Constant, but I believe I would have chosen John Careless.”

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.

Monday, April 26, 2010

Essay: Twenty-Four Hours in London." Richard Steele.


Essay: “Twenty-Four Hours in London.” Richard Steele.

Review: Narrator went to London just to seek novelty. Met people of different vocations. Hackney coachmen and chimney sweeps on their way to bed and young women who gather in Covent Garden to purchase fruit for their families. Women who ramble from shop to shop without buying anything. From beggars to people on the exchange, the variety of life styles to be found in London is most enjoyable to people who are open to experience—“It’s an inexpressible pleasure to know a little of the world, and be of no character or significance in it.”

Comment: In other words an astute observer. RayS.

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.
 

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Essay: "An Hour or Two Sacred to Sorrow." Richard Steele.



Review: Takes time to reflect on persons with whom he was familiar but who are now deceased. He remembers his mother’s grief when his father died. He remembers the soldiers who bravely died but he  remembers better those who lived and with whom he frolicked. And he remembers the delightful young thing who “…in the same week I saw ... dressed for a ball, and in a shroud.” He is interrupted in his reverie by a gift of wine, so he gathers some friends and they drink into the night.

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Essay: Nicolini and the Lions." Joseph Addison.



Review: Signore Nicolini fights the lions, impersonated by three admirable actors. They are sham fights, of course. There are even people who say that Signor Nicolini and his lions share a pipe together after their fight on stage. Not unlike “what is practiced every day in Westminster Hall, where nothing is more usual than to see a couple of lawyers, who have been tearing each other to pieces in the court, embracing one another as soon as they are out of it.”

The Art of the Personal Essay: An anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A division of Random House, Inc. 1995.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Essay: "Of Greatness." Abraham Cowley.


Review: The person who desires to be great will always strive for a greater degree of greatness and will never be satisfied and tranquil. 

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.
 

Monday, April 19, 2010

Essay: "On Some Verses of Virgil." Michel de Montaigne (3).


Review: The essay is 54 pages long and interspersed with lines from Virgil’s poetry. The whole thing is one continuous digression. He begins with old age, switches to marriage and then the essay becomes a sex manual on just about every aspect of the subject that the reader can imagine, with a three-page digression on writing.

Quotes: [The most prurient discussions from this essay will not be reproduced here. For that, you’ll have to read the essay.]

“For Socrates love is the appetite for generation by the mediation of beauty. And considering often the ridiculous titillation of this pleasure, the absurd, witless and giddy motions with which it stirs up…that reckless frenzy, that face inflamed with fury and cruelty in the sweetest act of love, and then that our delights and our excrements have been lodged together pell-mell, and that the supreme sensual pleasure is attended, like pain, with faintness and moaning….”

“We eat and dine as the animals do, but these are not actions that hinder the operations of our mind.”

“On the one hand nature pushes us on to it, having attached to this desire the most noble, useful, and pleasant of all her operations; and on the other hand, she lets us accuse and shun it as shameless and indecent, blush at it, and recommend abstinence. Are we not brutes to call brutish the operations that make us?”

“May we not say that there is nothing in us during this earthly imprisonment that is purely either corporeal or spiritual, and that we do wrong to tear apart a living man….”

“To conclude this notable commentary, which has escaped from me in a flow of babble….”

“I say that males and females are cast in the same mold; except for education and custom, the difference is not great.”

The Art of the Personal Essay. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Essay: "On Some Verses of Virgil." Michel de Montaigne (2)



Review: The essay is 54 pages long and interspersed with lines from Virgil’s poetry. The whole thing is one continuous digression. He begins with old age, switches to marriage and then the essay becomes a sex manual on just about every aspect of the subject that the reader can imagine, with a three-page digression on writing.

Quotes: [The most prurient discussions from this essay will not be reproduced here. For that, you’ll have to read the essay.]

“What has the sexual act, so natural, so necessary, and so just, done to mankind, for us not to dare talk about it without shame and for us to exclude it from serious and decent conversation?”

“…as in the matter of books, which become all the more marketable and public by being suppressed.”

“A good marriage, if such there be, rejects the company and conditions of love. It tries to reproduce those of friendship.”

“I have seen in my time, in high places, love shamefully and dishonestly cured by marriage.”

“Women are not wrong at all when they reject the rules of life that have been introduced into the world, inasmuch as it is the men who have made these without them.”

“For that law that commands them [women] to abominate us because we adore them and to hate us because we love them is indeed cruel….”

“…a lady who had not been tempted could not boast of her chastity.”

“That man knew what it was all about, it seems to me, who said that a good marriage was one made between a blind wife and a deaf husband.”

To be continued.

The Art of the Personal Essay. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Essay: "On Some Verses of Virgil." Michel de Montaigne (1)



Review: The essay is 54 pages long and interspersed with lines from Virgil’s poetry. The whole thing is one continuous digression. He begins with old age, switches to marriage and then the essay becomes a sex manual on just about every aspect of the subject that the reader can imagine, with a three-page digression on writing.

Quotes: [The most prurient discussions from this essay will not be reproduced here. For that, you’ll have to read the essay.]

“Once I used to mark the burdensome and gloomy days as extraordinary. These are now my ordinary ones; the extraordinary are the fine, serene ones.”

“…so easily is my habit of body beginning to apply itself to illness.”

“Our masters are wrong in that, seeking the causes of extraordinary flights of our soul, they have attributed some to a divine ecstasy, to love, to warlike fierceness, to poetry, to wine, but have not assigned a proper share to health….”

“I hate a surly and gloomy spirit that slides over the pleasures of life and seizes and feeds upon its misfortunes….”

“I am annoyed that my essays serve the ladies only as a public article of furniture, and article for the parlor.”

