'I'd rather be a good cook'

"If a man has any good in him, let him show it in his conduct, in his ordinary talk, in the way he loves or quarrels, at play, in bed, at table, in the conduct of his affairs and the management of his household. Those whom I see composing good books in poor breeches should have tended to their breeches first, if they had asked me. Ask a Spartan if he would rather be a good rhetorician than a good soldier. As for me, I'd rather be a good, if I didn't have one to serve me.

Good Lord, Madame, how I would hate this sort of reputation, of being an able man in writing and a good-for-nothing and a fool elsewhere."

—Montaigne, Of the Resemblance of Children to Fathers

'A Kind of Mental Inertia'

From The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga:

"...an assiduous reader of the chronicles and the literature of the fifteenth century will hardly resist the impression that nobility and chivalry occupy a much more considerable place there than our general conception of the epoch would imply. The reason of this disproportion lies in the fact, that long after nobility and feudalism had ceased to be really essential factors in the state and in society, they continued to impress the mind as dominant forms of life. The men of the fifteenth century could not understand that the real moving powers of the political and social evolution might be looked for anywhere else than in the doings of a warlike and courtly nobility. They persisted in regarding the nobility as foremost of social forces and attributed a very exaggerated importance to it, undervaluing altogether the social significance of the lower classes.

So the mistake it may be argued, is theirs, and our conception of the Middle Ages is right. This would be so if, to understand the spirit of an age, it sufficed to know its real and hidden forces and not its illusions, its fancies and its errors. But for the history of civilization every delusion or opinion of an epoch has the value of an important fact...

...This failing to see the social importance of the common people, which is proper to nearly all authors of the fifteenth century, may be regarded as a kind of mental inertia, which is a phenomenon of frequent occurrence and vital importance in history."

'Mental inertia' is the kind of phrase that gets turned around in the mind. One wonders how much one suffers from it oneself. Or how much one's 'epoch' is given over to what, in retrospect, might be clearly seen as delusions of the most untethered sort.

'To Die Usefully and Manfully'

Among the things I admire most about Montaigne is his extensive grasp of military history, both ancient and of his own time, not a predominant trait of our would-be philosophers and clerisy. (What I wouldn’t give to have bagged half the classes I took in college and traded them for a better grounding in Thucydides and the World Wars.) In his first essay, By diverse means we arrive at the same end, he begins by dishing a series of military anecdotes: “As Scanderbeg, prince of Epirus, was pursuing one of his soldiers in order to kill him…” “Emperor Conrad III, having besieged Guelph, duke of Bavaria, would not come down to milder terms…” “Dionysius the Elder, having take the city of Rhegium after extreme delays and difficulties…” These are not the type of specimen one expects to find in contemporary essays. It gives the text muscle. It also gives Montaigne a preoccupation, I expect usual for his day, with matters of honor:

“It is a noble craving to want even to die usefully and manfully; but the outcome lies not so much in our good resolution as in our good fortune. A thousand have proposed to conquer or die fighting, who have failed to do either, wounds and prison crossing this design and lending them a forced life. There are maladies that lay low even our desires and our consciousness.” (Against do-nothingness)

Here’s Joseph Epstein reviewing a book called “Why Honor Matters”.

Flowers at the Portal

In his essay Imagination as Value (from The Necessary Angel, 1942) Wallace Stevens lays out a case for "perceiving the normal," in contradistinction to "the deliberate exploits of the abnormal," as in the case of Rimbaud and Kafka:

"Jean Paulhan, a Frenchman and a writer, is a man of great sense. He is a native of the region of Tarbes. Tarbes is a town in southwestern France in the High Pyrenees. Marshal Foch was born there. An equestrian statue of the Marshal stands there, high in the air, on a pedestal. In his Les Fleurs de Tarbes, Jean Paulhan says:

One sees at the entrance of the public garden of Tarbes, this sign:

It is forbidden
To enter into the garden
Carrying flowers

He goes on to say:

One finds it, also, in our time at the portal of literature. Nevertheless, it would be agreeable to see the girls of Tarbes (and the young writers) carrying a rose, a red poppy, an armful of red poppies.

I repeat that Jean Paulhan is a man of great sense. But to be able to see the portal of literature, that is to say: the portal of the imagination, as a scene of normal love and normal beauty is, of itself, a feat of great imagination. It is the vista a man sees, seated in the public garden of his native town, near by some effigy of a figure celebrated in the normal world, as he considers that the chief problems of any artist, as of any man, are the problems of the normal and that he needs, in order to solve them, everything that the imagination has to give.”

A Second Dance

When I first read them, I found Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time books both highly entertaining and highly irritating. (I'm not the only one to feel irritation. Scribbled on the first page of my paperback copy of A Question of Upbringing is what I take to be a quondam reader’s exasperated warning: “NEVER TRY AGAIN.”) The books' narrative delivery is unusual: The narrator, Nick Jenkins, is a companionable but secondary presence. The books are mainly his investigations into the lives of other people—met at school, in business, and at parties; mixed up in the worlds of business, romance, politics, the arts and the second world war, inter alia. The books are short—they average about 230 pages—but in no hurry. The "action" isn’t so much slow as intermittent, sometimes abrupt. Sixty pages might be spent at a single dinner party. Dialogue alternates with Nick’s philosophical musings. Like Henry James, Powell operates at a slow boil, though to a lighter and a more comic effect.

I found the peculiar ruminativeness of Powell's style—which, if you lack a certain sense of humor, would be absolutely crushing in its deliberativeness—frequently irritating in my first run-through. I don't know why. Maybe I was missing a lot of the humor. Maybe I was more sympathetic to the gist of that famous and priggish Eleanor Roosevelt quote about great minds discussing ideas and small minds discussing people. But aren't novels, primarily about people, a higher form of gossip, anyway? Powell, not a small mind, discusses people first, to delightful effect. That's also his way of getting at ideas, which—it's easy for people like Roosevelt to forget—are never unaccompanied by human bearers. My second time through the Dance, my irritation with Powell is gone; my enjoyment, nearly unadulterated. (There are, here and there, longueurs.) I don’t mind his sixty-page dinner parties in the least. Bring ‘em on, I say! 

To like Powell, you have to find enjoyable this species of reflective riff: 

"There is something overpowering, even a trifle sinister about very large families, the individual members of which often possess in excess the characteristics commonly attributed to 'only' children: neurasthenia: an inability to adapt themselves: all the traits held to be the result of a lonely upbringing. The corporate life of large families can be lived with severity, even barbarity, of a kind unknown in smaller related communities: these savageries and distillations of egoism often rendered even less tolerable if sentimentalized outside the family circle."

Montaigne, showing his conservative streak:

"The worst thing I find in our state is instability, and the fact that our laws cannot, any more than our clothes, take any settled form. It is very easy to accuse a government of imperfection, for all mortal things are full of it. It is very easy to engender in a people contempt for their ancient observances; never did a man undertake that without succeeding. But as for establishing a better state in place of the one they have ruined, many of those who have attempted it have achieved nothing for their pains."

—Of Presumption

Montaigne on having a poor memory:

"Now, the more I distrust my memory, the more confused it becomes. It serves me better by chance encounter; I have to solicit it nonchalantly. For if I press it, it is stunned; and once it has begun to totter, the more I probe it, the more it gets mixed up and embarrassed. It serves me at its own time, not at mine."

—Of Presumption