~by David Aiken~
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| By Leighton 1847 |
Right at the outset of
one of his essays (literally on page 1 of the Parerga und Paralipomena), Schopenhauer makes a distinction between
two types of philosophy: 1) that which is taught as a heave-to discipline in
the University, which is the handmaiden of the State and subject to its
interests and influences; and then 2) the type of philosophy that stands ready
to cast off “full steam ahead” in the service of Nature and Humanity,
philosophy as the “unhindered quest for truth.” We are meant to conclude, of
course, that folks like the then very-popular young Hegel are the university teachers-of-philosophy (the Kathederphilosophen), academic
philosophers who are maintained in an intellectually upright position by their
state-financed pulpit or lectern, who are duty-bound (career oblige!) to service a State-sanctioned vision in and of
philosophy, which will fairly reliably represent the intellectual statu quo or unilluminated mediocrity of
thought. Nietzsche might have called this a glorification and codification of
the herd Instinct, rather than Thought! So, Kathederphilosophen
are really quite distinct animals from those philosophers, presumably like Schopenhauer himself, who “do” the
true questing and journeying work of philosophy.
In many ways
universities remain true to the spirit of Schopenhauer’s rather grumpy tendency
to make Disobliging Distinctions; and while I am in fact absolutely sympathetic
with this particular D-D with respect to philosophy, this month’s reflection is
actually about a different application of the D-Distinction—the one that
Departments of Languages and Literatures have so often made among types of
literature. First there is Academic Literature, all the wonderful stuff that
has been hallowed, originally by the 17th century’s Battle of the Books in England, then by
the 20th century’s “canon wars.” Then there is
All-the-other-stuff that is thought unworthy of ivory-tower classrooms.
The D-Distinction between Reading and Merely Reading
can already be anticipated by looking at the types of authors one used to read
at American universities. According to an updated 2000 survey (pdf here) by the National
Association of Scholars, there was a time when English classes would spend
their semesters pouring over many of the inhabitants of Encyclopedia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World reading the famously and
classically dead (the notably notable “dead white European male” society!)—immortal
names like Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope, and T.S. Eliot
could be readily heard echoing sanctimoniously in the corridors of Academe. A few
scant decades after the original 1964 survey, and many of the immortals have
bitten the academic dust; for while one could still occasionally catch the
dulcet tones of Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer lingering like an afterthought
in the air, Other Sounds as well, New Sounds, were “unleashed upon ‘the learned
world’” (as Harold Bloom writes in The Western Canon), distinctly less mellifluous echoes, less illustrious, less classical,
and profoundly less masculine: Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Alice
Walker, Toni Morrison.
It is a truism of
literature in general (both academic + airport reading combined) that we are
hooked on a book when the action of the story seduces us into exchanging our here-and-now version of reality (e.g., I
am waiting at the airport….) for the fast-paced activity of Storybook (e.g., I
am being hounded by the bad guys across roofs and through the back gardens of
innocent and unaware citizens whom I am trying to save from horrible destruction
at the hands of some Jabberwocky, and the inevitable clock is ticking in the
background…). Similarly, we can become hooked when we see ourselves,
some(mysteriously)how, reflected back to us in the eyes of Storybook
in-dwellers.
To
the degree that either of these intuitions is accurate about our adventures in
Reading and Merely Reading, I would argue that the academic Disobliging
Distinction between them is fundamentally irrelevant, and therefore no better
than bluster, swagger, and general, all-‘round censoriousness—because we have
become involved in, transformed, and transported by the Literature of our
Lives. We are Kidnapped.
Extended sojourns in Academe’s hallowed halls permit
one to listen, sometimes attentively, to all
of the above “dulcet tones” of the world’s authors, some truly great, some
less, liking some more than others. These experiences allow each one of us to
put ourselves personally into all the visions and adventures of the various worlds
that have unfolded before us through the hidden passages of their pages. And I
have to admit that I still get caught up by a good Hero’s Tale – from Hektor to
Reacher by way of Luigi Natoli’s Sicilian hero,
Blasco da Castiglione—for me every hero is a good hero. So, whether in the
Reading world of the Academy or the Merely Reading world of everyone else, the
Heroic Story is the secret passage at the back of the wardrobe for me to pass
from my here-and-now into the not-here-and-not-now of Narnia, which can become my here-and-now if I choose
to make it so.
We seldom if ever read O’Henry in our hallowed halls
of higher learning. Yet O’Henry created some of the most significant
collaborators of my life, teachers all, who continue to show me how my life can
be if I choose to make it so. In a
story called The Last Leaf, O’Henry
introduces us to a proud, but humble old immigrant painter, Behrman, who,
believing he will never create a work of art that people will buy thereby
making him rich and famous, yet creates one single work of life-giving art, but
which goes (almost) unnoticed—(because you and I notice!). This unsung and
lowly artist-hero created a single painted ivy-leaf clinging to an alleyway
wall in the face of winter’s onslaught, a willful leaf that saved the life of a
young woman, lying in bed behind the opposite window, whose despair was driving
her into death’s arms. The old artist died that night from the cold; but the
young woman took heart in the morning and lived… she decided that if one single
ivy leaf could resist winter’s icy fingers plucking it to its doom, then she
could also resist death as well. In The
Gift of the Magi the same O’Henry shows us how the Spirit of Christmas can
be real in our lives as a Love Story – that we can each sacrifice our “pearl of
great worth” for the Beloved, and, in the Love Story, it would go without
saying that the Beloved would sacrifice her “pearl of great worth” for her Lover.
O’Henry’s story makes us value and want to experience this Love; so, like the
story’s hero we make this type of love the Adventure of our life.
Tarzan
was perhaps the earliest of my heroes. I so much preferred the Tarzan of Edgar Rice Burroughs to the
Weismuller-esque Tarzans of cinema. Instead of Hollywood’s pseudo-buffed strongman
swimmer, Me-Tarzan-You-Jane type of monosyllabic troglodyte, Burroughs gave me
the vision of a polyglot and exquisitely educated Tarzan-Lord Greystoke whose
first language was that of the Great Apes, and whose first man-language was
French (albeit of a Belgian sort, bien sûr!). It was Lord Greystoke, the
English aristocrat reared in the wilds of “darkest Africa,” who rose up through
battle with his peers to be the white King of the Mangani, the tribe of Great
Apes, and who later, in his persona of
Lord Greystoke, would bring to the world of human injustices in the cities of
Europe, the savage justice of the animals, the justice of the strong individual
committed decisively to right action, in which context his “tribe” would remain
whole and secure.
It
was James Fennimore Cooper who introduced me to
Deerslayer, the hero of his Leather-Stocking Tales. This was the natural man
who could have been the model for Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, a white man in the
savage world of the early American frontier, who uses all of his natural gifts,
those inherited from his “whiteness” as well as those learned from his long
frequentation of the native wild-places and their inhabitants, to become the
exceptional man in both environs.
Another
of my heroes is Mozart’s Papageno, the sidekick-to-the-hero of Die Zauberflöte. I think, though, that
Papageno is important to me for different reasons; he is more a type or
model-of-man that I have chosen to carry around with me so that I remember what
has become important in this modern world of ours. But let me be painfully
realistic about this particular hero-model: Classism continues to exist in
these supposedly class-free democracies of ours; and my experiences have taught
me that I am a class hybrid. I do not fully belong, either by birth or by
sentiment, to the privileged (moneyed) classes or to the normal working
classes. Were I to have been alive during the French Revolution and the Terror,
I would have been guillotined—that is clear to me; for even though the
principle occupants of my porte-monnaie are nearly always only dust-bunnies, my
education places me socially in a privileged (albeit not moneyed) class, in an
inter-class ni chèvre, ni chou. I
experienced this in-betweenness throughout my adult working life, before the
Academy, because most of the jobs that sustained me during my education were of
the laboring sort. I did not mind the labor then and I still do not; but those
laboring around me and at my side were often made uncomfortable by me because it seemed apparent to them that my life was not exactly
like theirs. My education was changing the very nature of my social reality;
following in the footsteps of Odysseus, the in-between course on the map of my
life was already being charted, and was leading me to very different
destinations, both short-term and long-term, from my companions.
So
Papageno sings to me the joy of the authentic common man, which is a testimony
to Mozart’s genius. In a high-minded society whose courtly values and
expressions were dominated by Verdi and Italian opera, with the creation of
this Bird-Man character Mozart seemed to have understood how, and then dared,
to translate the heart of a normal, socially powerless “simple man” into a
language and for an audience that would only ever attend the Volksoper, whose joy was to share in the
life and miseries of a bawling and grousing, but faithful and good hearted
volks-hero-sidekick whose highest lament, in the German language of the people,
is his lost-love (lyrics in German and
English here; YouTube aria here). Mozart’s creation
of this type of hero is significant, in part, because it anticipates the “rise
of the masses,” which defines in many ways the 19th century. This is also most
certainly why romantic lyrics, such as those of the famous Donizetti aria, Una Furtiva Lagrima, [Pavarotti], from his operatic
melodrama, L'elisir d'amore, [1830s] continue to move us all, of all classes—because they validate
our individual experience of the
post-19th century world, and especially of that experience we all most seek
out—Love.
