(posts) a quote from Middlemarch by George Eliot (true name Mary Anne Evans)

"That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity."

 

something about "The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway"

This collection is divided into three parts; some stories go together like a series. I especially enjoyed the random excerpts, such as "One Reader Writes." Here, Hemingway exhibits the empathy only a writer could capture. 

My favorite Hemingway short story in this collection is "I guess Everything Reminds You of Something." The heaviness of meaning and relevance in this story, which, unsurprisingly, is an easy read, will force any reader to pause.

Note: I read an edition labeled "The Finca Vidia Edition."

something about "On Writing Well," by William Zinsser

On Writing Well was American writer and teacher William Zinsser's attempt to capture the nonfiction writing course he taught at Yale. The book's most useful parts come in the first nine chapters, which need only 66 pages in my 2016 Harper edition. I very much like Zinsser's approach because I think coaching good writing (teaching good writing is usually impossible) has much, much more to do with focusing on principles rather than mechanics. Zinsser stresses the basics: simplicity, cutting words, and rewriting. In addition to principles, Zinsser relays a few anecdotes, and he quotes examples of good nonfiction writing. Among the best tips he offers are to read aloud what you write and approach writing as a process rather than a means to a product.

Zinsser calls nonfiction writing a craft; he even calls On Writing Well a craft book. I wish he had explored this claim further. He does not define craft or contrast it with art.

The latter chapters of On Writing Well mostly focus on particulars about specific forms of nonfiction writing, like the memoir, travel writing, interviews, and so on. The book's earlier chapters are not only more useful, I found them to be better written. Zinsser gets too conversational for me as the book pushes on.

Notes:

• This book reminds me of my other favorite book about writing, Writing with Style, by John Trimble.
• On Writing Well was first published in 1976; Zinsser updated the book as times and technology changed. Zinsser died in 2015 at age 92.

something from "Bartleby, the Scrivener" by Herman Melville

"Bartleby, the Scrivener" is one of my favorite pieces of writing. The story's themes of isolation, conformity, and human folly echo loudly. But it is Melville's humor that I heard clearly during my most recent reading. My favorite passage comes when the lawyer, after dismissing Bartleby on a Friday, returns to work Monday morning to find his scrivener still occupying the office. The lawyer, narrating, begins thinking through his next move:

“Not gone!” I murmured at last. But again obeying that wondrous ascendancy which the inscrutable scrivener had over me, and from which ascendancy, for all my chafing, I could not completely escape, I slowly went downstairs and out into the street, and while walking round the block, considered what I should next do in this unheard-of perplexity. Turn the man out by an actual thrusting I could not; to drive him away by calling him hard names would not do; calling in the police was an unpleasant idea; and yet, permit him to enjoy his cadaverous triumph over me,—this too I could not think of. What was to be done? or, if nothing could be done, was there anything further that I could assume in the matter? Yes, as before I had prospectively assumed that Bartleby would depart, so now I might retrospectively assume that departed he was. In the legitimate carrying out of this assumption, I might enter my office in a great hurry, and pretending not to see Bartleby at all, walk straight against him as if he were air. Such a proceeding would in a singular degree have the appearance of a home-thrust. It was hardly possible that Bartleby could withstand such an application of the doctrine of assumptions. But upon second thoughts the success of the plan seemed rather dubious. I resolved to argue the matter over with him again.

will she ever stop talking?

There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
creeps in this petty pace from day to day
to the last syllable of recorded time,
and all our yesterdays have lighted fools
the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
that struts and frets his hour upon the stage
and then is heard no more: it is a tale
told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing.

one of many things about Camus' "The Stranger"

(aka "The Outsider" or "L’Étranger")

Albert Camus' The Stranger begins with the main character, Meursault, attending to his mother's funeral. He resumes his life the day after the funeral, but quite soon kills a man in cold blood, apparently, and stands trial. It is not so much his murderous act, but rather his earlier callousness and inexplicable behavior after his mother's death that are used as evidence to convict him.

