The Whole Five Feet

Volume 22

The Odyssey of Homer

Anyone who read Homer at some point in school will probably remember the oft-repeated "wine-dark sea" and "rosey-fingered dawn." Less famous is the epitaph so often attached to Odysseus throughout the poem -- man of many devices, as it is given in this translation; man of many turns, as it is elsewhere rendered. While some heroes are famous for strength or for bravery, Odysseus is known for his resourcefulness. Throughout his trials, he never hesitates to make use of what would generously be called guile or cunning.  That is to say, he's a bullshit artist.  This first become clear when he introduces himself to Polyphemus as Noman, so that, once he goes after him, Polyphemus will cry out, Noman is attacking me, and all the other Cyclops will leave him to be blinded.

Of course, we can forgive -- or even commend -- a little b.s. when it's necessary to escape the Cyclops or drive dozens of armed suitors from one's home. But the most striking example of Odysseus's guile comes in the poem's last book, once he has successfully made his way home, revealed himself, and defeated Penelope's suitors. At this point, he goes to find his father, Laertes, who is living out what remains of his life in mourning for his lost son. Odysseus finds his father alone, dirty and stooped with sorrow. Homer writes:

Then he communed with his heart and soul, whether he should fall on his father's neck and kiss him, and tell him all, how he had returned and come to his own country, or whether he should first question him and prove him in every word. And as he thought within himself, this seemed to him the better way, namely, first to prove his father and speak to him sharply.

Why does he feel the need to test the father he hasn't seen in twenty years? Stranger still is the method he chooses for his test. He approaches Laertes in the guise of a stranger and, after a brief conversation, says:

Tell me moreover truly, that I may surely know, if it be indeed to Ithaca that I am now come ... Once did I kindly entreat a man in mine own dear country, who came to our home, and never yet has any mortal been dearer of all the strangers that have drawn to my house from afar. He declared him to be by lineage from out of Ithaca, and said that his own father was Laertes son of Arceisius. So I led him to our halls and gave him good entertainment, with all loving-kindness, out of the plenty that was within.

At this point, Laertes begins to weep, and says,

Stranger ... plainly tell me all: how many years are passed since thou didst entertain him, thy guest ill-fated and my child, -- if ever such an one there was, -- hapless man, whom far from his friends and his country's soil, the fishes, it may be, have devoured in the deep sea, or on the shore he has fallen the prey of birds and beasts. His mother wept not over him nor clad him for burial, nor his father, we that begat him.

This would seem like as good a time as any to reveal himself, but Odysseus of many counsels continues: But for Odysseus, this is now the fifth year since he went thence and departed out of my country. Ill-fated was he.  It's only after Laertes begins to pour ash and dirt over his head that Odysseus relents and admits, Behold, I here, even I, my father, am the man of whom thou asked.

All in all, these seems less like a test of loyalty and more like an ancient episode of Punk'd. Leaving aside the cruelty of it, what is most striking is how purely gratuitous it is. Nabokov once remarked that literature began not on the day when the boy came running down the hill crying, Wolf, and the wolf came chasing after, but on the when he came running down the hill crying, Wolf, and there was no wolf behind him. I thought of this line when I read this exchange between Odysseus and Laertes. Odysseus is like a CIA-trained assassin in a bad movie, who can't stop killing once the war is over. He lies not to save himself, but for the sheer pleasure of the lie. At that moment, he becomes a story teller.

This seemed fitting to me, because the other thing that struck me as I read this week was how many of the other books in the Classics owe some sort of literary debt to Odysseus. To begin with there is The Aeneid. Then there are all the Greek tragedies that dramatize stories -- like Agamemnon's murder -- that originate with Homer. And without The Aeneid, there couldn't be the Divine Comedy. Without Aeschylus there couldn't be Shakespeare. And so on. And all this began not when Odysseus, trapped in the land of the Cyclops, gave his name as Noman.  It began once Odysseus was safely home, and he couldn't stop turning.

---CRB, July 11, 2007

Volume 23

Two Years before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

Throughout the past six months, I have struggled to discover some logic behind the order of the Classics. For the most part, I've come to the opinion that there is none. They aren't grouped chronologically, or thematically, or by genre. But occasionally there is some tantalizing pairing that suggests a hidden pattern that might eventually make itself clear. The appearance of Richard Henry Dana's Two Years before the Mast alongside The Odyssey is that kind of pairing.

