Criticism

There are only two possible foundations for a science of criticism: the criticism of perfection, and the criticism of excellence. The criticism of perfection judges a work by a system of rules, or by its resemblance to a postulated masterpiece. The criticism of excellence, being unsystematic, is harder to define; but to earn approval and applause this way, a work must surprise its critics.

I confine my examples to literary criticism as the paradigm, but I address all criticism.

Many systems for measuring perfection have been proposed; many schools of critics have tried to appoint themselves the lifetime judges of excellence. But to know that a work has been found perfect is not to know why it is perfect; and to know that a work has been found excellent is not to know why it is excellent. Each kind of criticism has its own failings, which appear whenever some standard or group wins out.

The failings of the criticism of perfection are familiar. This method is so far out of favor that it is harder to imagine how it could ever have worked, than what could have gone wrong. The few efforts which have been made in this direction have either fallen flat, or had to shelter downwind of science. This is, after all, the kind of criticism we are taught forms of in school. It takes things apart, it anatomizes to give names to each dead part: theme, plot, symbol, character. Mastery of this method allows the quick-witted to turn a story into an essay so fast and so thoroughly that one is only left to wonder why authors bother with the formality of fiction. It is so inefficient. Why don’t they just write the essays themselves? But this is fishmonger criticism: it fillets the story. The most generous interpretation of this approach is that it expects the hard, essayistic and the soft, aesthetic parts can later be reconciled; but that usually works out no better for the story than it does for the fish.

This method was not always decadent. In the French critics of the late Renaissance, for example, we find, not a vital impulse for drama constrained by revenant rules, but rediscovered laws calling dramatic art back into being. Before the professionalization of literature, the criticism of perfection was the only kind of criticism possible: the aspiring writer could present no credential of the mastery of the form, except the perfect fulfillment of the form.

Shakespeare, to make a joke like Pyramus and Thisbe, to hammer at the fourth wall with The Mousetrap, had to enclose them in larger plays; to play with nonsense and anacoluthon, had to put them in the mouths of fools and madmen. But were he alive today, he could do these things directly. It might be better for his career. Would a modern Shakespeare more easily stage The Tempest or Pearls That Were His Eyes? Titus Andronicus or A Dinner Fit for an Emperor? Macbeth, or The Porter Equivocates?

Despite its failings, of the two kinds of criticism, the criticism of perfection is the more open, the more honest, and the more consistent. It is the default form of criticism: it was the first; it is almost inextinguishable, absent only where literature is absent; and it is resistant to debunking. Where the tools can all be seen, it is hard to call their users impostors.

But what could be more perverse than to write to please those hostile to literature?

The failings of the criticism of excellence are unfamiliar. After all, it saves books. How many great books, not written for the public at large, would be lost had not the criticism of excellence assembled a voluntary public willing to meet them halfway? How many great books that came in the first instance before the wrong public, had only the criticism of excellence where to make their appeal?

The failing is simple: the criticism of excellence is based on a fallacy. By definition (assuming a normal distribution), the majority of anything cannot be excellent. Or put another way: all books cannot be above average. The criticism of excellence, by valuing only the excellent, destroys what it loves: like the gardener who, to make room for more flowers, plucks off all the leaves.

Worse, the criticism of excellence is necessarily cliquish. To be able to recognize excellence with certainty – to know a work for the best of its kind or the first of a new kind – you must know (or believe that you know) everything. The result is that a body of critics of excellence form a kind of priesthood or freemasonry; they speak shorthand, they write secret handshakes. This is doubly problematic. First, it makes literature inaccessible from the outside – it is not enough to read the words if you are not in on the joke; and second, it makes literature inaccessible from the inside. If you have not shared their formation, you can no more join a body of critics than you can join an organization of veterans of a war you did not fight in. It is not a question of adopting the mindset formed by certain experiences: instead the experiences constitute the mindset. Thus every few decades a new corps of critics comes up, and drives out the old ones. Unless you belong to the rising corps of critics – unless you belonged to it before its coup, which must be in large part a matter of geography and luck – you are out as long as they are in.