I
read Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus & Goldmund for the first
of many times when I was an undergraduate student of religion, only to realize
that, in very fundamental ways that I could not remedy in myself, I was both Narcissus and Goldmund. I was a walking contradiction; but I also began to
understand why the life of a seminarian was not going to be for me. I have also
“felt” the anguish of Flaubert’s Emma Bovary as she
broke through the wall of 19th century French morality, which threatened to
suffocate her. Her break-through (1856), which makes her the heroic prequel of
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (1883), also transforms her into a spiritual and social
pariah unto her death. And yet I, also, had felt along with Emma Bovary both
the boredom of the mundane routines that await the “normal” life, as well as
that intoxicating moment when we realize that we each hold our own destiny, our
fate, in our own two hands. She made her choices, I mine.
I am
thrilled, and moved, each time I read through Milton’s Paradise Lost. After Satan and his
legions have been cast out of the heavens and into the deepest regions of
hell—Satan picks himself up, shakes himself off, sees laying stunned around him
his myriad warriors, and, not ever one to give himself up as beaten, this
prodigious angel shouts out to them in a great, virile voice: “Awake! Arise, or
be for ever fall’n! (Book I).” And how much have I learned about the world’s
truth when, in Book II at the war council of the fallen gods, I hear the poet
sing of Belial:
in act more graceful and humane:
A fairer person lost not Heavn’n! He seemed
For dignity composed and high explóit,
But all was false and hollow though his tongue
Dropped manna…;
or when Moloch, “the strongest and the fiercest
spirit/That fought in Heav’n, now fiercer by despair”— in response to the
deceptive and cowardly words of Belial, spoke words of absolute clarity and
frankness: “My sentence is for open war…” And then there is Milton’s Satan, an
exquisite creation if ever there was. Intent on wreaking havoc at the heart of
his Enemy’s creation, Satan penetrates into Eden to seek out Eve and lead her
into temptation. In this encounter (Book IX, 455ff) Milton reconstructs for us
one of the most interesting experiences in all of the worlds, literary and
real-life: Satan meeting Beauty, and Malice is struck dumb! This is the
original Beauty meeting the Beast.
She most, and in her look sums all delight:
Such pleasure took the Serpent to behold
This flowery plat, the sweet recess of Eve
Thus early, thus alone: Her heavenly form
Angelick, but more soft, and feminine,
Her graceful innocence, her every air
Of gesture, or least action, overawed
His malice, and with rapine sweet bereaved
His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought:
That space the Evil-one abstracted stood
From his own evil, and for the time remained
Stupidly good; of enmity disarmed,
Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge:
Such pleasure took the Serpent to behold
This flowery plat, the sweet recess of Eve
Thus early, thus alone: Her heavenly form
Angelick, but more soft, and feminine,
Her graceful innocence, her every air
Of gesture, or least action, overawed
His malice, and with rapine sweet bereaved
His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought:
That space the Evil-one abstracted stood
From his own evil, and for the time remained
Stupidly good; of enmity disarmed,
Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge:
All of these books are standing on my shelves—lovely
sets covering the walls from floor to ceiling. And yet, in the interests of
transparency, I do also have to admit that while I own copies of others, as
well, I have not yet been successful in wading through Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), which is of a density that defies the laws of
physics; and, frankly, I have to also admit that I would rather die or suffer
serious dismemberment before plunging into the interminable 7-volume wasteland
of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (A la recherche du temps perdu). My wife
loved Proust… but, call me silly.
All of those whom I have met in these collective
pages—these guides, continue to roam through the corridors of my life, my own
private herd (flock? gaggle? school?) of Daimoni; and unlike the single and
limited Daimon of Socrates, whose only job was to point out to Socrates the way
he should not go, my myriad of
Daimoni continue to illuminate my path in all the varied and sundried
circumstances of my life. They are the sign-posters who attend me and
illuminate the dark places on the path of how I should go. In our broken and fragmented world where lessons and
rituals are being forgotten as quickly as computer passwords, how else are we
supposed to learn how to “do” real-world living and dying?
In my
life I have followed Horatio’s example in the face of loss—saying farewell to a
friend: Good night, Sweet prince… and Shakespeare’s
words actually expressed truly what I was experiencing in that moment of my own
grief and loss. Horatio’s words taught me what to say in my own real-life pain,
and they gave me comfort worthy of my feelings. This is the phenomenology, the
lived space, of the Reading Life. Our lives are a flash in the pan, here today
gone tomorrow, gone in the twinkling of an eye, ashes to ashes, dust to dust…
all truthful sayings that have been, and are used in real situations by real
people experiencing real grief.
“I” am a handy Fiction upon which to hang the story of
my life… the cohesion that links the passage of my days into an historical
continuity, into the narrative continuum of Me, into my Noble Lie. I will be
many things in my life. Or, perhaps more philosophically, there will be many
pieces of me, many facets, that reflect the various ideas I will value as I
pass through these worlds of mine.
(Modified from an original essay published November, 2012)
Further reading:
