The Whole Five Feet

Volume 1

His Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin

Dear Son:

These are the first words of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography and, as such, the first words of the Harvard Classics. A letter to Franklin's son, recounting Franklin's picaresque early life (from Boston to New York to Philadelphia to Boston to Philadelphia to London to Philadelphia), takes up roughly the first third of the Autobiography, ending with a Memo: Thus far was written with the intention express'd in the beginning and therefore contains several little family anecdotes of no importance to others. Further letters follow, written not by Franklin but by two friends who have come to read the first letter and urge Franklin to publish it. In response to these letters, Franklin provides a more conventional narrative, including the kind of maxims for living we expect from Poor Richard: Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.

All of which is to say that the structure of Franklin's Autobiography is almost Nabokovian in its oddity. And yet how fitting it seems to the material, and to the Classics more generally, both of which are largely concerned with passing lessons on from one generation to the next. About an uncle of his, Franklin writes, He had formed a short-hand of his own, which he taught me, but, never practicing it, I have now forgot it.

Franklin himself struggled self-consciously to form a short-hand for good living, one that relied on common sense rather than religious faith. Having done so, he was eager that it be passed on, practiced, and not forgotten.

If I might step back now from the edge of bathos, I should add that the chief delight in reading Franklin's Autobiography comes from stripping away the Franklin legend (printer, publisher, statesman, amateur scientist, dazzling conversationalist) to find a man, well, exactly like that legend. If the Autobiography is an act of self-mythologizing (this struck me throughout as more than possible), it is too stylish such an act to begrudge.

Journal by John Woolman

For all Franklin's charm, however, he occasionally lets loose an unsettling opinion, particularly on racial matters. Though he seemed to have an opinion about every issue of his day, he has little to say (at least here) about slavery, still prevalent throughout the Northeast in his time. One might shrug these lapses off, for Franklin was a man of his own time and place, not to be judged by 21st Century standards. The second book in Volume One, the Journal of John Woolman, serves as a corrective to this easy response.

Woolman was a staunch Abolitionist, a New Jersey Quaker who fought to end the practice of slavery within the Society of Friends. He was also a contemporary of Franklin's, and Franklin even published some of his writings. Throughout his Journal, Woolman struggles with questions that remain deeply relevant today. How responsible are we for acts our government commits in our name? Is it appropriate to withhold material support from such a government? Are we ethically permitted to benefit, even indirectly, from immoral economic practices? How do we counteract a commercial culture that plays on our vanity to create imaginary wants?

Woolman's example also serves as a reminder, pace Richard Dawkins and others who believe that faith in God has rarely been a force for true good, that the Abolitionist movement, like the Civil Rights movement, was fundamentally religious in nature.

In fact, the only criticism I can find to make against Woolman's Journal is that it is virtually unreadable. At its worst, it's insufferably boring; at its best, merely laughably so. For whatever reason, the problem seems to rise in direct proportion to the moral propriety of the actions Woolman undertakes. On one page, he writes:

In the beginning of the twelfth month I joined, in company with my friends John Sykes and Daniel Stanton, in visiting such as had slaves. Some whose hearts were rightly exercised about them appeared to be glad of our visit, but in some places our way was more difficult. I often saw the necessity of keeping down to that root from whence our concern provided, and have cause, in reverent thankfulness, humbly to bow down before the Lord.

Admirable work, of course.  And passable prose, though unlikely to elevate anyone's heartbeat.  But then comes the next page:

First month, 1759 -- Having found my mind drawn to visit some of the more active members in our Society at Philadelphia, who had slaves, I met my friend John Churchman there by agreement, and we continued about a week in the city.

And the next:

Seventh Month -- I have found an increasing concern on my mind to visit some active members in our Society who have slaves, and having no opportunity of the company of such as were named in the minutes of the Yearly Meeting, I went alone to their houses, and, in the fear of the Lord, acquainted them with the exercise I was under; and, thus, sometimes by a few words, I found myself discharged a heavy burden.

Don't misunderstand: I didn't want Woolman to stop trying to talk people out of owning slaves; I just wanted him to stop telling me about it. These are pages 236, 237, and 238, respectively; they might have been just about any other three pages in the Journal.

Perhaps I'm being unfair to a man who genuinely doesn't seem to have intended these Journals for a wide readership. The real question isn't why Woolman chose to record his days, or why the Journals (which are no more repetitive than the average blog) had a readership in their time. The question is why Charles Eliot chose to include them in the Harvard Classics. The only answer I can offer is that Eliot admired Woolman, with good reason, and wanted his legacy preserved.

The Journal is widely recognized as Eliot's most eccentric editorial choice, and it's tough to watch Homer nod so early in the day. But if I have to read something this tedious, it might as well be in week one, when enthusiasm is high.

Fruits of Solitude by William Penn

William Penn's Fruits of Solitude rounds out Volume One. Penn, a Quaker convert and founder of Pennsylvania, played a large role in creating the society in which Franklin and Woolman would flourish a generation later. Fruits of Solitude is a collection of Franklinesque aphorisms, Writ for private satisfaction, and now publish'd for an Help to Human Conduct.

This means that each of the three books in Volume One were composed as private documents and made public out of some sense of authorial obligation. All three are deeply concerned with one question: How are we to live? Eliot seems to be outlining a theory of literature as primarily didactic. I expect the next year to test how such a theory holds up.

About Fruits of Solitude itself, I don't have all that much to say. Penn is a better writer by half than Woolman, and some of his reflections will stay with me for some time. But the most memorable tend to be the least practical. Knowledge is the Treasure, but Judgment the Treasurer of a wise man. This is wonderfully put, and true in its way, but what does one do with such a fact? How does one live with it? The answer, as far as I can tell, is that one saves it to drop at one's next dinner party. Armed with a few of these lines, you might become as much fun in company as Franklin famously was. Armed with all 299, you might become as much fun as Woolman.

A week into the Classics, I seem to be inching towards my own theory of didactic literature.

--CRB, January 7, 2007

Volume 2

The Apology, Phaedo and Crito of Plato

The three Platonic dialogues that begin Volume Two of the Harvard Classics comprise a kind of passion of Socrates. They begin with his trial and sentencing for corrupting Athenian youth. Then his disciple Crito attempts to convince Socrates to escape from his cell into exile, which prospect Socrates examines with rational disinterest before abandoning. Lastly, Phaedo recounts Socrates' last moments with his followers before he stoically accepts the hemlock that will kill him.

While the Republic is probably more important to the history of ideas, these are Plato's greatest narrative works, and they are the ones from which our popular image of Socrates stems. It helps, of course, that they have a built-in plotline lacking from most philosophy texts. But mostly they work as literature because of Socrates himself. Whatever his relation to his historical counterpart, the Socrates of these pages is a wonderful literary character, the kind of sly ironist we tend to think of as a particularly modern type.

The most powerful (and most famous) lines in these dialogues are Socrates' parting words to the court that has sentenced him:

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways--I to die, and you to live.  Which is better, God only knows.

God only knows seems like a pretty good summary of Socrates' worldview, at least as laid out here. By his own account, Socrates knew nothing, except that he knew nothing, but this one bit of knowledge put him ahead of most. His philosophy here is remarkably negative; he sets himself to "cross examination of the pretenders to wisdom," rather than to testimony on wisdom's behalf.

All this is to say that Socrates is intent on tearing down systems, but little troubled to build something in their place. Of course, this complaint is still leveled at ironists today (hence the short-lived, wishful insistence, after 9/11, that the Age of Irony had passed, as if irony were only as old as Joe Isuzu). Nobody wants to have their old truths destroyed, least of all if nothing is offered in their place. This may be Plato's most impressive literary achievement: however much we admire Socrates, we know just why certain Athenians wanted to put him to death.

The Golden Sayings of Epictetus 

There's probably no other writer whose place in the Classics is as secure as is Plato's. In fact, he seems like a logical starting point for the project, and so his presence here in Volume Two makes the decision to begin Volume One with Benjamin Franklin only more curious. At this point it's too early to tell what, if any, significance will be found in the order of the Classics, but already I see some connections between the first two volumes -- less obvious than those between the individuals works within each volume, but unmistakeable nonetheless.

The Golden Sayings of Epictetus bears surface resemblances to the maxims of Franklin and Penn collected in Volume One. But Epictetus -- a freed Roman slave and Stoic philosopher -- bears an obvious, acknowledged debt to Socrates and Plato.

Throughout his life, Socrates had a voice, an "oracle or sign," that spoke to him:

The sign is a voice that comes to me and always forbids me to do something which I am going to do, but never commands me to do anything.

Sometimes Epictetus sounds rather like this sign:

What then? do I say man is not made for an active life? Far from it! ... But there is a great difference between other men's occupations and ours ... A glance at theirs will make it clear to you. All day long they do nothing but calculate, contrive, consult how to wring their profit out of food-stuffs, farm-plots and the like ... Whereas, I entreat you to learn what the administration of the World is, and what place a Being endowed with reason holds therein: to consider what you are yourself, and wherein your Good and Evil consists.

Admittedly, he does command us to do something ("to learn" and "to consider"), but he cannot tell us what we are after in the end, cannot tell us wherein our Good and Evil consists.  Man can embody truth, Yeats said, but he cannot know it. This seems to me one of the central lessons of Socrates and of those, like Epictetus, who follow him faithfully: that knowledge is a process, not an object.

If that seems too abstract (or itself too objective), I'll add that the difference I'm talking about is roughly the difference between when Franklin says:

Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.

and when Epictetus says:

Above all remember that the door stands open.

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius seems to have spent much of his life considering wherein his Good and Evil consisted, and his Meditations represent the product of that consideration. He was a philosopher in the line of Plato by way of Epictetus, and he references both men frequently. To be sure, there's a good deal more in the way of positive injunction here, but it's always directed at Aurelius himself. As emperor of Rome -- the most powerful man in the known world -- he took great pains to remember "How soon will time cover all things, and how many it has covered already." If there is a single message to the Meditations it is this -- Before long, you'll be dead; for a short time after that, you might be remembered; then those who remember you will all be dead, too. Or, to put it more poetically:

Lucilla saw Verus die, and then Lucilla died. Secunda saw Maximus die, and then Secundus died. Epitynchanus saw Diotimus die, and then Epitynchanus died. Antoninus saw Faustina die, and then Antoninus died. Such is everything.

