Unhealthy and o'erdarkened ways

After last year’s parade of horrors, I began this year hopefully. In spite of the world’s wild entropy, this would be a year of calm flourishing. I made my usual list: more yoga, more vegetables, more beauty.  I might still reach for my phone as soon as my eyes opened, but I would read poetry, not politics.

But the bad news centrifuge is strong, and so are the outcry and uproar that hourly spout from the internet’s blowhole. Before it was a month old, this year seemed worse than the one before. Calm flourishing seemed quixotic. 

Of course, outcry is the right response when civil society suddenly descends to the eighth circle of hell.  And yes, Danish coziness is probably insidious. But the lie of life online is that it resembles life at all; that you can sustain the rage it makes room for, or be sustained by it. Being immersed in the stream, the feed, is not the same as being engaged. It's at best a distraction; at worst, it's outrage as recreation. 

If I sound insular, it’s because last year I felt as though the walls around my inner life were too thin. So much of what I consumed was not nourishing. So much of what consumed me was gone within a week, sometimes less. This year, I wanted to resist that lure. I wanted to spend time in places of restorative quiet and beauty, and on things that will still matter a year, or a hundred years, from now. I believe that's a way to flourish, but it's also a way to see the stream, the feed, for what they are — to see how small they are. 

A month in, I haven't kept those resolutions. But the year is young. There's still time to find those quiet bowers beauty keeps for us. 

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: 
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. 
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth, 
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days, 
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all, 
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon, 
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
’Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake, 
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms: 
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead; 
All lovely tales that we have heard or read: 
An endless fountain of immortal drink, 
Pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink.

Keats, from Endymion (1818).

An incandescent fall

Down he came from up,
and in from out,
and here from there.
A long leap,
an incandescent fall
from magnificent
to naked, frail, small,
through space,
between stars,
into our chill night air,
shrunk, in infant grace,
to our damp, cramped
earthy place
among all
the shivering sheep.

And now, after all,
there he lies,
fast asleep.

(Luci Shaw) 

Anniversary

I wish I could remember that first day,
First hour, first moment of your meeting me, 
If bright or dim the season, it might be
Summer or Winter for aught I can say;
So unrecorded did it slip away,
So blind was I to see and to foresee,
So dull to mark the budding of my tree
That would not blossom yet for many a May.
If only I could recollect it, such
A day of days! I let it come and go
As traceless as a thaw of bygone snow;
It seemed to mean so little, meant so much;
If only now I could recall that touch,
First touch of hand in hand – Did one but know!

(Christina Rossetti)

On Emma

Counting from its actual publication date of December 1815, or from the date on the frontispeice of 1816, Emma is now 200 years old. Looking back through these pages I find I haven’t had much to say about it, but I’ve read it about as often as the others, and more than Northanger Abbey, which I never read at all. The book’s first line describes its heroine as ‘handsome, clever and rich.’ It’s not too much of a stretch to say that that description fits Emma as well as it does Emma. This novel is handsome: it shares with Persuasion the elegance and assurance of Austen’s mature style. It’s also very clever, in more ways than one, and richly sown with secrets: the more you look, the more you see. The use of games and charades is one kind of cleverness, but there’s another kind altogether in the way the storytelling works. It’s easy to miss how cleverly Austen uses Emma’s consciousness (which Emma herself fondly thinks penetrating) as a mask for the real machinations of the plot and the true motives of the other characters. Even after many readings, it’s Emma’s version of Frank and Jane that we see—Jane as cold and insipid, Frank as silly and trifling—though there are plentiful clues that she’s wrong about both. It’s Emma’s mind that not only unfolds but shapes the story, and cajoles the reader into missing exactly those clues that Emma herself misses too. And unlike a detective novelist, Austen is completely inconspicuous, almost impassive, in planting her clues. 

John Mullan in The Guardian points out how many clues are buried in Miss Bates’s long monologues (which many readers will probably skip). He goes as far as to say Austen here invented the free indirect style that came to characterise the modern novel. This novel does feel modern, because of Emma’s plainspoken inner monologue and because Emma herself is so flawed. Compared with Pamela or Evelina, the virtuous, one-dimensional heroines of eighteenth-century novels, she’s much more real and rounded, much more modern. As Austen said about her: “I am going to take a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like.” Emma is likeable, though, in spite of her flaws, and she grows more likeable the less she is self-deceived. Like Pride and Prejudice, the plot of this novel hinges on the heroine’s self-knowledge. With Emma’s dawning self-awareness comes truer perception (for herself and us) of the others around her.

Mullan also points out how all but imperceptibly Austen uses a character like Mr Perry, who never speaks a word of his own, to reflect the other characters. Something similar happens with Miss Nash. Harriet looks up to Miss Nash, but the attentive reader, conditioned by Emma’s rigid class consciousness, will notice how pitiful Miss Nash’s claims are: a teacher in a boarding school, on the vertiginous edge of gentility, desperately in love with Mr Elton but with less chance even than Harriet of his ever reciprocating. She only ever appears in Harriet’s reports, never in person; her principal role is to make Harriet look pathetic. Harriet is another cleverly drawn character, whose abysmal vacuity is given in a few lines. Mr Wodehouse and Mrs Elton, even Mr Weston and Mr John Knightley, are comic creations, subtly but sharply drawn.

In a novel about perception or the failure to perceive, one of Austen's most incisive observations is the rarity of true discernment. Mr Weston’s main flaw—a frustrating one for Emma—is his lack of discrimination. He gives equal weight to the company and opinions of people so widely different as Miss Bates and Emma herself. Mrs Elton (nee Hawkins), properly despised by Emma, is liked and lauded by all the rest of the village. Here is her introduction: “A week had not passed since Miss Hawkins’s name was first mentioned in Highbury, before she was, by some means or other, discovered to have every recommendation of person and mind; to be handsome, elegant, highly accomplished, and perfectly amiable [and] in addition to all the usual advantages of perfect beauty and merit, was in possession of an independent fortune, of so many thousands as would always be called ten.” Common report so blurs true character, common chatter so elevates the commonplace, that it’s no wonder a deception like Frank and Jane’s can be practiced so easily. Emma’s is not the only blindness. 

Charlotte Brontë objected to Emma that it lacked passion, that it was only concerned with “delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people.” What Austen so cleverly achieves in the new narrative style of this novel is to show how deceptive those surfaces can be, how the interplay between surfaces and inner lives both constructs and conceals realities, and how appearances and perceptions are the charades we all play. 

The Snowy Day

Among other things out from the library at the moment, we have The Snowy Day: Ezra Jack Keats' Caldecott-winning picture book from 1962. It's a simple story. An African American child, Peter, enjoys the snow. He makes snowmen and snow angels, makes tracks and takes a stick to beat a snow-shower down from a tree. He takes a snowball home in his pocket, but it melts in his warm house, where his warm mother pulls off his cold, wet socks. He dreams of more melting snow, an end to the white world he's just discovered, but in the morning, the snow is there still. He takes a friend and sets out again into another snowy day. That's all. 

This book was groundbreaking at the time, which speaks to how desolately white the children's book landscape must then have been. But the sad thing is, it still feels groundbreaking. It still feels unusual to see a black child as the main character (not the offsider) in a story that's just about unalloyed joy. And that is what this story is about. It's about beauty, innocence, wonder, the romance of childhood freedoms and childhood feats. It's not about justice. It's not about diversity or equality.

And yet, it is about those things. It's about the world we'd have if they'd already arrived. In this world, they don't need to be named or won. They're the air a child like Peter breathes, the transfigured landscape on which he sweeps his angel arms, makes his tracks.