If neither approach to a science of criticism is viable, then there are only two conclusions. Either criticism does not exist; or criticism is not a science. And, in practice, many writers behave as if there were no such thing as criticism. Whom, after all, should they trust? An older writer who has outlived cycles of praise and abuse, ceases to care about their recurrence. And if a young writer needs to keep an ideal audience in mind – let it be anyone but a critic.

Yet criticism exists. Its more workmanlike forms are increasingly difficult to avoid; and if the workman exists, then so must the master. But if criticism is not a science, then what is it? How should it be done? If neither the criticism of perfection nor the criticism of excellence suffices, then is there some third, artistic way; is there some synthesis to achieve; is there some prior unity to return to?

The truth is that there is no criticism; there are only critics. Those who practice criticism according to some criticism of criticism can only be secondary critics. Criticism must end somewhere. Be you tireless as a dog, lithe as a cat, still you cannot catch your own tail.

Nondefinition #3

Doors. Devices which, on all civilized planets, remove themselves from the path of people moving from one room to another. Some swish aside, some rush up and down, some dilate, some simply disengage. There are still, alas, backward planets where people must employ their manipulatory appendages to open doors. Such primitive doors, being dangerous disease vectors and traffic choke-points, and reinforcing inequalities with elaborate conventions of who opens for whom, hold back planetary economic and cultural development. When we find such a planet, tragically barred from further progress by its doorknobs, then it is our clear duty to invade and conquer, in order to civilize them.

Tourism

Filling the mind is as easy as reading, but enlarging the mind is a demanding task, best and most easily done by travel. And tourism is still travel. Even shepherded tourists gain new perspective on themselves; gain the precious stirrings of what the ancients called cosmopolis – the membership of civilized human beings in, and their first loyalty due to, the community and continuity of civilization, and the principle called civility or humanity. Even if a tourist does nothing but add to pictures and names they know already the traces of smell, hearing, and touch; even if the tourist comes away with nothing in memory but a sort of deepened postcard; then that is still an improvement. For what is more bitter than Browning on Venice: “I was never out of England; it’s as though I’d seen it all?” What is more high-handed than to condemn those who hope at last to meet what they have long admired, as if their presence would diminish it? There is nothing wrong with being a tourist – nothing wrong with being just a tourist.

A nation of tourists is a healthy and a vigorous nation. Each tour improves the tourist by some increment, however infinitesimal; and each community returned to is similarly enlarged, by the presence of a human connection to what was before only a source of pictures and things. It is not logical, but it is a human truth, that Japan is shelved in the mind beside Ruritania or Middle Earth until some human proof of it is made. It is one thing to know that Japan exists; another to know someone who has been there; and still another to have been there yourself. Even the most credulous still harbor a deep doubt that something could exist whole and right yet different – a doubt which we must take dramatic steps to beat down, and can never fully overcome.

Tourism does incur a kind of homogeneity, a floating country of hotels and restaurants; but its contribution to the world’s homogenization is slight. The vices of tourists are overshadowed by business travelers. Tourism is one of the only forces – in many places it is the only force – giving value to and protecting not just the particular instances, but the general concept, of the individuality of place. What must we think of those who propose to encourage tourism – as if it were rainfall to be channeled – to save this natural wonder, this artificial curiosity, but disdain to be called tourists themselves?

Cities as beautiful as Venice or Prague or New Orleans have not been preserved to us by the pride or taste of their residents; each is frozen for us at the moment of the collapse of its prosperity. We must suppose that cities just as beautiful as these have been torn down by their own residents to make way for the brick of Progress, for the glass of Modernity. Now that these cities have, in a degree, recovered their prosperity, it is their value in tourist dollars, not their residents’ sentiment or sensibility, that preserves them. Business is business, and unless sentimental wealth pays better to preserve than to tear down, to the man with the sledgehammer it is always the season to cast away stones. Tourists vote, with their feet and their wallets, for the preservation of the places they visit. They may do damage in their sheer breathing numbers; but in the meantime their presence as witnesses deters the petty crimes of progress.