To be continued.

The Art of the Personal Essay. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Essay: "Of a Monstrous Child." Michel de Montaigne.



Review: The “monster child” is a child, fourteen months, who cannot chew, can only suck, and is joined at the hip by another body without a head. Montaigne tries to assure the reader that if we are amazed at the apparition, God is not. Whatever comes in nature is natural in the eyes of God. And the same should be true of us.

Quotes:
“What we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity of his work the infinity of forms that he has comprised in it…. From his infinite wisdom there proceeds nothing but that is good and ordinary and regular; but we do not see its arrangements and relationship.”

“We call contrary to nature what happens contrary to custom; nothing is anything but according to nature, whatever it may be. Let this universal and natural reason drive out of us the error and astonishment that novelty brings us.”

The Art of the Personal Essay. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Essay: "Of Books." Michel de Montaigne



Review: Montaigne is a critic of the books he reads, writing judgments of individual authors and their books after he has read them. Much of the essay is taken up with his judgments of individual books and authors. But he also discusses how he reads.

Quotes:
“…I try to give knowledge not of things, but of myself.”

“And if I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retentiveness.”

“I seek in books only to give myself pleasure by honest amusement; or if I study, I seek only the learning that treats of the knowledge of myself and instructs me in how to die well and live well.”

“If I encounter difficulties in reading, I do not gnaw my nails over them; I leave them there, after making one or two attacks on them…. What I do not see at the first attack, I see less by persisting.”

“If this book wearies me, I take up another; and I apply myself to it only at the moments when the boredom of doing nothing begins to grip me.”

“Most of Aesop’s Fables have many meanings and interpretations.”

“I want a man to begin with the conclusion.”

“In general, I ask for books that make use of learning, not those that build it up.”

“To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as … unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before and scribbled over with my notes, I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book (I mean of those that I intend to use only once) the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it.”

The Art of the Personal Essay. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Essay: "Pleasure Boat Studio." Ou-Yang Hsiu.



Review: He has furnished his government office as if it were a boat and describes the trials he has encountered in his travels by boat. “…when I was unlucky enough to encounter sudden storms or rough waters, many times I cried aloud to the gods to spare my brief life.” January 25, 1043. China.

The Art of the Personal Essay. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

"Essays in Idleness." Kenko (1283-1350).


One-minute review: Musings, meditations. “…fragments ranging from a line to several pages.” A “random mode of composition.” Sometimes uses “subtle links” to join the compositions. Kenko had a function in the court and then became a Buddhist monk after the Emperor died. He celebrated the idea of the “beauty of impermanence.”

Some of his musings are interesting: “The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.” ………. “Nothing leads a man astray so easily as sexual desire.” ………. “A man’s character, as a rule, may be known from the place where he lives.” ………. “In all things, I yearn for the past. Modern fashions seem to keep on growing more and more debased.” ………. “In all things, it is the beginnings and ends that are most interesting.” ………. “The man of breeding never appears to abandon himself completely to his pleasures; even his manner of enjoyment is detached.” ………. “It does not matter how young or how strong you may be, the hour of death comes sooner than you expect.” ………. “Death is like that. The soldier who goes to war, knowing how close he is to death, forgets his family and even forgets himself.” ………. “When you confront death, no matter where it may be, it is the same as charging into battle.”

The Art of the Personal Essay. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Essay: "Hateful Things." Sei Shonagon.



One-minute review: Court lady in tenth-century Japan who kept a journal recording her likes, dislikes and events around her. She likes to make lists.

The contemporary reader will find many of her “hateful things” familiar: men in their cups who shout; to envy others and complain about one’s own lot; the habits of elderly people; a crying baby interrupts her story; snoring men; mosquitoes; annoying noises; people who interrupt her story with a minor detail; a lover who talks about a former lover; dogs who won’t stop barking; people who try to use elegant language and look ridiculous.

She leaves us with one useful thought: “One’s attachment to a man depends largely on the elegance of his leave-taking.”

The Art of the Personal Essay. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.

Monday, April 5, 2010

Essay: "Consolation to His Wife." Plutarch.



One-minute review: On the death of their little daughter. “Above all, my dear, help us both preserve our customary composure in this affliction.

Quotes:
“But the dreadful thing which does so much mischief in these cases I need have no fear of—I mean the visits of silly women and their cries and the continuing lamentations by which they fan and whet grief and prevent it from abating….”

“Endeavor often to transpose yourself in imagination to the period when our child was not yet born, and yet we had no cause to reproach Fortune; And then consider that our present state is a continuation of that former period….”

“But the soul which remains in the body but a short span and is then liberated quickly recovers its natural form, for the constraint [the body] which was put upon it was but mild and gentle.”

“The soul is incorruptible and you  must imagine that its experience is like that of a caged bird.”

“It [the soul] is made to pass the gates of death as quickly as possible, before it conceives too great a love for the things of this world….”

The Art of the Personal Essay. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Essay: "Asthma." Seneca.


“Asthma.” Seneca.

One-minute review: The experience of difficulty in breathing is like “rehearsing death.” But so what? We were dead before we were born and we will be dead after we live. So what?

Quotes:
“..with anything else [other ailments] you’re merely ill, while with this [asthma] you’re constantly at your last gasp.”

“Even as I fought for breath, though, I never ceased to find comfort in cheerful and courageous reflections.”

“…when in fact it [death] precedes as well as succeeds.”

“The man, though, whom you should admire and imitate is the one who finds it a joy to live and in spite of that is not reluctant to die. For where’s the virtue in going out when you’re really being thrown out.”

The Art of the Personal Essay. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. A Division of Random House, Inc. 1995.