Happiness is...

... reading Pride and Prejudice, which I've just done for the squillionth time. What sprang out at me this time was how much of the book is about happiness. The word ‘happiness’ appears 74 times and the word 'happy’ 84 times in the book. We tend to think that Jane Austen's all about social mores or moralities, and the correction of behaviour through painful experience, but I wonder if she sees these simply as structures put in place to secure or guarantee individual happiness. Charlotte Lucas sacrifices happiness in order to obtain the socially valuable goods of household and status. Elizabeth on the other hand rejects the same offer of social stability in favor of personal happiness and is ultimately rewarded. Her resolve to act in a manner that will constitute her own happiness without reference to Lady Catherine's strict preservation of the distinctions of rank makes her an appealing heroine and ultimately delivers Mr Darcy into her hands.  In Sense and Sensibility, Elinor's constant caution is a means of guarding her personal happiness, rather than simply of obeying social codes, and Marianne provides an example of the pain that ensues when codes are flouted and happiness is squandered on undeserving objects. 

Vale Frank Kermode

This is a belated note on the death of influential English critic Frank Kermode.  I've always enjoyed his writing. He was one of those old school critics who really loved literature and though at times he was at odds with the broad trends of post-modern criticism, by saying what he really thought, he reached a stature where he could say what he really thought and people listened.  He was also one of the founders of the London Review of Books, which has been printing not a few obituaries since his death some weeks ago. Here's a nice one.

Burn me!

I've been following the story of Florida pastor Terry Jones with interest. On the news this morning I heard he's decided not to host a Koran burning on 11 September, after receiving requests, warnings and opprobrium from various senior figures, including the Pope, President Obama, Hillary Clinton and even Sarah Palin.  What disturbs me about the response to his outrageous proposal was that so much of it was focused on possible recriminations. His gesture was criticised more because of its inflammatory propensities in an already volatile global environment than because book burning itself is a vile and alarming act. His right to burn the books was even defended by New York mayor Michael Bloomburg, who said the 'distasteful' gesture was an exercise of the pastor's first amendment right to freedom of speech. Whether or not setting fire to something constitutes 'speech', in the twentieth century at least, book burning has been rightly viewed as a signal of descent into ignorance, barbarism and violence. It is a refusal to engage the mind or the heart; ironically, it is a denial of the human freedom to think and feel.  An act of provocation, it is also fundamentally an act of illiteracy. It reveals a misapprehension of what books are and how they work. The burning of books is the rage of the fool against what he does not understand.

To mark this sorry episode, here's Bertolt Brecht's sardonic poem on "The Burning of Books."

When the Regime commanded that books with harmful knowledge
Should be publicly burned and on all sides
Oxen were forced to drag cartloads of books
To the bonfires, a banished
Writer, one of the best, scanning the list of the Burned, was shocked to find that his
Books had been passed over. He rushed to his desk
On wings of wrath, and wrote a letter to those in power ,
Burn me! he wrote with flying pen, burn me! Haven’t my books
Always reported the truth ? And here you are
Treating me like a liar! I command you!
Burn me!

All art is a revolt against man’s fate

So said Andre Malraux, French adventure and statesman, and author of the 1933 novel Man's Fate.  I read this quote in Don Watson's Obama essay in The Monthly (June), and it's stayed with me. I think it's profoundly true.

Art and revolt seem synonymous in modernism, but what about grand old art, trundling in the broad furrows of classicism, or floating in the current of conformity? Yes, even this kind of art is revolting in its way.

Whatever other fates we can think of - the fate of meaninglessness in tragic isolation, the fate of biology in the black comedy of marriage - the commonest fate is death. Art - all art - is a revolt against death.

It's a way of recording what's constantly slipping away from us. It's an attempt to fix in space and time what is fundamentally unfixable. It's an attempt to aggrandise what we know is subject at last to indignity. Art is a shot at eternity.

I wonder if our general cultural failure at memento mori accounts for our (general) lack of interest in art. Or perhaps, vice versa.  When we entrust eternity to scientists and cosmeticians, art is aimless and death becomes revolting.

We keep the wall between us

Since I had occasion to misquote this Robert Frost poem “Mending Wall” some days ago, I thought we could visit it entire today. I like Frost because he's something between the frontiersman and the farmer. You can feel the countryside in his quiet tread; hear the gentle but reclusive neighbourliness in his wry voice.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
He is all pine and I am apple-orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down!” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

I also enjoyed his appearance with Krusty the Clown in 1963:

Robert Frost: [reading] “He will not see me stopping here, to watch his woods fill up with snow...”
Krusty: Hey, Frosty! You want some snow, man?
[He pulls a bellrope, and an avalanche of fake snow is dumped on Frost]
Robert Frost: We discussed this, and I said no.

You can feel the gentle and reclusive wryness in Krusty's voice.