Good Friday, 1613

On its 400th anniversary, what better poem to choose today than John Donne's "Good Friday, 1613: Riding Westward." While his body travels west, his mind and soul look toward Easter. There are echoes of Ignatian meditation in his attempts to see with the mind's eye what the mind itself cannot comprehend. Yet the sheer weight of imagery in the spectacle of Christ's death is overwhelming. He prays to be made worthy to turn, and see. 

Let man's soul be a sphere, and then, in this, 

The intelligence that moves, devotion is; 

And as the other spheres, by being grown 

Subject to foreign motion, lose their own, 

And being by others hurried every day, 

Scarce in a year their natural form obey; 

Pleasure or business, so, our souls admit 

For their first mover, and are whirl'd by it.

Hence is't, that I am carried towards the west,

This day, when my soul's form bends to the East.

There I should see a Sun by rising set,

And by that setting endless day beget.

But that Christ on His cross did rise and fall,

Sin had eternally benighted all.

Yet dare I almost be glad, I do not see

That spectacle of too much weight for me.

Who sees Gods face, that is self-life, must die;

What a death were it then to see God die?

It made His own lieutenant, Nature, shrink,

It made His footstool crack, and the sun wink.

Could I behold those hands, which span the poles

And tune all spheres at once, pierced with those holes?

Could I behold that endless height, which is

Zenith to us and our antipodes,

Humbled below us? or that blood, which is

The seat of all our soul's, if not of His,

Made dirt of dust, or that flesh which was worn

By God for His apparel, ragg'd and torn ?

If on these things I durst not look, durst I

On His distressed Mother cast mine eye,

Who was God's partner here, and furnish'd thus

Half of that sacrifice which ransom'd us ?

Though these things as I ride be from mine eye,

They're present yet unto my memory,

For that looks towards them; and Thou look'st towards me,

O Saviour, as Thou hang'st upon the tree.

I turn my back to thee but to receive

Corrections till Thy mercies bid Thee leave.

O think me worth Thine anger, punish me,

Burn off my rust, and my deformity;

Restore Thine image, so much, by Thy grace,

That Thou mayst know me, and I'll turn my face. 

From these would I be gone

I'm a bit of a news junkie. I tend to reach instinctively for the news and politics feed, and can find myself pawing through news sites like a starving raccoon. However, I can see that the news as a mode is hardly a reliable index of the human condition. Surely the world can't be that utterly full of scoundrels, scandals, failings, falterings, corruptions, and defections? It's somewhat comforting to think that even if the news is bad, the badness is not really new. If the poets and the ancients are a more reliable guide, it seems we're not living in an age of particular evil, ushered in by 9/11, just more of the same afflictions humans have always suffered. Shakespeare's 66th sonnet sounds as though he's just switched off CNN in disgust. 

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry, 
As, to behold desert a beggar born, 
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity, 
And purest faith unhappily forsworn, 
And guilded honour shamefully misplaced, 
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted, 
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled, 
And art made tongue-tied by authority, 
And folly doctor-like controlling skill, 
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity, 
And captive good attending captain ill: 
   Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
   Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

And further back, the writer of Ecclesiastes gets at the cussedness of human life beautifully:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Just by chance, that verse is found at 9:11. 

Great circles, radials

For Canberra's centenary, “City and Mirage” by edge-dweller Judith Wright.

The tawny basin in the ring of hills
held nothing but the sunlight’s glaze,
a blue-blank opaline mirage,
sheep-cropping, flies, the magpies’ warble.
Burley Griffin brimmed it with his gaze.

Cloud-architecture in reflected image:
arena, amphitheatre, gallery
on gallery of quivering marble,
rose from his mind - great circles, radials...
Over the clear-strung air his fingers played
conjuring a rhetorical opera-city
for that bald-eagle, King O’Malley.
 
Fantasies of power. The grey sheep nibble,
dogs snap at flies. Shoddy officials 
argue his job away, confuse his plan.
Mirages, changed to lakes, lap sewage.
Cities are made of man.

Brontë on Austen

I mentioned in my last that Charlotte Brontë was not an Austen fan. I had a vague recollection of some remarks she'd famously made on the subject, and went looking for them. They appear in letters she wrote to the critic GH Lewes, and to her publisher's reader WS Williams, both of whom admired Austen and encouraged Brontë to give her a try. 

“Why do you like Jane Austen so very much?" she complained to Lewes in a letter of 12 January 1848. On his advice she had read Pride and Prejudice, but all she found there was “a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck... [George Sand] is sagacious and profound; Miss Austen is only shrewd and observant."

To Williams she wrote, in 1850, that she had just read Emma: “read it with interest and with just the right degree of admiration which Miss Austen herself would have thought sensible and suitable—anything like warmth or enthusiasm; anything energetic, poignant, heartfelt, is utterly out of place in commending these works: all such demonstration the authoress would have met with a well-bred sneer, would have calmly scorned as outre and extravagant. She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well; there is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy in the painting: she ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound: the Passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy Sisterhood; even to the Feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition; too frequent converse with them would ruffle the smooth elegance of her progress."

It's a difference of period as well as temperement, but it's also, I would venture, a misreading. Brontë's own preference for sturm und drang (the aspect of her novels I find least appealing) leads her to read Austen's calm as a preoccupation with surfaces. In fact surfaces are precisely what Austen is concerned to trouble and displace. Customs and courtesies cover a seething multitude of relational subtleties and human failings. Masks and impressions fall before knowledge and revelation. Austen's sharp penetration of civil surfaces makes for inspired comedy and an enduring social realism for which Brontë never strove. 

Jane Austen's inward world

There's plenty to read about the 200th birthday of Pride and Prejudice, but I especially enjoyed this piece from the archives of The Atlantic. It was published in 1863, on the novel's 50th anniversary. It's fascinating to read something so old that feels itself to be modern, so removed from its subject and yet so much closer to it than we are. In general the Victorians were not wild about Austen, preferring Dickens' more florid and surreal portraiture, or George Eliot's wider intellectual and social compass. But this reviewer, one Mrs R.C. Waterson, is warm and eloquent in her praise. She puts her finger on Austen's quiet genius: “Infinite sameness, infinite variety, are not more apparent in the outward than in the inward world, and the work of that writer will alone be lasting who recognizes and embodies this eternal law of the great Author. Jane Austen possessed in a remarkable degree this rare intuition.” 

She quotes the diary of Walter Scott, who wrote in 1826 of Austen's “exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from truth of the description and the sentiment.” And she concludes that though Austen will not be everyone's cup of tea (a nod to Charlotte Bronte, perhaps, who found Austen insipid), yet “while the English language is read, the world will always be provided with souls who can enjoy the rare excellence of that rich legacy left to them by her genius.” I couldn't agree more.