A sense of proportion

Having recently become a septuagenarian, it occurs to me more and more that I ought to let go of a great many things that have strongly exercised me in the past; and furthermore that my over–valuation of these things – which is to say ideas, writers, and certain books – has led to a certain degree of dogmatism, which is clean contrary to any kind of liberal and open–minded education. I go against the current of my own reading. Not always, by any means, but far too often. I am not entirely to blame in this, for as Emerson writes:

We are armed all over with subtle antagonisms, which, as soon as we meet, begin to play, and translate all poetry into stale prose. Almost all people descend to meet. All association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other. What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted! After interviews have been compassed with long foresight, we must be tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play us true, and both parties are relieved by solitude.

There is undoubted truth in this, but anyone who has read Emerson’s essay ‘Friendship’ in Essays: First Series, cannot but agree with Oliver Firkin:

The essay on “Friendship” is the most discomforting and estranging performance in the entire volume. If he had stopped with his heartening motto, if he had even stopped with the two first warm–blooded lines – 

“A ruddy drop of manly blood / The surging sea outweighs,” –

He would have left us stimulated and inspired. But this is only the parting handshake on the wharf; the next moment he has weighed anchor, and is steering lustily into the polar sea of this immitigable essay.

But I diverge from my main idea of learning to let go of cherished ideas. In respect of which, I today discovered some lines I’d written inside the cover of an Ordnance Survey map:

The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up one’s mind about nothing (peremptorily) – to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts, not a select party.

I presume that this was something I wrote down on a country walk. Certainly I had forgotten it – as well as what had occasioned the thought. It’s imperfectly expressed, but I’ll let it stand, ‘select party’ and all.

But there’s something to it, is there not? Should I be pugilist in defence of my own ideas? I think not. Because if I do, I betray my doubts, do I not? Well, since Emerson has had a fair monopoly in what I’ve written so far, I’ll bring him in again. I doubt that any other writer has had such an influence on me. And yet he has his detractors:

“The essays of Emerson”, T. S. Eliot wrote, “have already become an encumbrance . . .” And the American academics, William Morrow and Quentin Anderson both “see Emerson’s individualism as an expression of a lamentably infantile and retrograde personality.”

So what am I supposed to do: rage at these people and refuse to read their books? I think not. Better to read them and get a more rounded and critical–edged view of Emerson. Something in the light of this passage:

It is only the avoidance of a tight little dogma, the preservation of negative capability, that makes such a mind [as Emerson’s] interesting. And the student must be careful, as the hostile critic conspicuously is not, to avoid in his turn reducing him to an easy formula. Stephen E. Whicher, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

So there you have it! (Even though I would not accuse William Morrow and Quentin Anderson of being ‘hostile’.) I love Emerson, but I am not an Emersonian. If I were, I would be likely, at the least criticism, to explode with rage. And then, as Frank Kermode so succinctly expresses it, “abandoning meaning”, I would “slip back into the old comfortable fictions of transparency, the single sense, the truth.”