Rome died, not quickly at the hands of barbarians, but slowly at the hands of Romans. It was Romans who tore down the marble city of Augustus, breaking up pillars to wall their fields and statues to burn in their lime-kilns. Locals whine about tourists; but of all people, locals care least about their cities. The same people in childhood formed and inspired by the wonders of a place, in adulthood take a special delight in corrupting and destroying them; and when you hear a slogan from an architect it is likely to translate to: “Come, the nest is ours now, let us foul it.” It takes tourists – badly dressed, out of shape, gawking, dumbstruck, craning, pointing, peering, murmuring, muttering, exclaiming, picture-snapping tourists – to save cities from themselves.

Nondefinition #2

Lachrymatory. In the Victorian period, a small glass bottle used to catch and preserve tears of mourning. Today, tear bottles are made of plastic, pre-filled to be dropped in dry eyes (as of contact wearers), and manufactured in the third world (presumably under third-world conditions). How they fill these bottles, it were better not to ask.

The Pine Barrens

Forests have gods of their own that they shelter, keeping your old gods
Left there by peoples vanished or dead in their hollows and deer paths.
Always defeated, they whisper and slink through the shivering shadows.
But we have a god, a devil, a shrieking and wandering devil.
You hear him hunting and howling: he hunts in the night and the day-time.
You see the marks of his hooves in the snow on your backyards and rooftops.
You know the devilish son, thirteenth son of Mother Leeds, cursed son.
Twelve mortal children had grown in her womb by turns and had suckled.
Loose as it hung from her, skin could not hold in her bitterness. Maddened,
Weeping, she prayed that this one be a devil. Darkness had filled her
Darkness to cover the sun like a storm cloud, night without morning.
Sticky and crying he lay in his crib while she died in her bedsheets.
Lying alone in his crib how he grew, like the wave in the ocean
Last child of Mother Leeds, thirteenth child, cursed child, fanged child, winged child
Leaving the towns behind, fearing his father’s kind, flying he found us.
Devils are hungry for blood but we gave him pine sap to suckle
We fed him pine sap and bear flesh. He needed no shelter from hunters
Men had forgotten their towns in the dark woods next to the red bogs.
Men left their churches and sweet homes shut up, silent and empty.
Free of their axes we rose up, covered the roads and the clearings
Rotted and broke down fences, dragged down markers and signposts
Scattered young acorns tight in the cracks of the walls and the rooftops
Driving their roots in as wedges to throw down the walls and the roof beams
Unhinged doorways, battered windows, wind-swaying branches
Heaved up foundations. Jumbled and heaped up stables and workshops
Houses, schoolrooms, churches. Mice made nests in the bedsheets.
Sweeter is nothing for forests than violently taking their own back
Nothing like claiming the ruins. We watch all your cities and highways
All of your wire-strung poles and your blind towns white in the night-time
Ready and hungry we plan for their ruins. We wait for your weakness
Sending our acorns, testing defenses. Soon when you falter
Our god will walk out among you clearing the way for us,
Violently clearing the way for the oaks and the pines that adore him.
Empty, your sky-scraping towers will rust through, buckle and falter
Vines will soon pull down your wires and smother the voice of your broadcasts
Trees will soon grow in your roads, in your lawns, your cellars and playgrounds
Spiders will seal up your houses and mice will make nests in your bedsheets.

Nondefinition #1

[I have said that I want to post more often; but I don't want to overburden the blog with too much substance. Thus I am trying out a light feature to be run each week besides the Friday post: a short Tuesday "nondefinition".]

Brain. An appliance invented by nineteenth-century German philosophers to remove the drudgery from thought experiments. Pity the situation of the medieval Arabic philosophers who had ask God to specially create a flying man – separated from all his parts, falling forever through lightless infinity – merely in order to raise the problems which any modern philosopher can confront by borrowing a mad scientist’s brain in a vat.

Specialization

Despisers of specialization oppose it to a golden age when to be a thinker was to be a generalist, universalist, polymath, omnifarium doctus, a Renaissance man (Renaissance-era or not, man or not). Defenders of specialization sadly acknowledge the loss, but call it a trade-off: because we know vastly more than our predecessors, we are doomed to specialize: knowledge has become too complex for generalists.

Both these positions are based on false comparison. If specialization were going to undo us, we would have been undone by now. There may be danger may be in restricted training, but we can be sure there is no danger in restricted responsibility.

It is a mistake to compare the most difficult problems we can solve, the most difficult projects we can undertake, with the most difficult problems and projects of our ancestors. If we compare their methods with ours in the same problems, we find that (for example) the Scholastic philosopher, weaving new syllogisms to account for every problem a modern physicist dispatches with a fillip of calculus, lived in a vastly more complicated universe than we do.

The diversity of our specializations, the subtlety of our investigations, are possible only because the leading ideas of science are simpler now than they have ever been before – not easier, but simpler, because entities are fewer. Newton uniting the celestial and the sublunary, Dalton reducing a handbook of elemental behaviors to an algebra of atomic weights, Darwin tracing back the origin of species, Einstein folding space into time and time into space, Faraday’s fields, Shannons’s bits, Noether’s symmetries, Feynman’s diagrams – all bear witness. The scientific endeavors of the present are the most complex ever, because they are the least burdened with overhead.

The same phenomenon is present in the humanities, though at a different level. Consider the half-facetious “Godwin’s Law”: “If you are the first to mention the Nazis, you lose the argument.” But the warning of Nazism really does prune our thinking, mostly before we even speak. Knowing that certain ways of thinking can only end in horror saves us time wasted in toying with them, and effort wasted in arguing ourselves or others out of them.

The highest thinking takes place in this kind of shorthand. Philosophy would be impossible without the ability to reference positions by the names of their originators. Even Plato did it, with Parmenides, Empedocles, and Heraclitus. If we had to begin every discussion with a clean slate, it would be intractable to think at a philosophical level. Each such new name nucleates the floating notions and inchoate ideas that were not so much inaccessible before, as too much trouble to chase down.

Look at an orchestra. Hundreds of instruments, each with players who have traded much of their lives for mastery. Then look at a chamber ensemble from two or three centuries before. Compare an orchestral score with a piece of chamber music. What has changed? Has music theory become so complex that an orchestra full of instrumentalists is now required to implement it?

To the contrary: music theory has become simpler. Composers use chords (or tone rows) instead of counterpoint; but more importantly, tuning has been simplified. The system of tuning now in almost universal use – equal temperament – is the simplest ever: divide the octave into 12 exactly equal parts. Tuning used to be higher math; now it is A=440. Indeed, it could never be done with precision; thus the chamber ensemble had to be small enough that each player could hear, and adjust to, the deviations of others. It is only by the very simplicity of equal temperament that massed instruments can play in tune.

The very subtlety of our specializations, the very complexity of our problems and projects, testify that our intellectual progress has been due to the simplification of our ideas. It is because we increasingly speak the same language that we are free to develop dialects.

But even for orchestras, tuning only matters when there is something to play. What of composers and conductors? What of generalists? Where are they in the war of department against department?

If departments fight, then they have something to fight over, which implies there are still generalists around, however informally. If so, then their position in our society is like that of homemakers: so indispensable that they go unnoticed, so invaluable that they are not valued.