Almost two thousand years after his death, Marcus Aurelius is still remembered. All the more bracing to know he was probably right about his eventual obscurity. As I turned the pages of the Meditations in my hundred-year-old edition, they crumbled around the edges, leaving a kind of dust on my lap. Plato wrote about Socrates, and then Plato died. Epictetus wrote about Plato, and then Epictetus died. Aurelius wrote about Epictetus, and then Aurelius died. So here I am, writing about Aurelius. Such is everything.

--CRB, January 14, 2007

Volume 3

Essays, Civil and Moral & The New Atlantis by Francis Bacon

 

After all that Stoic reserve in Volume 2, it's almost refreshing to see Francis Bacon dedicate his collected essays to the Duke of Buckingham. Even better to find him insisting that these essays may last as long as books last. Socrates died an enemy of the state; Epictetus lived as a slave; even Marcus Aurelius, as Roman Emperor, attempted to stand apart from temporal matters; but Bacon is unmistakably a government functionary, and the obligations of this role are never far off in his essays. He reads like a kind of English Machiavelli. (I think.  Not that I've read the Prince, which is all the way off in Volume 36; ask me about it in September...)

Of course, Bacon is best known as the father of the modern scientific method. It may be that the real difference between his essays and, say, Plato's dialogues lies here: the Greek metaphysicians operate in an abstract field of thought, while empiricists like Bacon limit themselves to practical, testable assertions. There's no question which method works better in the natural sciences, but in the field of ethics, Bacon's results are decidedly mixed. Empiricists are experts in how things are, but can sometimes fall short in the matter of how things ought to be.

 

Of Love:

The stage is more beholding to love, than the life of man. For as to the stage, love is ever a matter of comedies, and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much mischief ... You may observe that amongst all the great and worthy persons (whereof the memory remaineth, either ancient of recent) there is not one that hath been transported to the mad degree of love: which shows that great spirits and great business do keep out this weak passion.

Of cunning:

If a man would cross a business that he doubts some other would handsomely and effectually move, let him pretend to wish it well, and move it himself in such sort as may foil it.

I don't know that some hip-hop star hasn't yet picked up Bacon, as others have Machiavelli and Sun-Tzu, but I highly recommend him. Here he is on keeping an entourage:

Costly followers are not to be liked; lest while a man maketh his train longer, he make his wings shorter.

On Great Place:

The rising unto place is laborious; and by pains men come to greater pains ... The standing is slippery, and the regress is either a downfall, or at least an eclipse, which is a melancholy thing.

Not as pithy, perhaps, as Mo Money, Mo Problems.  But you get the idea.

As for the New Atlantis, Bacon's unfinished vision of an ideal future state, it is easily the strangest thing I have read in the Classics so far. Given Bacon's legacy, the editors choose to emphasize the second half of the text, in which, in Eliot's words, we have Bacon the scientist indulging without restriction his prophetic vision of the future of human knowledge. But I was far more interested by the first half, which tells of Bacon's arrival at the unknown island of Bensalem and of the island's history, including its witness of a fiery cross in the sky within a generation of Jesus' death and the elaborate means by which the island has kept itself secret. For purposes of political science, this speculative narrative is completely gratuitous. I couldn't help thinking that Bacon, more than a century before Poe or Wells, had proven himself also the father of modern science fictions.

Areopagitica & Tractate on Education by John Milton

I expect to spend the next few days gorging myself on Milton (Volume Four: the Complete Poems in English), so I won't say much about him here. I read his Tractate on Education with great interest, hoping it might help illuminate Charles Eliot's own ideas on the topic, and with them his method in compiling the Classics. And I think they might have. Specifically, I suspect that the Classics' early emphasis on ethics, both practical and abstract, conforms to Milton's belief that The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright. On these questions, there will be much empirical evidence in the months to come, so I'll hold off on further speculation for now.

Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne

17th Century England -- the England of Bacon and Milton -- produced far more than its share of history's great prose writers in any language. Even in this company, Thomas Browne stands apart. Religio Medici, which outlines Browne's religious beliefs and the path by which he came to them, provided me the most sheerly delightful reading experience of the past few weeks. In my solitary and retired imagination, he writes, I remember I am not alone. And this is very much how I myself felt while reading him. Every time I began to think that his elaborate biblical cosmologies had little to tell me, a crystal of prose broke through. At the end of a long discourse on angels, bordering at times on the absurd, Browne concludes, in brief, conceive light invisible, and that is Spirit.

Browne was a medical doctor who combined Bacon's attention to the physical world with Milton's spiritual sense, and he believed this double vision was man's great gift:

Thus is man that great and true Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live, not onely like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds: for though there be but one sense, there are two to reason, the one visible and the other invisible.

I hesitate to admit this, but then I read these words, I felt like the page in front of me gave off an invisible light. Without reference to any religious doctrine, I can say that writers like Browne make sensible to me the invisible world. Though I may not occupy that world much of the time, at least I can sometimes be reminded that I am not alone.