It's boilerplate to say Camus' The Stranger depicts a brand of existentialism. But even so, Meursault is not readily understood, though, oddly enough, he's completely relatable. Maybe this is because he also personifies another philosophy--one we all have but hate to admit to, a way of life that does not always seem conventionally noble: Pragmatism. 

The novella first casts pragmatism as universal, a view everyone adopts at one time or another.* Then, pragmatism, in all its beauty and brutishness, is contrasted with and convicted by lofty, often unrealistic ideals like nobility and justice.

Here are examples of how pragmatism is depicted as a quite ordinary mode of life, as universal: In accepting his mother's death, Meursault says, "The funeral will bring it home to me, put an official seal on it, so to speak ... " (p. 2). When he arrives at the retirement home chapel, the caretaker is too busy to greet him right away; then, when he arrives, Meursault immediately asks to see mother's body, but the caretaker has already rested the lid on the coffin. When asked, Meursault declines to have the lid removed for viewing. Here, the "official seal" is already on, and he need not see the body for repeated closure. His not viewing the body is later deemed criminal. But, meanwhile, the warden denies the other retirement home residents access to much of the ceremony because death, he says, puts them "in a nervous state for two or three days. Which means, of course, extra work and worry for our staff" (p. 4). The whole sequence goes on like this, Meursault just going through motions and the staff joining him and cutting corners of their own. In this way pragmatism is first cast as universal--everyone seeks their own convenience much of the time.

When retold in the courtroom, it is Meursault's behavior, not everyone else's, that is reexamined--reexamined out of context. And behavior that was previously all too human is on second thought deemed inhumane.

* Pragmatism may be easily confused with, and, in a sense, interchangeable with selfishness.

Notes: 

• On the matter of mourning: Meursault doesn't give much sign of mourning for his mother. But the novel shows that mourning is usually centered on oneself rather than the deceased--you mourn your own loss, not the death of the other. For example, when an elderly woman cries at the wake, the caretaker explains, "She was devoted to your mother. She says your mother was her only friend in the world, and now she's all alone" (p. 12). This is the only person who cries throughout. Compare this scene to one later in the novella in which Meursault's neighbor loses his dog and suffers for it; on the suggestion that the pound might euthanize the mutt, the neighbor, Salamano, is quoted as saying, "'They won't really take him from me, will they, Monsieur Meursault? Surely they wouldn't do a thing like that. If they do, I don't know what will become of me'" (p. 50). Then, after Meursault and Salamano return to their respective rooms, we hear Meursault thinking, "Through the wall there came to me a little wheezing sound, and I guessed that he (Salamano) was weeping. For some reason, I don't know what, I began thinking of mother" (p. 50). And, on the astonishing final page, Meursault speaks again of this mourning, judging it so: "With death so near, Mother have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life all over again. No one, no one in the world had any right to weep for her" (p. 154). 

• The murder is still a bit of a mystery, though not entirely. 

A favorite line:

On leaving another neighbor's apartment drunk on wine:

After closing the door behind me I lingered for some moments on the landing. The whole building was quiet as the grave, a dank, dark smell rising from the well hole of the stairs. I could hear nothing but the blood throbbing in my ears, and for a while I stood still, listening to it. Then the dog began to moan in old Salamano's room, and, through the sleep-bound house the little plaintive sound rose slowly, like a flower growing out of the silence and the darkness (p. 42).

Humanities

In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky was given the prompt, "In your new book, you suggest that many components of human nature are just too complicated to be really researchable." He replied,

That's a pretty normal phenomenon. Take, say, physics, which restricts itself to extremely simple questions. If a molecule becomes too complex, they hand it over to the chemists. If it becomes too complex for them, they hand it to biologists. And if the system is too complex for them, they hand it to psychologists ... and so on until it ends up in the hands of historians or novelists. As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.