The Odyssey may be the oldest work in the Classics.  Two Years before the Mast is among the most recent. Dana was a student at Harvard -- just a generation before Charles Eliot -- when weakened eyesight, brought on by a case of measles, forced him to leave school. In 1834, he signed up as a sailor on a merchant ship. (The term before the mast refers to common sailors, who bunk in the ship's forecastle, as opposed to the captain and his officers.) The odyssey that followed is the subject of Dana's book.

It's true that Dana's trip lasted only two years, as opposed to Odysseus's twenty. But it did suffer from unexpected delays. Throughout the journey, there were storms and lulls and icebergs. And then there were the hides. After sailing from Boston down and around Cape Horn, Dana's ship, the Pilgrim arrived at pre-Gold Rush California, then a sparsely populated Mexican territory. The ship came to California to trade for hides, which had to be tanned before making the passage back to Boston, so Dana finds himself six months on shore at this work. The descriptions of California are among the great pleasures of the book. To ensure a worthwhile profit, the ship continued up and down the west coast until it had collected 40,000 hides. Gradually, Dana comes to understand that this may take longer than expected -- that his eighteen months away from Boston may easily stretch to two years, to three, maybe more. By the time the Pilgrim returns to Boston, it will be too late for him to return to Harvard and make a professional life for himself; he will be a sailor. And this is when a brief trip threatens to turn into a lifetime on the sea.

In the event, Dana was able to get on to another ship that is returning in a more timely fashion. He returned to Harvard and eventually became a prominent maritime lawyer and advocate for sailors' rights. Twenty-four years later, he returned to California -- recently annexed to the U.S. He recounted this trip in a chapter appended to later editions of his book. Here is where Two Years before the Mast's juxtaposition with The Odyssey was most striking. For it seemed to me that the mechanics of sea travel had changed nearly as much in those twenty-four years as they had in the thousands of years prior. To be sure, by the time of the Pilgrim, the world had been more or less mapped; Dana's captain had navigational tools unknown to Homer. But in the end, Dana was among a crew of sailors in a wooden boat, dependent on the winds, working round-the-clock shifts to bring in and let out the sails. When he traveled again in 1859, he did so on the superb steamship Golden Gate, gay with crowds of passengers, and lighting the sea for miles around with the glare of her signal lights of red, green, and white, and brilliant with lighted saloons and staterooms.

The California to which Dana arrived on this lighted steamship was unrecognizable to him:

How strange and eventful has been the brief history of this marvellous city, San Francisco! In 1835 there was one board shanty. In 1836, one adobe house on the same spot. In 1847, a population of four hundred and fifty persons, who organized a town government. Then came the auri sacra fames, the flocking together of many of the worst spirits of Christendom; a sudden birth of a city of canvas and boards, entirely destroyed by fire five times in eighteen months, with a loss of sixteen millions of dollars, and as often rebuilt, until it became a solid city of brick and stone, of nearly one hundred thousand inhabitants, with all the accompaniments of wealth and culture, and now (in 1859) the most quiet and well-governed city of its size in the United States.

Dana is stirred by a feeling that has become perhaps more common in the hundred and fifty years since he wrote, as the rate of change has accelerated dramatically. It is a feeling I have had myself as I these two seafaring books in the space of a few days. The past was real, Dana writes.  The present, all about me, was unreal.

--CRB, July 18, 2007

Volume 24

On Taste & On the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke is the kind of writer I had in mind when I decided to read the Harvard Classics. That is, he's a writer I've never read before, a writer I've wanted to read, a writer I feel I ought to have read, and I writer I almost certainly would never have read without a project like this to spur me on. Having finished this volume, I can say that he's also the kind of writer who makes me glad I'm reading these all these books.

Burke is best known as a poltical thinker, but this collection of his work begins with an early treatise on aesthetics. I've always found aesthetics to be among the easiest branches of philosophy to mock. At its worst, it has the same tendency to obscurant pedantry as metaphysics or ontology, but it deals in something less fitting of such treatment. Interpreting the meaning of a work of art is one thing, but trying to explain beauty itself is like trying to explain what makes a joke funny. There is something bathetic about 1000 words on why we like to look at sunsets when compared with, say, a sunset.