--CRB, January 22, 2007

Volume 4

Complete Poems Written in English by John Milton

Milton's poems are the first true works of literature contained in the Classics, if we define literature as stuff I was forced to read in undergraduate English classes.  Granted, it's an approximate definition; but it's serviceable, I think.

The assumption that the full range of human discovery -- from philosophy to economics to physics -- could and, given time, would be expressed in literary form underlies the Five Foot Shelf. Over the past century of specialization, this assumption has been almost completely abandoned, and literature has increasingly been seen as just one of a number of competing modes of thinking and talking about the world. There's been much debate about the effects of this development; every few years seem to bring us a Jeremiah to warn that literature has become too self-reflexive, too little willing to grapple with big issues.  All of this is contrasted with an earlier, less self-conscious era, when literature wrestled with the angels.

And yet, while reading the poetry of John Milton over the past week, I was struck by how anxious much of it is, how uncertain and groping in its quest for proper material. Here are some lines from an early poem, addressed to the English language:

Hail Native Language, that by sinews weak,
Didst move my first-endeavouring tongue to speak,
And madest imperfect words, with childish trips,
Half unpronounced, slide through my infant lips,
(...)
I have some naked thoughts that rove about,
And loudly knock to have their passage out,
And, weary of their place, do only stay
Till thou hast decked them in thy best array;
That so they may, without suspect or fears,
Fly swiftly to this fair Assembly's ears.
Yet I had rather, if I were to choose,
Thy service in some graver subject use,
Such as may make thee search thy coffers round,
Before thou clothe my fancy in fit sound:

He seems, not long after this poem, to have found his graver subject, in The Passion, but just as this poem is getting somewhere, it's cut off with these words: This Subject the Author finding to be above the years he had when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished.

Not long after that comes On His Being Arrived to the Age of Twenty-Three:

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stolen on his wing my three and twentieth year!
  My hasting days fly on with full career,
  But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,
  That I to manhood am arrived so near,
  And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
  That some more timely-happy spirits indu'th.
Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
  It shall be still in strictest measure even
  To that same lot, however mean or high,
Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven,
  All is, if I have grace to use it so,
  As ever in my great Task-master's eye

Before this week, I had read this poem several times, but Milton's fear of the subtle theft of youth had never meant much to me -- perhaps because I hadn't yet felt the loss myself, or perhaps because I had the retroactive certainty that his late spring would indeed produce the greatness that he sought. In the context of his other early work, Milton's struggle felt far more real, more moving. I came to his odes L'Allegro and Il Penseroso -- one embracing Mirth in the face of Melancholy, the other choosing a deeper Melancholy over simple Joy -- which I had been taught to read as complementary.  I saw them instead as contradictory, as further marks of uneasiness over a proper poetic stance.

All of this indecision was complicated, of course, by Milton's loss of sight, as rendered in his most famous short poem, On His Blindness:

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide,
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,

And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait."

And so he stood and waited.  But of course his great subject did come, not long after this poem was written. And when he did decide to take Man's Fall, it must have seemed that it too had been waiting all along for him. It's now something of a critical truism to note that Satan is given all the best lines in Paradise Lost, but even this fact read differently to me this week. In the poem's second book, Satan addresses his congregation of fallen angels. But before he does, Milton offers this introduction:

Satan exalted sat, by merit raised
To that bad eminence; and, from despair
Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires
Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue
Vain war with Heaven; and, by success untaught,
His proud imaginations thus displayed:--

Insatiate to pursue vain war and by success untaught. For all his piety, Milton, blind now and still without the inner ripeness he'd first wished for 25 years earlier, must have felt very much like this as he began Paradise Lost.

--CRB, January 31, 2007

Volume 5

Essays and English Traits by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Charles Eliot, the editor of the Classics, was asked late in life to rank the ten greatest men of the past millennia. He placed Ralph Waldo Emerson on that short list. I'm not sure if this fact becomes more or less surprising when one knows that the two came from the same New England world and were separated by hardly more than a generation. (Emerson graduated from Harvard in the 1820s, Eliot in 1853.) The inclusion of a man from roughly one's own time and place on a list alongside Jesus Christ is itself an Emersonian gesture, for one of Emerson's chief credos was: "The sun shines to-day also."

Instructive, then, still early in my journey through these books, to read an essay like The American Scholar. Here is Emerson's take on the Classics:

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm.

Ouch. And I've only gotten through Bacon so far. I didn't feel all that meek before I started reading these essays, but I got there in a hurry. Though of course it's not really that Emerson doesn't care for books:

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire.

As I understand it, he means inspire here in that strict etymological sense of bringing forth breath.  For Emerson, everything good is within us.  The external is good insofar as it draws the internal to us: That is always best which gives me to myself.

I must admit I found it jarring to be reminded of a time when people seemed too quick to depend on tradition, too little willing to trust in themselves. Our age is retrospective, Emerson writes.  Maybe so, but ours is certainly not, in part because we have so absorbed the lessons of our great American prophet of Self-Reliance. Emerson didn't, in fact, advocate going it alone, but rather a robust relationship with the world that brings out the best in oneself.

Truly speaking, Emerson writes, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. And Emerson does provoke a reader who turns to the Classics as some shelter from contemporary society. These books can tell you nothing, he seems to say, that isn't already in you and around you.

