Gotham Diary:
The Completed Thing
13 September 2013
It must be Friday the Thirteenth — that’s why I can’t find Emerson on the shelf. I must have put it in storage. It was a very fat Everyman’s Library volume, and I never opened it. It was something that I ought to have on hand, I thought, as part of a decently-stocked library. That’s what I wanted, then: a decently-stocked library. But I don’t have the room for one. I can only house a library of books that I’m going to open at least once a year.
Emerson is, it turned out, not for me. He is said to have had many wonderful thoughts, but I can’t find them, because all I see when I try to read him is turgid prose. Take this, from early on in “Self-Reliance.”
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.
Why do I dislike this so? The metaphoric sprawl is distasteful, certainly. Great men confide themselves childlike but yet are not minors or invalids in protected corners. “Cowards fleeing before a revolution” — what the devil can that mean? Iron rings vibrate in hearts that are also the seats of the absolutely trustworthy — this is in serious danger of saying nothing. (Emerson is an emphatically unmusical writer, with no sense of rhythm or sound, so it’s not surprising that his harp is strung with a string of iron.) Obeying the Almighty effort — what? Advancing on Chaos and the Dark, even if it does suggest Freud’s project for the unconscious, blurs its sense in a cloud of vague grandiosity. Are we there yet?
I was thinking about Emerson because Mark Edmundson, whose book, Why Teach?, I was writing about yesterday, admires him so much. I wouldn’t say that there are too many quotations from Emerson in the book — only that the ones that there are made me feel that I was chewing on mouthfuls of incompletely baked potato.
Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
This is wrong, I think — as all social-contract thinking is wrong. Society, and the humanity that guides it, have emerged from primordial unconsciousness over tens of thousands of years. There never was a congress of venerable ancestors who deliberated our civil arrangements — not until the disastrous attempts to do so of modern times. We don’t really know enough about ourselves to design a society from the ground up. We do not actually prize conformity, we simply find it very, very convenient. As a man of his time, Emerson routinely opposed the great (creators) to the bourgeois (joint-stock company members), and he had no reservations about urging his readers to transcend the everyday in the pursuit of greatness. But we have since learned that, transcendence or not, the everyday cannot be escaped. Somebody has to do the laundry. And it’s easier for everybody if you do your laundry on Tuesday, and I do mine on Wednesday. (In Emerson’s day, the men never had to do the laundry at all, but we don’t live there anymore.)
Aside from being wrong, the aphorism is phrased in the strangest English — raw Chaucer makes more immediate sense. “Self-reliance is its aversion”? Who speaks like that? “Culture of the eater” is particularly bad: the first two names for the object of Emerson’s derision, members and shareholders, establish a parallel that the concluding phrase cognitively insults. But here we have precisely what’s wrong with American prose before Henry James. It is overwhelmed by the literature of 1600: Shakespeare and the King James Bible. American letters appear to have declared independence from the style of the Eighteenth Century — the earliest form of the language that can still be read without mental ructions — only to lapse into self-conscious archaism. Emerson particularly had a horror of writing clearly and straightforwardly, but his irregularities, intended to recapture the sacred aura that lighted English letters for a decade or two after the last of Elizabeth I, have no genius of their own; they are merely awkward revivals of a dead manner.
No, I should say that we are advancing from the Chaos and the Dark. If you want to call that a cowardly flight from revolution, suit yourself.
***
I learned something very valuable from Mark Edmundson, although I don’t believe that he intended to teach it. I learned that I don’t admire anybody. Almost anybody. I do admire my wife, my daughter and my son-in-law, and my old friend Fossil. And perhaps one or two others — all people whom I know very well, whom I have seen up close for years. I think I’m very fortunate to live among these admirable people, but the point that I want to make is that they are really the only people I know well enough to admire. For the rest, I admire what people do. I don’t admire who they are, because I don’t know who they are. And I’m not about to assume that, because they’ve done great things, they must be great themselves. Nor, by the same token, am I going to scold them when it turns out that these doers of great things, whom I don’t know personally, are not so great themselves.
Lest this sound thought out, I want to add that I learned from Mark Edmundson that I have never admired other people. I started out admiring nobody. And this was not a problem, because I don’t need to admire people. Edmundson made me suspect that this is unusual, or perhaps it was the conjunction of having written about faith, and that fact that I’ve never felt the need for that, either.
I admire completed things. Not just paintings, symphonies, and novels, but also the manner in which paintings, symphonies, and novels are presented. I do not confuse the complete with the eternal: anything can change. Most completed things come to an end eventually. (You could say that I admire the family and friends whom I’ve mentioned because my sense of them has attained a certain completeness.) But, while they last, you can get to know them, and try to understand them, and the impulse that inspires you to do so is admiration.
As such, my idea of admiration is incompatible with the notion and practice of hero-worship. It is also hostile to celebrity culture, which creates the illusion of familiarity with people who, all too often, haven’t completed anything.