Community

Community is the best thing to have, the worst thing to be had by. The wish for community is at its worst a kind of wish for death – a wish to be submerged in the group, to be assigned a place, to be enfolded by a web of explicit rules and expectations, to be known in full – to be finished. But community, when it is good, is not a kind of group, but something that can be said of a group; an adjective, not a noun; like marital bliss or individual excellence, it exists only relatively – it can exist only where and because each manifestation is unique.

Community is not bad in itself; but if it is powerful for good, it is also simply powerful, and being powerful can be dangerous. Of course, none of us can escape the anonymous community of commerce, law, and arms. Even the hermit relies on the general peace to preserve him from abuse.

Community is worthy and strengthening in moderation, but in excess addictive and limiting. Everything worth doing in life is in part defiance of community – even the widening of a community; the more closely a community is jointed, the less room it has. Here, as elsewhere in life, the pleasure of security loses the profit of change.

A role in a community is a cell, and cella continuata dulcescit. The stronger the community, the more it will hypnotize itself into identifying you with your role: remembering what fits while forgetting or filing away, as aberration or as peccadillo, what does not. Strong as you are, given time, the expectations of others will turn your life into a story; turn your words and your thoughts into your lines; turn your taste into your image; turn your face into your symbol. This happens to the famous in the world at large; but in a close and closed community it is worse. Even virtual communities demand from you a declaration of personality, with fields for nicknames, statistics, lists of favorites (modest lists, more concealing than revealing). This is not an awkward imitation of community: real communities are more awkward and confining than anything which human beings could bear to consciously make.

It can be comforting – it is certainly convenient – to allow yourself to be shaped in this way; and it is to some degree inevitable – even the hermit must look like a hermit, if he does not want strangers to try to rescue him. But to surrender to this force is not to live as befits the equipment and the powers of a human being.

There is no honor in demolishing communities, but there is only good in building them if you do not immure yourself. Keep more than one community; and if one community tries to claim you for itself, shouts or whispers that every other is a lie – you are mine only, mine to judge, mine to keep, mine to make and re-make – then leave it. It is death in life.

The Anatomy of Enjoyment

I

It is fainthearted to require something to be explained and defended to you before you can decide whether you enjoy it. It is a weak mind which approves of only what it enjoys; it is as weak a mind which enjoys only what it approves of.

Approval is a kind of commitment. To approve of something is to vote in its favor. It is an act of conscious, conscientious judgment. Enjoyment is only to find something agreeable – to be pleasantly delighted, distracted, diverted, entertained, beguiled; or to find something bracing – the pleasure of being no more than confused, shocked, startled, uncertain, lost, speechless.

I do not mean the kind of distinction where you approve of the outcome without enjoying the means. We all approve of having things clean; few of us enjoy cleaning. By approved I mean defended, in outcome and in means, as proper and worthwhile.

II

What does it mean to be proper? Propriety varies by company, place, and hour. Yet it is not relative, since it has normative force; nor is it abstract, as it is attached to context. Fashion, as (partly) the propriety of clothing, shows that propriety is a kind of language, declaring the extent and degree of one’s membership, and the ratio of membership to individuality.

But judgment is more than a checklist of proprieties and approvals. Where there is a procedural standard, it is a graph with many dimensions and axes. Propriety answers to a rule and a precept. There is the precept in Rome to do as the Romans do; tempered by the rule that what is done in Rome (all roads leading there), does not stay there.

But young people do carry around checklists – the more precocious, the longer the list. The young zealot has a strict checklist of the proprieties of religion – attentively ticking off the signs and showpieces of religiosity. The young artist likewise proves their sensibility and genius by uncompromising bohemianism.

Youth is its own context; or for the young there is only one context. The young therefore cannot be judged wise or foolish, cowardly or courageous – not yet. Those who never ask themselves what is right age without growing up; nor do they grow up for whom the discipline of youth becomes the cage of snarling, pacing adulthood. It is the softening of youthful rigidity – sometimes gradually by ripening, sometimes by powerful, kneading shocks – that lets you function as an adult, not thoughtlessly obedient, not vainly defiant.