Although a few of Burke's chapter titles -- Proportion not the Cause of Beauty in Vegetables, Why Smoothness is Beautiful -- gave me a chuckle, his work -- especially the introductory On Taste -- is actually quite grounded, even useful. He operates on an aesthetic foundation consistent with his conservative political beliefs: It is probable that the standard both of reason and taste is the same in all human creatures. For if there were not some principles of judgment as well as of sentiment common to all mankind, no hold could possibly be taken either on their reason or their passions, sufficient to maintain the ordinary correspondence of life.  The key word here, I think, is standard. Burke doesn't pretend that all people have the same taste, only that there is a standard by which differing tastes can be judged. Sensibility and judgment, Burke writes, which are the qualities that compose what we commonly call a taste, vary exceedingly in various people. From a defect in the former of these qualities arises a want of taste; a weakness in the latter constitutes a wrong or a bad one.  He elaborates:

 

The cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment. And this may arise from a natural weakness of understanding, (in whatever the strength of that faculty may consist,) or, which is much more commonly the case, it may arise from a want of proper and well-directed exercise, which alone can make it strong and ready. Besides that ignorance, inattention, prejudice, rashness, levity, obstinacy, in short, all those passions, and all those vices, which pervert the judgment in other matters, prejudice it no less in this its more refined and elegant province ... Though a degree of sensibility is requisite to form a good judgment, yet a good judgment does not necessarily arise from a quick sensibility of pleasure; it frequently happens that a very poor judge, merely by force of a greater complexional sensibility, is more affected by a very poor piece, than the best judge by the most perfect; for as everything new, extraordinary, grand, or passionate, is well calculated to affect such a person, and that the faults do not affect him, his pleasure is more pure and unmixed; and as it is merely a pleasure of the imagination, it is much higher than any which is derived from a rectitude of the judgment .. In the morning of our days, when the senses are unworn and tender, when the whole man is awake in every part, and the gloss of novelty fresh upon all the objects that surround us, how lively at that time are our sensations, but how false and inaccurate the judgments we form of things? I despair of ever receiving the same degree of pleasure from the most excellent performances of genius, which I felt at that age from pieces which my present judgment regards as trifling and contemptible.

Our own culture isn't all that comfortable with these sorts of standards. We are hesitant to speak of tastelessness or bad taste, let alone wrong taste. In judging art, affect is all. It's considered churlish at best, and probably elitist, to suggest that a passionate response to a movie or to the final installment of a children's novel lacks judgement. I don't think it would help matters much to add that such judgement might be gained through proper and well-directed exercise.

Reflections on the French Revolution & A Letter to a Noble Lord 

Of course, Burke is remembered not for his aesthetics but for his politics. He is sometimes remembered now -- and was thought of by some in his own time -- as anti-democratic reactionary. But this isn't the picture that emerges here. Burke was a member of parliament during the American Revolution, and he advocated strongly on the colonies' behalf. He was a reformer, but he also had great respect for order and tradition (In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction).  Reform, to Burke, meant something different than innovation or change. It meant applying local solutions to local problems within a system, rather than overthrowing the system itself. This belief motivated the harsh response to the French Revolution through which Burke more or less invented modern poltical conservatism. To read Reflections on the French Revolution now is in part to see just how little those who are currently running the show resemble Burke:

If circumspection and caution are a part of wisdom, when we work only upon inanimate matter, surely they become a part of duty too, when the subject of our demolition and construction is not brick and timber, by sentient beings, by the sudden alteration of whose state, condition, and habits, multitudes may be rendered miserable. But it seems as if it were the prevalent opinion in Paris, that an unfeeling heart, and an undoubting confidence, are the sole qualifications for a perfect legislator.

Burke wrote these words years before the Terror made the worst tendencies of the French Revolution painfully apparent. Once the dust had settled, Burke might not have fooled himself into thinking we had cured ourselves of the habit of violently overthrowing the status quo in the name of freedom and democracy, but he might have been surprised to find those most eager to continue the habit calling themselves conservatives.

--CRB, July 21, 2007

Volume 25

Autobiography & On Liberty by John Stuart Mill

The education of John Stuart Mill, as outlined in his Autobiography, would make a great Frank Capra -- or perhaps Ron Howard -- movie. Mill's father, John Mill, was a leading Utilitarian thinker in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Mill pere seems to have had all of the moral authority and emotional coldness still associated with that school.  (Benthamites, they were still called then.) He treated the education of his son like an experiment. No summary of the process could quite do it justice, so I'll quote at length a typical passage from the early pages of the Autobiography:

