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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
