Some more words to live by

I’ve added a sentence from Simone Weil to the sidebar’s little gathering of Words to Live By. The sentence appears in a letter from Weil to the poet Joë Bousquet, April 13, 1942: “L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité.” In translation: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” The sentence is widely available online in English, but with no indication of a source. An couple of hours in the library looking through a dozen or so Weil books was no help, and I began to wonder if Weil had indeed written these words. I finally found the source by translating the sentence into French and searching for that online. A snippet view in Google Books gave me the answer.


[Joseph Marie Perrin, Mon dialogue avec Simone Weil (1984). I found the 1942 date elsewhere.]

Weil’s sentence seems especially suited to early-twenty-first-century life. To pay attention, when so many things compete to distract us, is to make a gift of oneself. I present the sentence as standing on its own, detached from any larger relation to Weil’s thinking about prayer and the Godhead (in which the idea of attention played an important part).

For many years I had Weil’s sentence (in translation) on a little slip of paper taped to my office door. (It was one of many things taped to the door.) The sentence was once the subject of an amusing conversation with a student, who told me that The Site That Shall Not Be Named had a complaint about me that went something like this: “He makes you come to his office and he goes over your essay with you line by line.” The nerve! My student said that reading that complaint made him decide to take a course with me. Ha.

“Pluto in His Cups”

From George Bodmer’s Oscar’s Day: “Pluto in His Cups.”

Note to Pluto: You are big . It’s the idea of what counts as a planet that got small.

I am a total third-grader when it comes to Pluto. The brave planet has been the subject of several OCA posts.

*

July 14: “Pluto in His Cups, Part 2”

“Happy days!”

From Willa Cather, A Lost Lady (1923):



Other Cather posts
Cather’s letters : Cather, snoot : James Schuyler on Cather : Proust and Cather

[If you think about how RSS readers turn paragraphs into nearly screen-wide ribbons, you’ll understand why I’ve posted these paragraphs as an image file.]

A concluding truck for belated pubs

So H. L. Mencken thinks English teachers are dumb? Take this, H. L. Mencken:

Transumption is the trope of a trope, or technically the metonymy of a metonymy. That is, it tends to be a figure that substitutes an aspect of a previous figure for that figure. Imagistically, transumption from Milton through the Romantics to the present tends to manifest itself in terms of earliness substituting for lateness, and more often than not to be the figure that concludes poems. Translated into psychoanalytic terms, transumption is either the psychic defense of introjection (identification) or of projection (refusal of identity), just as metaphor translates into the defense of sublimation, or hyperbole into that of repression. The advantage of transumption as a concluding trope for belated poems is that it achieves a kind of fresh priority or earliness, but always at the expense of the present or living moment.

I first came across this passage (from an essay on the poet Geoffrey Hill) as an undergraduate in 1977. It has stuck in my mind ever since as an example of what might be called unfriendly opacity. (On at least one occasion it was a great hit read aloud in tipsy company.) I like legitimate difficulty in poetry and prose. This passage though seems meant to produce an academic version of shock and awe. A master is speaking. And he need not offer a single example.

There are parts of academic life I will never miss.

[My Mac’s Dictation did a fine job with this passage: “a concluding truck for belated pubs.” Regarding difficulty: say, John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.”]

Atticus Finch’s permanent record

“An explosive plot twist that no one saw coming”: that’s how a New York Times article describes Atticus Finch’s changed character in Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman. (Briefly: he’s an out-and-out racist.) Certainly those responsible for the publication of this work have long known that its older Atticus Finch is not the Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird. That the news has come out just days before the novel’s publication date (July 14) seems to me the result of careful, cynical calculation: the timing is right to produce maximum buzz with minimal damage to sales (the early orders are in).