III

What does it means to be worthwhile? There are two standards: one avocational, one vocational.

Time passes whether we use it or not; we benefit by everything we experience, directly or indirectly. To be worthwhile, something need only not demand an inappropriate level of commitment, not mislead or misguide us.

What is worthwhile avocationally lies between what taxes laziness, and what imposes boredom. But the space between the two is elastic. The less lazy and the less passive in boredom the person, the more of what is done and undergone is worthwhile; the lazier and more easily bored the person, the less is worthwhile. And this is true even if the two persons do and undergo the same things.

But this is only where avocation is concerned. Vocation properly commits itself to more than a lifetime can accomplish, accepting responsibility for the concomitant minutiae and trivialities. The standard of the vocationally worthwhile is only profitability – not necessarily (though possibly) monetary, but yielding something, realizing something; something either defensible as being useful, or somehow self-justifying.

It is curious that a vocation, practiced long and well, comes with time to resemble an avocation. Laziness, or the indulgence of boredom, never become forgivable. Preoccupation rarely works an alchemy whereby chores become signs suffused with the sweetness of the achievement they lead too (they generally remain chores). Instead, the perception of time changes. Time put to use is prolonged, time merely spent is hastened, and our subjective time, if not our clock time, increasingly belongs to the most worthwhile.

IV

Enjoyment is not only the wild pleasure that attends indulgence and is paid for in regret, nor is to find worthwhile the same as to enjoy. Our capacity for enjoyment belies our mortality. The idea of heaven is the ideal of pure enjoyment. It would betray the idea of heaven to call it right or worthy, as if there were some vantage of purpose from which is could be judged. Heaven names the end of purpose.

Enjoyment is not a single emotion. The shades and nuances of emotion which enjoyment entrains are distinctive to the individual: a peculiar compound, unique as a fingerprint, of happiness, joy, delight, contentment, satisfaction, satiety, pleasure, wonder, transport, ecstasy; with an equally unique shape of associations formed as the experience twists and compresses to find breathing space, hemmed in by capricious distastes, painful worries, and bad memories.

Enjoyment is not a judgment. The same person varies in what is found enjoyable, and even these variations are variable.

Look to the lovers. Some people in love find everything enjoyable; their worlds are illuminated by their passion – they cannot fail or fall – they are strengthened, purified. Other people in love find nothing enjoyable, they long, they pine, they worry, they regret, they pace, they walk in circles, they are without hope, bereft, now burned by desire, now crushed by loneliness.

Look to the winners. Some people in triumph swell and float, crowds of strangers part for them, their worth is proven, their existence justified, their glory planted and growing, they are the strongest, fastest, smartest, coolest, their friends hang on their words, strangers seek their advice, they need only want to have, their future is full and short, they will blaze and burn out for all to see. Other victors are finished, their lives are over, their purpose served, they are obsolete, worn out by training, practice, and struggle, too old for further victories, the sun past its zenith, the sun setting, nothing but an already passing name; losers in truth by so many sacrifices and so many overlong deferrals that became unwitting sacrifices, and what is left is only a long, empty future, chewing over memories of victory until they have lost their savor, while the hard use they have put body or mind to in youth haunts and makes torment of old age.

Nothing is certain to be enjoyed, there are in fact no standards or criteria, not even for an individual. The same person may be at one time exalted, at another time devastated, by love or victory or anything else – by prosperity, progeny, power, wisdom, renewed health; or even now in enjoyment, now in agony, now in indifference, from day to day, hour to hour; or, in some commodious souls, all at once.

Enjoyment is not a judgment; but that does not eliminate the phenomenon of judgment from enjoyment. Enjoyment is an act, and stands in the same relation to the judgment preceding it as does any other act. Like other acts, enjoyment is best undertaken by plan, next best by chance, and worst by force. What you pay to enjoy you plan to enjoy; and though it is less potent than what is spontaneous, you cannot live in the expectation of the accidental and unpredictable. As food must be had every day to sustain the body, so something must be enjoyed or the faculty of enjoyment shrivels and turns bitter. All creatures are creatures of habit.