I have no remembrance of the time when I began to learn Greek. I have been told that it was when I was three years old. My earliest recollection on the subject, is that of committing to memory what my father termed Vocables, being lists of common Greek words, with their signification in English, which he wrote out for me on cards. Of grammar, until some years later, I learnt no more than the inflexions of the nouns and verbs, but, after a course of vocables, proceeded at once to translation; and I faintly remember going through Aesop's Fables, the first Greek book which I read. The Anabasis, which I remember better, was the second. I learnt no Latin until my eighth year. At that time I had read, under my father�s tuition, a number of Greek prose authors, among whom I remember the whole of Herodotus, and of Xenophon's Cyropaedia and Memorials of Socrates; some of the lives of the philosophers by Diogenes Laertius; part of Lucian, and Isocrates ad Demonicum and Ad Nicoclem. I also read, in 1813, the first six dialogues (in the common arrangement) of Plato, from the Euthyphron to the Theaetetus inclusive: which last dialogue, I venture to think, would have been better omitted, as it was totally impossible I should understand it. But my father, in all his teaching, demanded of me not only the utmost that I could do, but much that I could by no possibility have done.

This method continued until Mill was, perhaps literally, the best read thirteen-year-old in Britain, without having gone to any school but his father's study. Eventually, he took a job in his father's office at the East India Company. He also fell, like his father, under Bentham's influence. He even founded a group called the Utilitarian Club, which gave the movement its lasting name, and dedicated himself to liberal reform. All of this would be interesting enough in its own right, but the real drama comes with the inevitable crisis.

But the time came when I awakened from this as from a dream. It was in the autumn of 1826 [i.e., when Mill was 20 years old]. I was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent ... In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?" And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, "No!" At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

In his desperation, he returns to the favorite books that his father has pressed on him, and finds nothing there. As for human companionship: If I had loved any one sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should not have been in the condition I was.  And the man who had been his closest companion in his life to that point?

My father, to whom it would have been natural to me to have recourse in any practical difficulties, was the last person to whom, in such a case as this, I looked for help. Everything convinced me that he had no knowledge of any such mental state as I was suffering from, and that even if he could be made to understand it, he was not the physician who could heal it. My education, which was wholly his work, had been conducted without any regard to the possibility of its ending in this result; and I saw no use in giving him the pain of thinking that his plans had failed, when the failure was probably irremediable, and, at all events, beyond the power of his remedies.

Here's where Capra and Howard come in, because the solution that Mill find is so simple and heartwarming as almost to defy belief. He discovers that there is more to life than diligent study. There is such a thing as feeling.  He reads Wordsworth.  He read Coleridge.  He listens to music.  He decides that a man's internal culture matters as much as his action in the world. Perhaps most strikingly, he continues on a path much like the one his father laid out for him, but does so with a sense of well being that his father could never teach him.

Characteristics, Inaugural Address at Edinburgh & Sir Walter Scott by Thomas Carlyle

At the depth of his depression, Mill read Thomas Carlyle, and the experience played a major part in his return to good health. Carlyle, who wrote under the sway of German Romanticism, was the tempermental opposite of the elder Mill. Like him, Carlyle abandoned Christianity, but unlike Mill, he missed it, and he lamented living in an age of disbelief.  (In the Autobiography's funniest moment, Carlyle writes to tell J.S. Mill that he sees in him another mystic, forcing Mill to admit that he was as yet consciously nothing of a mystic.)

But Carlyle appealed to Mill because he diagnosed Mill's disease -- frigid over-intellectualizing -- as the disease of the age:

The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick: this is the Physician�s Aphorism; and applicable in a far wider sense than he gives it. We may say, it holds no less in moral, intellectual, political, poetical, than in merely corporeal therapeutics; that wherever, or in what shape soever, powers of the sort which can be named vital are at work, herein lies the test of their working right or working wrong. ... We might pursue this question into innumerable other ramifications; and everywhere, under new shapes, find the same truth, which we here so imperfectly enunciate, disclosed; that throughout the whole world of man, in all manifestations and performances of his nature, outward and inward, personal and social, the Perfect, the Great is a mystery to itself, knows not itself; whatsoever does know itself is already little, and more or less imperfect. Or otherwise, we may say, Unconsciousness belongs to pure unmixed life; Consciousness to a diseased mixture and conflict of life and death.

Carlyle ranks among the high points for me of the Classics so far. Reading him reminded me, once again, how much of what we consider quintessentially post-modern (in this case, a crippling self-consciousness that overwhelms authentic vitality) was not only present but written about long before our time.

--CRB, July 25, 2007