Bewilderment about how the Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird could espouse the beliefs he holds in Go Set a Watchman bespeaks a failure to distinguish between fictional characters and human beings. “Atticus Finch” isn’t a human being, a moral agent, who devolved over time — which in itself would require time travel, as Go Set a Watchman is the earlier work. “Atticus Finch” is the name of a character in two works of fiction. That the two works are wildly discrepant in their presentation of this character is a matter of a writer’s changing conception. “It’s sad to think that Atticus’s character is going to be tarnished,” says a teacher, as if the ugliness of Go Set a Watchman is going on Atticus Finch’s permanent record. (There is no human being for whom to make a permanent record.) Go Set a Watchman will require us to distinguish between what “our own desires” have made of Atticus Finch and “the literary truth,” says an academic, as if the Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird was really the old racist all along. Confusion upon confusion.

For me, the most exciting news about Go Set a Watchman is that the book is arriving in mid-July, which leaves open (at least in my mind) the possibility that a J. D. Salinger book will be arrive later this year. I don’t think it’s too cynical to imagine that publishers get together on the timing of these things.

[The tea cakes and lemonade affair is going to be pretty awkward, I suspect.]

A Mark Trail retort

[Mark Trail, July 11, 2015.]

Mark needs a boat. His editor Bill Ellis points out that the last one the magazine paid for got blown to bits. Mark’s reply offers a joyous philosophy of life: “Ha! . . . That wasn’t exactly my fault!” I’m not sure about the ellipsis though. How long to pause? Must practice.

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

A Mark Trail jackpot

  
[Mark Trail, July 4, 6, 10, 2015.]

Recycle, recycle, recycle.

Previous instances: here, here, here, and here.

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

Beard Oil

A recommendation that may be useful to a subset of Orange Crate Art readers: Beard Oil, by Leven Rose. It’s a mixture of jojoba and argan oils, fragrance-free. It makes my beard softer and rulier. Your beard may vary. A few drops should go a long way.

What’s that? Yes, rulier. Having written softer, I had to find a way around more manageable, so as not to sound too much like a shampoo commercial.

Ishmael says that a man who uses hair oil for non-medicinal purposes “has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere.” But he doesn’t say anything about beard oil.

Related posts
Beards and Perfect Etiquette (1879)
Beards as signs of the times
Beard-trimming recommendation
Polyphemus, beard-wearer

[This recommendation, like every other OCA recommendation, is unsolicited.]

“Tea Peps You Up!”

[Life, July 24, 1939. Click for a larger view.]

I like the clutter of this advertisement. But it isn’t clutter, really; it’s just more and more stuff to delight the reader. I like imagining the woman’s words aloud: she sounds like she’s on a jag. I like suspecting that the man is picnicking on liverwurst. (It sure looks like liverwurst.) I like the little Bayeux Tapestry at the bottom of the page. I especially like the treatment of the word TEA, a treatment usually reserved for ICE itself.

And speaking of ice, here’s Mr. Cube, larger, cleaner, colder:



Words often attributed to William Gladstone: “If you are cold, tea will warm you. If you are heated, it will cool you. If you are depressed, it will cheer you. If you are excited, it will calm you.” If you try to track down a source for these sentences, you will be disappointed. Here, have some tea.

Related reading
All OCA tea posts (Pinboard)

[I used the free Mac app Paparazzi! to grab the large ad. I used the Mac Preview alpha tool to clean up Mr. Cube.]

“Tea Answers America’s Call to Pep!”

[Life, December 9, 1940.]

Notice that this advertisement has a cameo by Mr. T. Pott, whose acquaintance I made last night. Pott was known on both sides of the Atlantic. On this side he appears without top hat, which makes a certain sense: he’s already wearing a lid. Besides, us Americans don’t have much truck with no fancy ways.

Here, for no practical purpose, is a neater, brighter, larger Pott:


[Life, February 12, 1940.]

Related reading
All OCA tea posts (Pinboard)

[I used the free Mac app Paparazzi! to grab the large ad. I used the Mac Preview alpha tool to clean up Mr. Pott.]