Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Essay: "Going Out for a Walk." Max Beerbohm.



Review: Somebody, when Beerbohm is in the country, always wants him to go for a walk. He always excuses himself by saying he has to write a letter. However, that excuse won’t work if it’s a Sunday. The post does not pick up on Sunday. He doesn’t want to go for a walk. He would rather ride.” The essay concludes with “…I never will go out for a walk.”

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, May 18, 2010

Essay: "On Marriage." Robert Louis Stevenson.



Review: Don’t run away from marriage. Recognize it for what it is. Two imperfect people who can succeed in managing themselves in an imperfect world. Don’t look for the perfect marriage. It doesn’t exist. In a round-about manner, Stevenson arrives at this point.

“…so man the individual is not altogether quit of youth, when he is already old and honored….”

“…the perennial spring of our faculties….”

“There is no hocus-pocus in morality; and even the ‘sanctimonious ceremony’ of marriage leaves the man unchanged.”

“And yet there is probably no other act in a man’s life so hot-headed and foolhardy as this one of marriage.”

“What! You have had one life to manage, and have failed so strangely, and now can see nothing wiser than to conjoin with it the management of someone else?”

“Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support.”

“But there is a vast difference between teaching flight, and showing points of peril that a man may march the more warily.”

“Hope lives on ignorance, open-eyed Faith is built upon a knowledge of our life, of the tyranny of circumstances and the frailty of human resolution. Hope looks for unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes honorable defeat to be a form of victory.”

“In the first, he expects an angel for a wife; in the last, he knows that she is like himself—erring, thoughtless, and untrue….”

“…that hope and love address themselves to a perfection never realized…..”

“And ever, between the failures, there will come glimpses of kind virtues to encourage and console.”

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, May 17, 2010

Essay: "An Apology for Idleness." Robert Louis Stevenson.



Review: “And it is not by any means certain that a man’s business is the most important thing he has to do.” He can instead enjoy life. “Idleness. so-called, which does not consist in doing nothing….”

“Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little about stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none.”

“Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, Kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.”

“But it is not only the person himself who suffers from his busy habits, but his wife and children, his friends and relations…. Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.”

“And yet you see merchants who go and labor themselves into a great fortune and thence into the bankruptcy court.”

“…and fine young men who work themselves into a decline, and are driven off in a hearse….”

“The ends for which they give away their priceless youth, for all they know, may be chimerical or hurtful; the glory and riches they expect may never come, or may find them indifferent; and they and the world they inhabit are so inconsiderable that the mind freezes at the thought.”

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, May 12, 2010

Essay: "The Fight." William Hazlett.



Review: England. Getting to, being there, and coming from the fight. A blow by blow account. A bloody account. “All traces of life, of natural expression were gone from him. His face was like a human skull, a death’s head, spouting blood. The eyes were filled with blood, the nose streamed with blood, the mouth gaped blood.”

A vivid account of a bare-knuckles fight.

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, May 11, 2010

Essay: "On the Pleasure of Hating." William Hazlitt.



Review: A tribute to misanthropy. A litany of reasons for hating human nature. I have quoted only a few of the many  very quotable execrations against humanity that fill this essay. And it begins with not hating oneself enough.

“But so it is, that there is a secret affinity [with], a hankering after, evil in the human mind, and that it takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction.”

“Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; hatred alone is immortal.”

“…a whole town runs to be present at a fire, and the spectator by no means exults to see it extinguished.”

“Men assemble in crowds with eager enthusiasm, to witness a tragedy.”

“Have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do. And chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.”

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, May 10, 2010

Essay: "A Chapter on Ears." Charles Lamb.



Review: He has no ear for music. (So much of Lamb’s writing depends on digressions, sometimes in the form of—to me—archaic references and allusions that I find it difficult to follow his line of thought. In having to stop to try to recall the allusions, many of which I cannot, I forget his train of thought.) But the gist of this essay is that he has no ear for music.

“I even think that sentimentally I am disposed to harmony. But organically, I am incapable of a tune.”

“Scientifically, I could never be made to understand…what a note in music is or how one note should differ from another. Much less in voices can I distinguish a soprano from a tenor.”

“I am constitutionally susceptible to noises.”

“Above all, those insufferable concertos, and pieces of music, as they are called, do plague and embitter my apprehension….”

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, May 5, 2010

Essay: "New Year's Eve." Charles Lamb.



Review: While many people look forward to the new year as a means of escaping the past, the author savors the past. He would stay in the present if he could, for in the future, we are headed toward death.

Quotes:
“I have heard some profess an indifference to life. Such hail the end of their existence as a port of refuge; and speak of the grave as some soft arms in which they may slumber as on a pillow.”

“Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities and jests and irony itself—do these thing go out with life?”

“Some have wooed death—but out upon thee, I say, thou foul, ugly phantom! I detest, abhor, execrate…as in no instance to be excused or tolerated, but shunned as a universal viper; to be branded, proscribed, and spoken evil of! In no way can I be brought to digest thee, thou thin, melancholy privation, or more frightful and confounding positive.”

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, May 4, 2010

Essay: "The Noble Science of Self-justification." Maria Edgeworth (2).



Review: The war of the sexes—if they are married. How to torture your husband. How to destroy the enemy’s [your husband’s] logical, rational arguments—when you are a woman in the 16th or 17th centuries. Sounds very contemporary to me.

Quotes:
“Did not you say so? Don’t you remember? Only answer me that.”

“I know what you were going to say.”

“…like Queen Anne, you will only repeat the same thing over and over again, or be silent. Silence is the ornament of your sex; and in silence, if there is not wisdom, there is safety.”

“Nothing provokes and irascible man, interested in debate, and possessed of an opinion of his own eloquence, so much as to see the attention of his hearers go from him: you will then, when he flatters himself that he has just fixed your eye with his very best argument, suddenly grow absent—your house affairs must call you hence—or you have directions to give to your children—or the room is too hot, or too cold—the windows must be opened—or door shut—or the candle wants snuffing.”

“Remember, all such speech as these will lose above half their effect, if you cannot accompany them with the vacant stare, the insipid smile, the passive aspect of the humbly perverse.”

“Whilst I write, new precepts rush upon my recollection; but the subject is inexhaustible.”

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, May 3, 2010

Essay: "The Noble Science of Self-justification." Maria Edgeworth (1).



Review: The war of the sexes—if they are married. How to torture your husband. How to destroy the enemy’s [your husband’s] logical, rational arguments—when you are a woman in the 16th or 17th centuries. Sounds very contemporary to me.

Quotes:
“…let me teach you the art of defending the wrong.”

“Timid brides, you have, probably, hitherto been addressed as angels. Prepare for the time when you shall again become mortal.”

“Can superior with inferior power contend? No; the spirit of a lion is not to be roused by the teasing of an insect.”

“…he will yield to you in trifles, particularly in trifles which do not militate against his authority.”

“If the point in dispute be some opinion relative to your character or disposition, allow in general, that you are sure you have a great many faults; but to every specific charge reply, well, I am sure I don’t know, but I did not think that was one of my faults! Nobody ever accused me of that before.”

“Begin by preventing, if possible, the specific statement of any position, or, if reduced to it, use the most general terms, and take advantage of the ambiguity which all languages and which most philosophers allow.”

“…if he should grow absolutely angry, you will in the same proportion grow calm and wonder at his rage….”

To be continued.