Those who live by whim and happenstance are at once discontented and trusting. Why are they discontented? But nothing is more absurd than to require the justification of discontent. Can you justify your hunger? Trust comes from security, real or imagined, or from folly. (Folly being distinct from imaginary security in that willful folly manifestly spurns thought, while imaginary security – a condition more pitiable than contemptible – takes thought, but is too weak to bear it.)

The really secure, as far as life allows, are the wealthy, the healthy, the likable, the liking, the lucky. They haunt history as patrons, spectators, commentators. We find them about town or on tour. Everyone else wishes to be them; but their wish is to have the narrower spirits of genius – and only by keeping company with such narrower spirits are they ever remembered, hanging onto the lights that are the beacons of the otherwise unbroken darkness of history.

To be able to force yourself to enjoy things is a necessary skill. What moves us most, what becomes most precious to us among our experiences, is often what we have at first doubted – what we had, at first, to force ourselves to enjoy. But this has two dangers.

1​. To force enjoyment of everything – or just of too much – ends in a kind of mirror or complement to despair. When tragedy and comedy become indistinguishable, life loses form, and the mind becomes a confusion of powerlessness – comedy becomes tragedy, which we call despair; tragedy becomes comedy, which we have no name for, but should fear as much.

2​. To allow too many others – especially strangers; friends have the right to insist on introducing you to new things – to allow them to force you to enjoy, ultimately enfeebles your enjoyment; not only in the shrunken will, but in the abuse of the faculty. Enjoyment needs rest: not to close, slacken, and sleep like eye or arm, but like the stomach, intervals to digest, variety sufficient to keep up the appetite. No one, I suspect, enjoys food as a well-raised child – the set mealtime, the plate to be cleaned. Gourmandise is a privilege of adulthood, and is only obtainable to an individual through the swings and jumps of whim and fancy.

V

Gourmands are quick to enjoy and slow to approve – unlike critics (of food or generally), who commonly are quick to approve (if they hear the shibboleth), and slow – torpid – to enjoy. Creative individuals, in their spheres, are always ready to enjoy – even determined to do so where they lack the inclination to criticize. It is only zealotry which – with or without approval – withholds enjoyment from another faith’s holidays or ritual spectacles.

Not only religions, but cultures, regions, peoples, are usually distinct in their atmospheres, the diverse lights of different countries, the moods of their arts. You may enjoy the Aztec temples without approving their rituals. The educated must regard spectacle entertainments with disapproval, as tribal rites, as (bread and) circuses, as opiates. But if you end up in the stands, it is vain to be sullen, not to do your best to enjoy. And where music is in order, it should always be enjoyed as part of the occasion, even if you cannot stand it. Food and company on journeys can and should be enjoyed – however opposed to what you eat and keep at home – without determining your habits when you return.

VI

Those of us who will not dare to enjoy what they do not approve are not directly lessened. Neither our sense of the world nor the orbit of our sympathies comes from the diversity of our experiences. The world is too large, the human race too near infinite in numbers and kinds. Not one life, not a dozen, could compass it. Our understanding either receives an inherited or borrowed perspective from few others; or obtains perspective, through reading, from the distilled experience of many others. No matter how much you see; no matter how many countries you stand in; the world and the human race you know are not reflections from experience, but images you have taken either from tradition or philosophy.

Nonetheless, when we will not dare to enjoy, we are lessened, as anyone is lessened by cowardice: we lose our sense of self. We do not get to know the world by experience, but it is how we get to know ourselves. The science of self is an empirical one. We proceed by an experimental variation of conditions, and in the comparison of each contrast we discover the laws of our particular microcosm.

