Review: "Where, indeed, is there a better show in the world?"
Whether it's politics and elections or America during Prohibition, Americans are full of joy. In Germany, elections stir you up and worry you. In England elections put you to sleep. "In the United States, the thing is better done. Here it is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance—and stuffed with such gorgeous humor, such extravagant imbecilities, such uproarious farce that one comes to the end of it with one's midriff in tatters. But feeling better for the laugh."
Mencken sums up his view of America: "Let the 100% viewer-with-alarm stay his tears. If this is not joy, then what is?"
Mencken gives issues perspective and you almost always laugh at his point of view, even when you disagree with him.
The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995.
Review: Thoreau’s essay is like his walking—meandering. He wanders from topic to topic offering tidbits on everything. He provides the origin of the word “saunter”—probably apocryphal—but interesting anyhow. His man message is that existence of the wilderness is essential to the survival of civilized man. The wild needs to be a part of nature and of man. “I would not have every man nor every part of man cultivated any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated….”
Ideas:
Quote: “The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing; the poet today, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.”
Quote: “I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the wild.”
Quote: “In short, all good things are wild and free.”
Quote: “I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society.”
Quote: “A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful—while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.”
Quote: “Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the ;present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the ;passing life….”
Quote: “…but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy?”
The end.
The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995.
Review: Thoreau’s essay is like his walking—meandering. He wanders from topic to topic offering tidbits on everything. He provides the origin of the word “saunter”—probably apocryphal—but interesting anyhow. His man message is that existence of the wilderness is essential to the survival of civilized man. The wild needs to be a part of nature and of man. “I would not have every man nor every part of man cultivated any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated….”
Ideas:
Quote: “…sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all wordly engagements….”
Quote: “…the moral insensibility of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, ay, and years almost together.”
Quote: “Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking.”
Quote: “What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.”
Quote: “As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in Paradise was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this country.”
Quote: “…in wildness is the preservation of the world.”
Quote: “I believe in the forest and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.”
Quote: “Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.”
Quote: “Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but inn the impervious and quaking swamps.”
Quote: “Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp.”
To be concluded.
The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995.
Review: Thoreau’s essay is like his walking—meandering. He wanders from topic to topic offering tidbits on everything. He provides the origin of the word “saunter”—probably apocryphal—but interesting anyhow. His main message is that existence of the wilderness is essential to the survival of civilized man. The wild needs to be a part of nature and of man. “I would not have every man nor every part of man cultivated any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated….”
Ideas:
Quote: “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.”
Quote: “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of walking, that is, of taking walks.”
Quote: Evolution of the word “saunter”…. “…from idle people who roved about the country in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going `a la Sainte Terra,’ to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, ‘There goes a Sainte-Terrer,’ ‘A saunterer—a Holy-Lander.’ ”
Quote: “…no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.”
Quote: “…most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom and independence, which are the capital in this profession [of walking].”
To be continued.
The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995.
Review: The author is the product of two cultures, a Muslim father and a Welsh mother. The essayist teaches English at Yale University. The essay on the surface is about all you didn’t want to know about the contents of the food we eat. It begins with a secret ingredient of sweet meats, one of which is testicles. Actually, the subject of the essay is about reminiscences of her mother and her mother’s influence on her growing up.
Comment: This is not one of my favorite essays. It gave me culture shock. RayS.
The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995.
Review: Nigerian playwright is imprisoned and fasts during the Nigerian Civil War (1967 -1969). In this essay he describes the experience and the various psychological impressions he undergoes. His jailers want him to stop fasting but he will not. At one point the “Grand Seer’s” concern “…adds to the growing sense of superhumanithy. I need neither drink nor food. Soon I shall need no air.”
Quote: “What do I do all day? I watch light motes in the air. When eyes are shut a whole universe of colors fills the dome of darkness behind the eyeballs. In extreme fasts the open eye is treated to the same display on a lighter, vaster scale. The air is broken up in swirls of colored dots. Each speck of dust in a sunbeam is a fiery planet in the galaxy, its motion sedately plotted, imbued with immense significance.”
Comment: Reminds of the experience of being on drugs as described by other essayists. RayS.
The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995.
Review: “But no matter where I went, Spanish would be the language of my writing and Latin America the culture of my language.” The essence of this essay is in the quotes.
Quote: “Could I a Mexican who had not yet written his first book, sitting on a bench on an early spring day…have the courage to explore for myself, with my language, with my tradition, with my friends and influences, the region where the literary figure bids us consider it in the uncertainty of its gestation?”
Quote: “The novel is forever traveling Don Quixote’s road….”
Quote: “You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not do die.”
Quote: “This was, finally, a way of ceasing to tell what I understood and trying to tell, behind all the things I knew, the really important things: what I did not know.”
Quote: “I always tried to tell my critics: don’t classify me, read me. I’m a writer, not a genre.”
Quote: “Language is a shared and sharing part of culture that cares little about formal classifications and much about vitality and connection….”
Quote: “There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.”
Quote: “But no matter where I went, Spanish would be the language of my writing and Latin America the culture of my language.”
The end.
The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books. 1995.