There is a paradox here, which is that Emerson, by his own lights, can't even teach us to turn inwards. We must learn from ourselves to teach ourselves. For which I have no answer. Enough to say that I come out of reading Emerson feeling less meek. (Though still looking forward to Cicero and Locke.)

--CRB, February 7, 2007

Volume 6

Poems and Songs by Robert Burns

The Classics feature three book-length poems -- the Aeneid, the Odyssey, and the Divine Comedy -- and three more volumes covering the English poetic tradition from Chaucer to Whitman. But only two poets are given entire volumes for their collected poems: Milton and Burns. By my rough count, the 600 pages in Burns' volume are more than are given to any other single author. From the time I first became interested in the Five Foot Shelf, I have puzzled over this fact, which seems completely out of step with Burns' poetic reputation.

As it happens, Burns' indifference to such a reputation -- to his place among the Classics -- emerges over these pages as one of his great charms.  As he writes in Stanzas on Naething:

The Poet may jingle and rhyme,
  In hopes of a laureate wreathing,
And when he has wasted his time,
  He's kindly rewarded wi'-naething.

Or, from Epistle to James Smith:

Some rhyme a neibor's name to lash;
Some rhyme (vain thought!) for needfu' cash;
Some rhyme to court the countra clash,
                      An' raise a din;
For me, an aim I never fash;
                      I rhyme for fun.

While Milton struggled to find a subject to match his ambitions, Burns wrote about the death of a neighbor's horse or being offered a newspaper subscription. His most famous lines (the best-laid schemes o' mice an' men...) were written upon accidently destroying a rodent's nest. My favorite of these poems was inspired by Burns' seeing a pretty girl open her missal in church:

Epigram to Miss Ainslie in Church

Fair maid, you need not take the hint,
  Nor idle texts pursue:
'Twas guilty sinners that he meant,
  Not Angels such as you.

This poetry of everyday life was a breakthrough that had a great influence on the Romantics and others who followed Burns. For my part, I was reminded often of one of my favorite modern poets, Frank O'Hara. Of his poetic school, Personism, O'Hara wrote:

It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It's a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents.

By the time I finished this volume, I'd come to think of Burns as a kind of anticipatory Personist. The letter was the pre-modern equivalent of the phone call, and many of Burns' poems are epistolary. Others are humorously occasional in the mode of O'Hara's Lana Turner Has Collapsed.  Toss-offs with titles like Lines written on a Bank-note reminded me of O'Hara's Lunch Poems. If O'Hara has one advantage for me, it's that he writes mostly in English, which I happen to read, as opposed to Scottish, which I don't. Here is one of Burns' most O'Hara-esque poems:

Versified Reply to an Invitation

SIR,
Yours this moment I unseal,
  And faith I'm gay and hearty!
To tell the truth and shame the deil,
  I am as fou as Bartie:
But Foorsday, sir, my promise leal,
  Expect me o' your partie,
If on a beastie I can speel,
  Or hurl in a cartie.
YOURS,

ROBERT BURNS.

MAUCHLIN, Monday night, 10 o'clock.

It took me a bit of work with the glossary before I was able to put together the following paraphrase: Just got your invite.  Thanks.  I'm wasted as hell right now, but if I can find a ride and sober up by Thursday, count me in.

It's fitting that Burns' most famous work, Auld Lang Syne, is sung every year by a bunch of sentimental drunk people with their arms around each other, because this seems to be more-or-less the lifestyle Burns preferred. I'm still not convinced he deserves a volume of his own -- a few dozen of these poems might have been enough -- but it's nice to be reminded that literature is not just good for understanding life, but for enjoying it.

--CRB, February 14, 2007

Volume 7

The Confessions of Saint Augustine

The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis

"Give me chastity and continence," St. Augustine famously prayed, "but not yet." This "but not yet" suggests the central conflict of the Confessions, the plight of one who has come intellectually to understand something that he can't yet give himself over to emotionally. Augustine, who admired St. Paul above all religious writers, had no single "road to Damascus" moment. Instead, he moved incrementally -- almost asymptotically, it seemed to me at times while reading the Confessions -- towards salvation.

Most of these steps along the way center somehow on reading. The Confessions represents, among other things, a life lived in books. Thus Augustine's early preference for Latin over Greek is seen as a mark of youthful waywardness:

For what more miserable than a miserable being who commiserates not himself; weeping the death of Dido for love to Aeneas, but weeping not his own death for want of love to Thee, O God.

Eventually, he makes it to the Greeks (by way of translation), which proves a major step in his development:

But having then read those books of the Platonists, and thence been taught to search for incorporeal truth, I saw Thy invisible things, understood by those things which are made...Upon these [books], I believe, Thou therefore willedst that I should fall, before I studied Thy Scriptures, that it might be imprinted on my memory how I was affected by them.

It is only a short step then to Paul's Epistles, though even reading these is not at first enough to cause a definitive change in Augustine's life. The conversion comes, when it does, as Augustine sits weeping under a fig tree.

So I was speaking and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when lo! I heard from a neighbouring house a voice, as of a boy or girl, I know not, chanting, and oft repeating, "Take up and read; Take up and read." ... Eagerly then I returned to the place where ... had I laid the volume of the Apostle when I arose thence. I seized, opened, and in silence read that section on which my eyes first fell: Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision from the flesh, in concupiscence. No further would I read; nor needed I: for instantly at the end of this sentence, by a light as it were of serenity infused into my heart, all the darkness of doubt vanished away.

The Confessions are animated throughout by the idea that reading can change one's life, that books can make invisible things understandable to those things which are made. Needless to say, I was put in mind of my own reading this year, which has already brought me through Plato and will bring me to the Aeneid before long. But here we are given a new idea: that one might find somewhere the precise words one has been looking for through all these books, and so reach an end to reading. And I almost hoped it would be so.

But not yet.

--CRB, February 23, 2007

Volume 8

Agamemnon, The Libation-Bearers,
The Furies, & Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus

Oedipus the King & Antigone of Sophocles

Hippolytus & The Bacchae of Euripides

The Frogs of Aristophanes

Briefly: Before leading the Greeks against Troy, Agamemnon is forced to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, to assure the favor of the gods in battle. Upon his triumphant (and unlikely) return, he is killed by his wife Clytemnestra as revenge for this sacrifice. Seems reasonable enough, except that she has been aided in the killing by her lover, Aegisthus, who has his own beef with Agamemnon (which involves fathers' being made to eat the meat of their sons). Eventually, Clytemnestra's son, Orestes, takes revenge on his mother for his father's death. Unlike Agamemnon's murder, this is a blood-kin killing, typically treated particularly harshly by the gods. But when it comes time for the Furies to take revenge on Orestes, Athena intercedes on his behalf, and the Athenian rule of law is born.

So much for plot summary. Though it doesn't have the same place in the popular imagination as the Oedipus cycle (I have no doubt that someone has defined the "Oresteian Complex," but it lacks that incestuous hook), Aeschylus' Oresteia -- comprised of Agamemnon, The Libation-Bearers and The Furies -- represents the high point of Greek tragedy.

What makes it better? Greek tragedies are famous for their fatalism, but fate operates here differently than it does in Sophocles or Euripides. Oedipus goes to great lengths to avoid his fate, but the prophecy is nonetheless fulfilled by improbable means. Here, fate is almost indistinguishable from free will: Agamemnon wants something (the gods' support in battle) and he must knowingly make a sacrifice to get it. Though his tragic fall stems from a long-standing curse on the House of Atreus, his own actions bring it directly about. Orestes is told by gods and oracles that he must avenge his father; having been told, he must commit the act with open eyes.

Above all, Aeschylus is a moralist, and his treatment of fate is designed to allow for this morality:

Lo! sin by sin and sorrow dogg'd by sorrow--
   And who the end can know?
The slayer of today shall die tomorrow--
   The wage of wrong is woe.
While Time shall be, while Zeus in heaven is lord,
   His law is fixed and stern;
On him that wrought shall vengeance be outpoured--
   The tides of doom return.
The children of the curse abide within
   These halls of high estate--
And none can wrench from off the home of sin
   The clinging grasp of fate.

This morality still exists by the time we get to Sophocles, but it's been undermined considerably. Oedipus is rash in announcing the banishment of Laertes' murderer, and rash in seeking knowledge that others insist he would be happier without. But for the most part, he can't be blamed for actions (like marrying a widowed queen to whom he might have borne a slight resemblence) whose significance he can't have understood. There is the growing sense, in Sophocles, that life is rigged against us no matter how well we act:

From hence the lesson draw,
To reckon no man happy till ye see
The closing day; until he pass the bourn
Which severs life from death, unscathed by woe.

This progression is more or less completed by Euripides, the last of the great writers of Greek tragedy. Euripides is the most modern of three -- which is to say, the least Greek. His characters -- even the gods -- are recognizably human; they act and talk more like real people do. Often, the drama stems not from fate but from a Faulknerian human heart in conflict with itself. The characters are not types, and their suffering isn't meant to teach us any greater lesson than that this is how life sometimes is. In Euripides, as in neither of his predecessors, Grecian gods like Dionysus and Aphrodite are themselves frivolous and misguided. Obeying a god may lead to grave mistakes. When Hippolytus is punished for his failure to worship Aphrodite, for example, this punishment reflects more on her than on him.

This development from Aeschylus to Sophocles to Euripides happened in little more than a generation, and must have been startling for those who lived to see it. Depending on your view, it represents either a great advance or a degeneration. I came away from these plays uncertain of which. Thus, it was a deft editorial stroke to cap these tragedies with one comedy: Aristophanes' The Frogs. Aristophanes, conservative by nature, came down naturally on the side of Aeschylus. After Euripides' death, he wrote this play, about a trip to Hades to crown the best of these three tragedians.

Here Aeschylus and Euripides duke it out:

EURIPIDES:
I showed them scenes of common life, the things we know and see,
Where any blunder would at once by all detected be.
I never blustered on, or took their breath and wits away.
...

AESCHYLUS:
For just consider what style of men he received from me, great six-foot-high
Heroical souls, who never would blench from a townsman's duties in peace or war;
Not idle loafers, or low buffoons, or rascally scamps such as now they are,
But men who were breathing spears and helms, and the snow-white plume in its crested pride,
The greave, and the dart, and the warrior's heart in its seven-fold casing of tough bull-hide.

We now tend to prefer the art that gives us life as it is to the art that tells us how life ought to be, particularly if that ought involves men breathing spears. But suppose Aeschylus and Artistophanes are right? What if we too are children of the curse, and the form our curse takes is that there is no one left to tell us we are cursed?

A LESS PORTENTOUS CLOSING NOTE: My friend Ted asked that I note along the way those volumes of the Classics that I would recommend to a reader who will likely only have time for a handful of the fifty-one. With that in mind, I'm naming Volume Eight: Nine Greek Dramas as the first Ted-Should-Read-This pick from The Whole Five Feet.

--CRB, February 28, 2007

Volume 9

On Friendship, On Old Age & Letters by Cicero

In introducing Cicero's writings, the editors of the Harvard Classics give a brief overview of the historical events -- the Roman Civil War, the assassination of Julius Caesar, the emergence of Marc Antony and Octavian, and the birth of the Roman Empire -- that dominated Cicero's public life. The editors conclude: The evils which were were undermining the Republic bear so many striking resemblances to those which threaten the civic and national life of America to-day that the interest of the period is by no means merely historical.  To which I found myself responding, Wha?

Of course, this note of alarmist presentism would be nearly required of a contemporary academic introducing a Penguin Classic. But these words were written in 1909, in a period one thinks of now as the calm before the great conflagrations of the last century. I'm guessing the reference here is to the assassination of McKinley and to Teddy Roosevelt's subsequent expansion of executive power. But that's only a hunch. All of which goes to show something, I suppose, though I'm not sure what...

On to the volume itself, of which the most striking moment occurs in Cicero's letter to Lucius Lucceius, a friend who had retired from public life to write a history of Rome:

I am inflamed with an inconceivably ardent desire, and one, as I think, of which I have no reason to be ashamed, that in a history written by you my name should be conspicuous and frequently mentioned with praise. [...] I am quite aware, however, what little modesty I display, first, in imposing on you so heavy a burden (for your engagements may well prevent your compliance with my request), and in the second place, in asking you to shew me off to advantage. What if those transactions are not in your judgment so very deserving of commendation? Yet, after all, a man who has once passed the border-line of modesty had better put a bold face on it and be frankly impudent. And so I again and again ask you outright, both to praise those actions of mine in warmer terms than you perhaps feel, and in that respect to neglect the laws of history.

If I might engage in my own act of presentism: I doubt that even Karl Rove would have the chutzpah to address a letter like this to Roger Ailes (though perhaps he wouldn't have to). But what makes the request so fascinating is not just its audacity, but its historical irony. Cicero's public life was ultimately a total mess, and he's rather lucky that the 21st-century layman knows little of it. Instead, Cicero is remembered for precisely the thing that another writer couldn't possibly have saved for posterity: his prose style. As an orator and as a writer, Cicero is the greatest master of the Latin tongue.

And here is where the problems with this volume begin. For centuries, Cicero's work has been set as an example to students of Latin -- the editors of the Five Foot Shelf likely among them. But the days when ancient languages were a defining element of liberal education are long over. The Harvard Classics themselves, which are collected entirely in English and for which many new translations were specifically commissioned, recognize as much. And it seems to me that Cicero's writings, at least the ones collected here, lose a good deal of their interest in translation. To be sure, there are some striking moments, but the overall effect is one of long stretches of tedium marked by brief flashes of brilliance. I suspect I wouldn't feel this way if I were capable of reading the original.

One of the driving principles of the Harvard Classics is that our literary heritage is available to any reader willing to open the right books. And yet it may be that in our monoglotic culture the true grandeur of a stylist like Cicero is only available to specialists. If so, I'm sure Cicero would encourage the rest of us to continue to praise him in warmer terms than we feel.

Letters by Pliny the Younger

Pliny the Younger was born about a hundred years after Cicero's death, and he lived in a calmer political era. He served the Emperor Trajan at the height of the Empire's reach. As a writer, Pliny modeled himself on Cicero. He is every bit as concerned with his legacy: Others may think as they please; but the happiest man, in my opinion, is he who lives in the conscious anticipation of an honest and enduring name.  He even went so far as to make a similar request to a contemporary historian (although without suggesting that he neglect the laws of history). Some of the same problems of style and translation plague his letters as collected here, but I found them far more fun to read than Cicero's. There are more Vestal virgins here, more sooth-sayers, more gladiators. These letters include not one but two examples of wives killing themselves just so that their husbands will have the courage to do the same. Also, there are descriptions of back-scratching literary readings that will amuse anyone who has spent time in a graduate writing program.

But most of all, I prefer Pliny because he tells a better ghost story:

There was at Athens a large and roomy house, which had a bad name, so that no one could live there. In the dead of the night a noise, resembling the clashing of iron, was frequently heard, which, if you listened more attentively, sounded like the rattling of chains, distant at first, but approaching nearer by degrees: immediately afterwards a spectre appeared in the form of an old man, of extremely emaciated and squalid appearance, with a long beard and dishevelled, hair, rattling the chains on his feet and hands. The distressed occupants meanwhile passed their wakeful nights under the most dreadful terrors imaginable. This, as it broke their rest, ruined their health, and brought on distempers, their terror grew upon them, and death ensued. Even in the daytime, though the spirit did not appear, yet the impression remained so strong upon their imaginations that it still seemed before their eyes, and kept them in perpetual alarm. Consequently the house was at length deserted, as being deemed absolutely uninhabitable; so that it was now entirely abandoned to the ghost. However, in hopes that some tenant might be found who was ignorant of this very alarming circumstance, a bill was put up, giving notice that it was either to be let or sold. It happened that Athenodorus the philosopher came to Athens at this time, and, reading the bill, enquired the price. The extraordinary cheapness raised his suspicion; nevertheless, when he heard the whole story, he was so far from being discouraged that he was more strongly inclined to hire it, and, in short, actually did so. When it grew towards evening, he ordered a couch to be prepared for him in the front part of the house, and, after calling for a light, together with his pencil and tablets, directed all his people to retire. But that his mind might not, for want of employment, be open to the vain terrors of imaginary noises and spirits, he applied himself to writing with the utmost attention. The first part of the night passed in entire silence, as usual; at length a clanking of iron and rattling of chains was heard: however, he neither lifted up his eyes nor laid down his pen, but, in order to keep calm and collected, tried to pass the sounds off to himself as something else. The noise increased and advanced nearer, till it seemed at the door, and at last in the chamber. He looked up, saw, and recognized the ghost exactly as it had been described to him: it stood before him, beckoning with the finger, like a person who calls another. Athenodorus in reply made a sign with his hand that it should wait a little, and threw his eyes again upon his papers; the ghost then rattled its chains over the head of the philosopher, who looked up upon this, and seeing it beckoning as before, immediately arose, and, light in hand, followed it. The ghost slowly stalked along, as if encumbered with its chains, and, turning into the area of the house, suddenly vanished. Athenodorus, being thus deserted, made a mark with some grass and leaves on the spot where the spirit left him. The next day he gave information to the magistrates, and advised them to order that spot to be dug up. This was accordingly done, and the skeleton of a man in chains was found there; for the body, having lain a considerable time in the ground, was putrefied and mouldered away from the fetters. The bones, being collected together, were publicly buried, and thus after the ghost was appeased by the proper ceremonies, the house was haunted no more.

--CRB, March 11, 2007

Volume 10

Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

There's a classic genre of beer commercial, especially popular during football games and (now) during March Madness, that involve white men of about my age who go to great lengths -- picking up murderous hitchhikers; beaning their friends with rocks -- in order to get their hands on a bottle of beer (it's almost always a bottle, I've noticed, though the ads are for the kinds of beers one often drinks from a can). Of course, I've always recognized that these ads are stupid -- after all, no matter how much you want another beer, you can probably buy a six pack around the corner for ten bucks -- but now that I've read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, I have a whole new way to talk about what's stupid about them.

Before reading Smith, I would have said that the true value of any commodity is whatever price is set for it on the open market. I would further have said that this value is determined by supply and demand. And I would have thought that these ideas had been first articulated by Smith himself in Wealth of Nations. But I would have been wrong about all of this. As I learned this week, Smith believed that the real value of a commodity has nothing to do with how much people want it. Rather, the real value consists of the cost of the labor required to make it, plus a proportional share of the rent of the land on which it was grown or made, plus a reasonable profit on the capital provided for its growth or manufacture. The job of the free market, of supply and demand, is to assure that the nominal value (how much money the commodity actual costs the consumer) gravitates towards this real value. And so, among the many things that is stupid about cutting a hole in the back of your neighbor's refrigerator is that, by the time he gets wise and stops putting Bud in there, you will have elevated the market price of beer above the natural price.

I realize that this is all painfully obvious to anyone who has ever taken Econ 101, but as it happens, I never did, which is one of the reasons I've had this week circled on my calendar ever since I started reading the Classics. Most of the books I'll be reading this year -- The Iliad, for example, or Don Quixote -- offer, above all, an experience. To the extent that they have something to teach, it is something on the order of wisdom; one doesn't read the Divine Comedy to learn what happens to the Pilgrim. The Wealth of Nations, however, like Darwin's Origin of Species or the Scientific Papers of Louis Pasteur or a small handful of other books that await me in the coming months, has knowledge to impart, and it is primarily for the sake of this knowledge that it is still read. It happens that almost all of these works are in fields -- evolutionary biology, chemistry, economics -- about which I'm pretty much entirely ignorant. So I've been looking forward to learning what these books, beginning with this one, have to teach me.

The other side of this coin, of course, is that such books weren't written to be treated as experiences. In fact, Wealth of Nations is a famously brutal read. And this is another reason I've had it in my sight for months. But I have to say I didn't find it so bad. I have no doubt that a book will come along sooner or later that is 500 miserable pages (I start Darwin tomorrow), but this one wasn't it. I learned perhaps more about the price in pounds sterling of rare birds in eighteenth century England than I needed to know, but I also learned about some things, like free trade between nations, that are at least as relevant now as they were then. And I learned why, so long as we're willing to pay as much for a beer as it costs to make it and get it to us, we probably don't need to throw rocks at anyone's head.

--CRB, March 19, 2007