Animals belong to the environment they are in; human beings belong all at once to all the environments they have ever been in, to every construction they can put upon them, to every perspective they can take on them. As we gain in this capacity, as where we are becomes everywhere we have been, we gain in humanity.

Inattentive minds cannot be force-fed what they need; but attentive minds can get by on very little. They do not need grand tours or gallivanting Wanderjahren. A garden, for example, or any spot of growing earth, is not one place, but many: multiplied by seasons, by the generations of flowers, by visitors human or animal present or clinging to it in memory, by the state of mind you bring to it, by the purpose that brings you to it – to savor, to work upon, to hide in.

There is no meaning to the approval of those who never disapprove. Relativism is the privilege of irresponsibility. To act is to choose; to choose is to judge. What we only enjoy, we only regret losing; what we approve of, we fight for. If it is not hypocrisy to say I enjoy things I could not do, it is not hypocrisy to say I enjoy things I would not do. But the least thing you approve of should be more important to you than the greatest things you enjoy without approving.

VII

There are two ways to approve without enjoying: to approve, but choose not to enjoy; or to approve, but be unable to enjoy.

To approve of victory, but choose not to gloat; to approve of accomplishment, but choose not to celebrate and trumpet; to approve of an afterlife, or some abstract immortality by posterity or participation, but choose honor in grief; these are wise choices. Good taste and compassion often reserve enjoyment from things which, viewed in themselves, ought to be enjoyed. Enjoyment belongs to what we do for ourselves; in what we do for others, enjoyment may become condescension, mockery, even cruelty.

Where there is much to be forgiven, you can approve of forgiveness but not enjoy extending it. The more you compassionate the needy, the harder giving becomes, because it brings you nearer their state.

But most of the time, what we approve of without enjoyment is what we have become bored with. Every passion fades by like degrees. First there is unmixed enjoyment, love, satisfaction, delight; but however fascinating, we must look from it from time to time to other things. Where there was steady fire, now we only flare when we return. Then we only plan to flare; fire becomes a power, not a practice. The power untried atrophies; and we are left approving with our whole being what we can not longer enjoy.

There is nothing steady in life which is not subject to this failing; but it is not inevitable. Passive boredom is not a phenomenon, but a vice – one whose indulgence inevitably poisons every experience, empties every life.

VIII

There is a difference between boredom and blind habit. Boredom is the absence of enjoyment; blind habit is the absence of the awareness of enjoyment, an awareness which returns sharply in its deprivation. This is the fate of everything approved of and enjoyed: whether continuous or periodic, occasional or unique, it is unresistingly assimilated, until it acquires the indispensable invisibility of the foundation of a house or the smooth working of internal organs.

We see clearly what we approve of but do not enjoy; we see what we enjoy but do not approve of; but we do not see at all what we approve of and enjoy. It is therefore conditional to anyone creative or sensitive, who would see what others do not, to be able to withhold or supply enjoyment as needed, separately from approval. Together they conceal; separately, the arc between them can illuminate any experience.

Brevity

It is the lesson of poetry that more can be said briefly than can be said at any length. Brevity is wit itself. All comebacks are laconic. All attacks should be surprises. Quotations and proverbs contract with time. The short version on the lips, not the rambling original in books, gives the author credit and fame. Repetition for rhetorical effect may be eloquence; variation may be illumination; but most repetition is redundancy, and most variation is vanity. Something is always sacrificed to pad the page or word counts, or to the smearing thin of thick, subtle concepts to lubricate the passage of a dromedary audience through the needle’s eye of understanding. Eloquence that must be dug out is eloquence buried alive. What the mind retains of prose is its flensed, poetic skeleton. Digressions may be ends in themselves; but illustrations and examples are passed over or forgotten, if not burned in as metaphors. If you write to instruct, ineloquence is inevitable. Prose is not poetry; but even in prose you must have a poet’s discipline, and the poet’s principle: better lost than found for the wrong reason.