First Fire of the Season

Wednesday night. First fire of the season blazing in the fireplace. Chunks of dead branches from our maple out front that I cut up during the summer. Wonderful smell.

Thus, one thing leads to another. The branch falls. I saw it up, and months later we burn it. Then, smoke.

One of T.S. Eliot's most famous lines deals obliquely with this phenomenon. Something about "exploring," followed by a remark to the effect that "the end of all our exploring will be to arrive at the place we started from, and know it for the first time." Not a direct quote, obviously.

I could look it up—I see the collected poems on an upper shelf, almost out of reach—but the exact wording isn't important. I received that book as a gift from a friend back in college days. On the end paper he wrote, "Merry Christmas, and I'll be seeing you when we're both famous." An atypical remark, considering how modest and self-effacing he tended to be. He and his wife headed east to grad school, and I haven't heard from him since. 

I have never liked that line by Eliot. Pseudo-profundity, or at best sheer speculation. After all, when he wrote it, Eliot hadn't reached the end of his searching, so how would he know? And in any case, it doesn't seem likely we'll end up right back where we began, unless it's in oblivion, a place we won't be able to recognize at all.

I prefer my own pseudo-profundity: "One thing leads to another." But let's not confuse this notion with an altogether different one: "One thing leads to the next." That phrase implies that the steps are preordained or somehow causal or unavoidable, which isn't the case. Considered in retrospect, they often seem entirely fortuitous.

Such notions often cross my mind when I spot a book on the shelf—one that's been there for quite a long time—and chide myself for having bought it. "I'll never read that book. I should get rid of it," I say to myself. But I almost invariably leave it be, though once in a great while I will actually pull it down and take an extended look. Occasionally, in some small way, it changes my life. How close I came to missing this path entirely!

A few weeks ago a collection of essays by Theodore Adorno caught my eye for perhaps the twentieth time. The title, Critical Models, stands out in thick yellow lower-case italics on the spine. I have rued the day when I bought that book many times, because it reminds me of an entire realm of thought, loosely referred to as the Frankfort School, that I've never investigated. But on this occasion, I said to myself, for no reason that I can think of, "I'm finally going to read some Adorno."

I read a few pages dealing with interactions between the city and the country, and I found them interesting. I even went so far as to copy out a few passages.

"Urbanity is a part of culture, and its locus is language. No one should be reproached for coming from the country, but no one should make a virtue out of it either."

"The persistent divergence between city and country, the cultural amorphousness of the agrarian, whose traditions are meanwhile irrevocably on the ebb, is one of the forms in which barbarism perpetuates itself."

"I am always astounded by the acumen exhibited by even the most obtuse minds when it comes to defending their mistakes."

I suppose these remarks sound sort of cranky and high-handed, but it's worth noting that Adorno escaped Nazi persecution as an adult and returned to his home after the war to find that the German's hadn't really changed that much. Though he has plenty of scathing things to say about modern culture, his heart seems to be in the right place, to judge from this somewhat longer passage about spirituality and teaching:

"Intellectual activity may be more questionable today than in Schelling's age, and to preach idealism would be foolish, even if it still had its former philosophical relevance. But spirit itself, to the extent that it does not acquiesce to what is the case, carries within itself that momentum that is a subjective need. Every person who has chosen an intellectual profession has under­taken an obligation to entrust himself to its movement."

I find this association between "spirit" and "momentum" very attractive.

Some of Adorno's reflections on authoritarian personalities have obvious relevance to the American political scene today, but one or two sentences will suffice:

"Authoritarian personalities identify themselves with real-existing power per se, prior to any particular contents. [e.g. fascism, communism] Basically, they possess weak egos and therefore require the compensation of identifying themselves with, and finding security in, great collectives."

At one point a blurb on the back cover caught my eye in which Susan Sontag praises another of Adorno's collections, Notes to Literature, and especially that volume's introductory essay, "The Essay as Form." I requested the book and it arrived at my local branch a few days later, after having sat on a shelf in the semidarkness of the downtown stacks for years, in all probability.

Good stuff, though rather dense. For example:

"The essay does not stand in simple opposition to discursive procedure.  It is not unlogical; it obeys logical criteria insofar as the totality of its propositions must fit together coherently ... but it neither makes deductions from a principle nor draws conclusions from coherent individual observations. It coordinates elements instead of subordinating them, and only the essence of its content, not the manner in which it is presented, is commensurable with logical criteria."

A better gloss, perhaps, appears a few pages earlier:

"[The essay's] efforts reflect the leisure of a childlike person who has no qualms about taking his inspiration from what others have done before him....[It] reflects what is loved and hated instead of presenting the mind as creation ex nihilo on the model of an unrestrained work ethic. Luck and play are essential to it. It starts not with Adam and Eve but with what it wants to talk about; it says what occurs to it in that context and stops when it feels finished rather than when there is nothing to say."

This particular essay is quite a bit longer than it needs to be, I think. Adorno clearly feels the need to defend his chosen form against the strictures and the ridicule of the positivist scholarly community that had come to dominate German culture well before the 1960s.  At one point he writes, "In its allergy to forms as mere accidental attributes, the spirit of science and scholarship [Wissenshaft] comes to resemble that of rigid dogmatism. Positivism's irresponsibly sloppy language fancies that it documents responsibility in its object, and reflection on intellectual matters becomes the privilege of the mindless."

Reading such humorously scathing passages, I almost feel like I'm rereading a Thomas Bernhard novel.

Yes, one thing leads to another. And another. And sometimes three or four things. I really ought to order a used copy of Adorno's Notes the Literature. (Really? To sit there on the shelf beside Critical Models till the end of time?) But perhaps I ought to take a look at Susan Sontag's collection Against Interpretation. And why not her Notebooks, which offer fresh snippets of thought devoid of the hidden formal excellences that Adorno attributes to the essay form? For that matter, there are unread Thomas Bernhard novels scattered here and there on the shelves—Frost, Gathering Evidence. It's a beautiful situation: a plenitude of options, sullied only by an agonizing sense of insufficient time in which to do the exploring adequately.

Yet it strikes me that this agony of overwhelming possibilities grows weaker as we age. We don't give up in despair or resign ourselves to a third-rate understanding of things, but we come to recognize that our microcosmic worlds echo or exemplify the larger ones lying beyond our grasp, and the things and people we know best offer far more enrichment than a scattered and superficial familiarity with everything.

This may be what Eliot means when he says that at the end of our exploring we finally "know" a place for the first time. You can see, I think, how clumsy the wording is. There isn't much finality to the process. We gradually get to know and love things better, sink into them, feel more at home, limiting our field of view while honing our senses. Once eager to hike the Compostela Trail, we now stroll down to the creek at the bottom of the hill and relish every step.  

Which is not to say we won't be doing the Compostela Trail one of these days!