Some Brief Book Notes

I finished The Brothers Karamazov recently. It was very different from what I had always imagined it was. It is a fine book and all of that, especially in terms of characterization, but I was surprised by how little in the way of incident and episode the book consisted of. It did not exceed or really fulfill my expectations of it, which were extremely high, on a first full reading. Yet when I read the first 300 pages as a college student I remember feeling at every instant certain that it was the truly great book it is celebrated as being, and I did not really feel that going through this time--when I reached the 300 page mark, which is right around where the Grand Inquisitor episode starts, I noted that my sense of the book was completely different from the way I had remembered it and I wondered what had happened to me. Even the Grand Inquisitor section, so celebrated, did not resonate deeply with me. Maybe I am too cut off from the habits of life and thought needed to take in these books now, or I have grown to distrust them. I am going to be reading this again in a couple of years for my other list, and I plan on that occasion to immerse myself in it a little more deeply than I did this time, when I was more interested in seeing what effect it had on me and what I would get from it as myself, without making any special concessions or adaptations to understand it. But that proved to be not wholly satisfactory.

After finishing Karamazov I moved on to the lesser known Thomas Hardy novel A Laodicean (from 1881, almost exactly contemporary with Karamazov). I am something of a fan of Thomas Hardy at times. I like the atmosphere of the Thomas Hardy world, the slowness and almost eternal quality of it. A Laodicean is, ironically perhaps, in large part about the changes in the way life was lived during the 19th society, but the pace and scale of the change will strike the 21st century reader as modest, and, as recorded in the book, quaint and even kind of romantic. The story takes place in a castle that has been purchased from its owners since time immemorial by a railroad magnate, who has died, the possession passing to his intelligent and attractive twenty-something daughter. A telegraph line has been run into a cozy office set up in one of the castle's turrets, that comes crackling to life once or twice a day, and the young owner, since she has to live there at least part of the year, is contemplating a renovation of the decrepit castle to bring it up somewhat to a 19th century standard. The main occupants of this castle most days are the young owner, her friend and companion, who is a member of the dispossessed aristocratic family who formerly owned the castle, and the young (male) architect who has been employed to carry out the renovations, a process expected to take the better part of 2-3 years. All of these people are intelligent and attractive, and the minor characters--clergymen and other member of the local society--are reasonably bright and presentable as well. There are as yet none of the wretched, obviously doomed sort of person who occupies the more well-known Hardy books. I assume something excruciatingly awful is going to happen to someone eventually but it has not become apparent what this is going to be yet.   

I am tempted to try to wrestle more with the big contemporary political issues, especially all of those that in my heart of hearts and brain of brain I am on the wrong side of (which is most of them), but hopefully a time will come where I will hit on the right ideas to make my position intelligible to someone, for it must be that at some level. (See, I am falling asleep now, and I don't want to wait a month to post this while I sort through the origins and ongoing basis for my political beliefs and reactions...)    

Thomas Hardy--"Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave" (1914)

I was having one of my especially pessimistic weeks anyway, so it is opportune that Hardy should be the next author on my list.

While one reads, or has the option of reading anyway, a great deal about the ever-ongoing decline of a traditional, largely literary-informed understanding of education and the world itself, at least most of these critics have some small consolation in considering or knowing themselves to have absorbed a substantial part of this traditional and solid body of human learning and wisdom. The failings of the age in partaking of and contributing to the further vitality of these areas one can believe with some confidence lie largely with others. Being a serious person almost wholly surrounded by unserious people throughout most of life is doubtless a lonely and frustrating consolation, but still, it is a consolation.

It is not a consolation I am able, except on increasingly rare occasions, to feel myself. The great challenge of all education that would call itself good really is to synthesize one's varied learning in such a way as to become a person of worth to any reasonable community somewhat commensurate with one's potential. I have no sense of having attained this. The obvious solution is to work harder, albeit I suppose in some other direction which I am either resisting or cannot at this time perceive, for I seem to have reached the upper limits of my potential in the direction I have gone in hitherto, and where that has left me is not really acceptable I would not think. I would think that in this mindset the wisdom of meditative poetry, a rhythm and process of thought so noticeably lacking from contemporary life, would be a great help to settling my mind. However I cannot seem to focus on it with the necessary clearness and easiness of intellection. I am too distracted. Hardy of course famously wrote pessimistic novels until, at age 56, he stopped doing that and began writing pessimistic poems. These poems he wrote in his old age are much praised, to the point where I think the most up-to-date experts consider him to be more historically significant as a poet than a novelist. I hadn't read any of his poems before this, though I had read 3 of the novels. Jude the Obscure, his last novel, I thought was the best, though that may be because the unhappy protagonist has superficially a lot in common with me. It is certainly one of the most relentlessly grim books ever written. Tess of the D'Urbervilles I remember thinking was good too, though I was quite young when I read that. The Mayor of Casterbridge I did not like as much as the other two, though its depiction of the narrowness and general lack of appeal of rural life in Victorian England was even more convincing than in the other two books, which at least had some characters I found sympathetic. Hardy is thirty years younger than Dickens, but there is very little sense of anything modern, let alone of the energy and bustle, or outrageousness, that one finds in Dickens's books. Hardy's is a world where people walk ten miles (and back) to post a letter at the end of a long day of work as if it were nothing, go to market in the county town every Wednesday for forty years during which nothing substantially changes, taverns are either dreary or dangerous places where no one ever has any fun, and sex is primarily a lure to personal ruin (did I say I liked this guy?). This contrast in the general approach to reality between two obviously talented writers who were more or less contemporaneous is part of what makes literature interesting however.

I like this poem. That is to say, it scans well, it would probably not be difficult to memorize, and it fits in very nicely with the tradition of English meditative poetry of this type (which even had a "Graveyard School" in the 18th century, four or five of which poets I read, including Young's interminable and now inexplicably once-celebrated "Night Thoughts". Fortunately this was all before the blog). The theme appears to be pretty straightforward. If you haven't read it, the soul of a dead woman perceives someone to be visiting her grave and digging up the earth about it, she asks in turn if it is her husband, her kinfolk and her enemy, all of whom have largely ceased to think about her. Finally she gives up and asks who it is, the visitor reveals itself to be her old dog, who is merely burying a bone and had forgotten that the remains of his old mistress lay there. As far as I can tell that is all there is to it, but the pace, the patter of the poem is very effective and affecting.

Just a couple of observations:

(ll 5-6) The husband's statement on his remarriage (the implication being that it was rather too sudden). H's characteristic pessimism, though really cynicism:

"'It cannot hurt her now,' he said,
That I should not be true.'"

(ll. 26-30) This reference to the English faith in dogs is obviously meant as a joke:

"Why flashed it not on me
That one true heart was left behind!
What feeling do we ever find
To equal among human kind
A dog's fidelity!"