Category Archives: British Literature

Amazed Contemplation

Posted on by
Reply

Kind met doodshoofd (Vanitas), Simon van de Passe, after Crispijn van de Passe (I), 1612

The last days of dear old winter. Much of this year spent in a haze, reading little but well.

I read Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, a remarkably fine and wise contemplation of self-knowledge and the abyss of depression. Much of this explores the reduction of the human. The book also echoed a sentence I once transcribed from an attempt to read Hegel: This release of itself from the form of its own self is the highest freedom. That reading of Hegel resisted coherence, but that sentence, a coalescence of poetry and philosophy cut so deep I have transferred it from notebook to notebook.

The Vast Extent by Lavinia Greenlaw plays with light and attentiveness. I entered the aura of the text and did not want to leave. It is an extraordinary work that slips away from genre and definition. It works on the edge of autobiography but never quite removes the mask.

Spinoza looms over this year’s reading following my fascinated scrutiny of George Eliot’s translation of Ethics. I’m slowly reading Eliot’s Journals. Unlike Woolf’s diaries, these are economic, writing that subtracts ornament and distraction, but remains somehow rich and expressive.

Lengthening Days

Posted on by
Reply

How delightful, even to elders like us, to feel Spring breathing once more over air and earth! We have been quite happy and contented with Winter, however severe; nor have we ever felt the slightest inclination to be satirical on that hoary personage. On the contrary, there is not a Season of them all whom we love better than hale, honest Winter.

— John Wilson, Streams (April 1826)

Thoughts on Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G. H.

Posted on by
2

To escape the neutral, I had long since forsaken the being for the persona, for the human mask. When I humanized myself, I’d freed myself from the desert.

I’d freed myself from the desert, yes, but had also lost it! and also lost the forests, and lost the air, and lost the embryo inside me.

The mask—humanisation—that we put on to help us elude the harshness of reality. A personal encounter with a cockroach inside the wardrobe of her former maid provokes a profund reflection on originary existence that exceeds humanity. The year opens thus: with The Passion According to G. H. by Clarice Lispector. This is no Metamorphosis. Lispector’s narrator is not transformed but ritually ingests a part of the cockroach’s body.

The demonic precedes the human. And the person who sees that presentness burns as if seeing the God. Prehuman divine life is of a presentness that burns.

This exploration of the prehuman and divine in Lispector’s narrative echoes themes in Spinoza’s Ethics, particularly as interpreted by Clare Carlisle. This is the conflation of God and Nature that Carlisle addresses in Spinoza’s Religion:

When Spinoza identifies Nature with God, however, this conception of Nature must be expanded, beyond consciousness and extension, to comprise the infinity of attributes which, he declares, belong to God. Spinoza offers Natura naturans as, so to speak, an alternative name of God. This divine name works to free the concept of God from the cultural baggage-particularly the anthropomorphic and moralising connotations-it had acquired over many centuries.

Lispector’s assessment of humanity through G. H. is not without hope, but as Spinoza writes in Ethics: “The emotions of hope and fear cannot in themselves be good.” We are steeped in anthropomorphism and fake morality, which inhibits the emergence of a clear understanding of what it is to be human.

Lispector’s The Passion According to G. H. is best ingested slowly. It is a fine start to this year’s reading, but I do not wish to end the consequent introspective mood that it provoked. I read Ronald W. Sousa’s translation and will remain with the book in Idra Novey’s translation.

Emily Dickinson shares Lispector’s fervent interest in the relationship between Nature and the God, conceptions aligned with my limited understanding of Baruch Spinoza. As I’ve only dipped into Ethics, and read Spinoza only through Clare Carlise, an amusing project might be to combine my rereading of Dickinson and continued reading of Passion with George Eliot’s translation of Ethics, which may lead into Daniel Deronda and Clare Carlisle’s The Marriage Question.

Scything Through Time

Posted on by
8

Dostoevsky’s novels, wrote John Bayley, “are full of a stifling smell of living and littered with constitute daily reality,” as compared to Tolstoy who has, “houses and dinners and landscapes, ” which is a striking and nicely balanced comparison.

There is a singular scene in Anna Karenina which marked my transition from curiosity to a genuine fondness for Tolstoy’s story. The noble Levin scythes hay with the peasantry, transitioning over the course of the long day from a sense of detachment and to a more instinctual rhythm. It is a similar metaphor to Hamlet’s “the interim” as the place where contentment is found. As Tolstoy wrote elsewhere, “True life is not lived where great external changes take place.” It is a quite extraordinary scene and set my decision to read more Tolstoy, particularly War and Peace.

Normally at this time of the year I am brimming with plans for next year’s reading, but apart from wishing to read through those Shakespeare plays I’ve not read and more of Samuel Johnson’s Lives, I have few other settled intentions. “Age with his stealing steps / Hath clawed me in his clutch.” As I turn fifty-nine a deep sense of mortality is shaping what I read and I find myself turning more to those works of art that have eluded me to date. There is more urgency to try to read well. I read more books (87) this year than any other but feel that I read too much. With a handful of exceptions, the most profound and interesting reading this year was all older books.

Time’s Flow Stemmed feels a little rudderless at the moment but still appears to be of some interest if judged by 1,200 subscribers and 1,800 visitors per month on average, but I have no point of comparison. If any readers would like me to respond to specific questions about my reading life please either leave a comment or send an email. I still clearly feel a need to write into the internet as manifested by the occasional post here and my sporadic social media presence.

Samuel Johnson’s Craft in “The Lives of the Poets”

Posted on by
Reply

It will not be the last time that I stumble upon a work and wonder why I’ve not read it before. I’m reading Samuel Johnson’s The Lives of the Poets, specifically the chapter on John Milton.

It is not my first encounter with Johnson. I’ve read The History of Rasselas and some of his essays on Shakespeare’s plays. Samuel Beckett read Johnson intensely, ‘at times even obsessively, especially in the years 1937-40’.* Following the traces of books that my favourite writers ardently reread is a preoccupation.

Johnson’s Milton is no mere critical exercise; it’s a vivid journey through his intellectual life, written in a rich and sonorous prose that I frequently copy into my notebook, hoping against hope that his natural beauty of thought somehow flows through me. Each line resonates and invites me to pause and wonder. I plan to spend the rest of this year with this captivating book.

Johnson’s quotes Milton: ‘By labour and intense study, which I take to be my portion in this life, joined with a strong propensity of nature, leave something so written to after-times, as they should not willingly let it die.’

This year’s rediscovery of the very great pleasures of reading Shakespeare’s plays and my reading of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets will undoubtedly, with diversions, form the spine of next year’s reading.

*Samuel Beckett’s Library by Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon