A Promising Time for the Library

I got an email a few days ago from someone named Kristi bearing the title, "This is a promising time for your library." That struck me as a pleasant thought. I wasn't aware that anyone really cared much about my library except me; I wondered who Kristi was, and what she meant, exactly. 

It's true that several books have come my way recently via the de-acquisition cart in the lobby of the Golden Valley Library, including a handsome coffee-table book of Seth Eastman's paintings. And the other day, when Hilary and I were shopping for gifts at Magers & Quinn, I also picked up two books for myself: a collection of poems by Joyce Sutphen, Carrying Water to the Field; and Existential Monday by an obscure French philosopher named Benjamin Fondane.

To top it off, a few weeks ago I conceived the notion that it was necessary to have a decent hardcover edition of Samuel Johnson's writings at my disposal. I'm not sure why, though the Penguin paperback edition I own is looking pretty ratty. I consulted a used book consolidator online and discovered that Amazon was offering a recently compiled hardcover edition from Yale at half-price. How could I resist?

The book is handsome, but also formidable. It weighs in at a little less than four pounds, which makes it unwieldy and somewhat difficult to read. Selected essays from Johnson's two-penny sheets, the Rambler and the Idler, make up a good part of the book, and they've been arranged by theme—moral choices, men and women, war and imperialism—which is convenient.

Johnson was formidable himself, though he wasn't handsome. He's known today largely for his curmudgeonly one-liners about the weather, writing for money, and other commonplace subjects. Few read his works, I suspect. Many of the essays are occasional and short, which is good. But the language in which Johnson expresses himself tends to be wordy, syntactically complex, and riddled with specious generalities. Not so good. But right or wrong, suave or clumsy, you've got to give credit to an author who chooses a weighty subject, explores it in terms the common reader can understand, and arrives at a conclusion without unnecessary references, complications, or digressions.

The first essay I turned to happened to be about awe. It surprised me that Johnson would take up such a subject. Not so long ago young people referred to everything as "awesome," and I sometimes come upon articles offering tips about how to revive that precious yet elusive emotion. It doesn't strike me as a typically eighteenth-century topic. But his approach to that issue does fit the era in which he wrote, in which astronomic discoveries, steam engines, and spinning jennies were all the rage.

Johnson's theory is that the awe we feel in the face of an unusual phenomena is the result of our ignorance as to how it works. "The awful stillness of attention, with which the mind is overspread at the first view of an unexpected effect, ceases when we have leisure to disentangle complications and investigate causes." Johnson reiterates this argument several times and also seems determined to castigate those who are simply too lazy or too conceited to humbly and patiently investigate the inner workings of things. "To expect that the intricacies of science will be pierced by a careless glance ... is to expect a peculiar privilege, a power denied to the rest of mankind; but to suppose that the maze is inscrutable to diligence ... is to submit tamely to the tyranny of fancy, and enchain the mind in voluntary shackles."

It's worth reminding ourselves that in Johnson's day, many words had different shades of meaning than they do today. For example, nowadays the word "awful" carries connotations of disgust, whereas Johnson defines it in his famous dictionary as "that which strikes with awe, or fills with reverence." But it seems the primary association of awe with reverence hasn't changed much from his day to ours.

On the other hand, Johnson's notion that awe is inspired by ignorance, and evaporates once we've familiarized ourselves with a phenomenon, strikes me as doubtful at best. Our modern world is full of mechanical and electronic devices the workings of which remain incomprehensible and mysterious, yet we rarely hold any of them in awe. Maybe we should.

Meanwhile, I have found that if I do happen to develop a layman's understanding of how something works, it usually increases the admiration and awe I feel for it. Just now I pulled my copy of the plates created for Diderot's encyclopedia, which were designed to illustrate how everything from plate glass and rope to upholstery and marbled paper was made. Incredible.  

Nothing is more likely to inspire fleeting feelings of awe than aspects of the natural world. But perhaps this supports Johnson's thesis, insofar as such phenomena will forever remain largely inexplicable. Evolutionary theory can offer clues as to how the myriad life forms that surround us came to be, generally speaking, but it will never be able to "explain" the miraculous presence of a deer who beds down at nightfall in the back yard, much less a particular being whom we have come to know and love. 

By the same token, even a lifetime of astronomical study will do nothing to dissipate the awe we often feel when we contemplate the depths of space.   

The poets of Johnson's day had hardly begun to explore this realm of beauty and mystery. Wordsworth's "Westminster Bridge" and Keats "To Autumn" were still a long ways off. 

Johnson himself was perhaps wary of what he calls "the tyranny of fancy." I wonder what he, who loved words so well, would have made of this brief poem that I came across in the second of my purchases, Joyce Sutphen's Carrying Water to the Field:

It's Amazing

 

Another word for that is astonishing

or astounding, remarkable, or marvelous.

 

It's also slightly startling, which leads to

shocking and upsetting, perhaps a bit

 

disquieting, and that is troubling and

distressing—you could say outrageous

 

and deplorable, which leads to wicked

and more precise equations such as

 

sinful and immoral or just plain bad

and wrong. It's amazing, which is just to say

 

bewildering and unexpected, that

it happened out of the blue, and that we went

 

all the way from miraculous to absurd,

within the syllables of just one word.

 

Opening my third purchase, the slight volume of essays by Benjamin Fondane called Existential Monday, I suddenly found myself immersed in a realm driven not by awe and reverence, but by anxiety and dread. This is entirely understandable, given that Fondane was a Romanian Jew living in Nazi-occupied Paris. But Fondane's theories predate that dreadful circumstance by several decades. Writing in the zany Dada era and drawing heavily on the theories of Kierkegaard and the obscure Romanian philosopher Lev Shestov, Fondane emphasizes that every philosophic system, and especially Hegelianism and it's cartoonish offspring Marxism, will miss the mark unless it not only recognizes but also emphasizes the significance of the maverick, the outcast, the unique individual, and the once-in-a-lifetime event that shatters all systems. For example, the Resurrection. 

Fondane refers to Shestov so often that I requested a few of that thinker's books from the Hennepin County Library. And they actually had some! Now there is an amazing institution.

Meanwhile, taking a closer look at the email I mentioned above, I see that it comes from Kristi Pearson, executive director of the Hennepin County Library system. It was her library she was referring to, not mine. Then again, her library is also mine. 

She wants me to contribute, lend them of hand. Gladly. 'Tis the season.