The up side of the lockdown

One of the great pleasures of reading The New Yorker is the opportunity to wade through the rich world of American men and women of letters.

I had an especially rewarding read this morning at breakfast: a review by James Marcus of author Nicholas Basbanes' tenth book, a biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Makes me want to stop what I'm doing and just sit and read for a while. Don't know where to start, with Longfellow, with Basbanes or with Marcus.

I just ordered Evangeline on my Kindle - haven't read it since high school - and because it's so old the copyright has expired and you can get it for a buck. And I googled Basbanes and Marcus. Basbanes, it turns out, is a writer who writes about writers, and about books and libraries. Not a bad choice of professions, methinks. Almost wish I had chosen that path. Except that then I remember only yesterday I was wishing I had chosen a career in music. Didn't go down that path, either. And if I had, I wouldn't have ended up teaching languages, then linguistics, and ultimately teaching kids, a choice over which I have absolutely no regrets. Also not sorry I didn't choose a career in politics. Or accounting.

James Marcus, if I've got the right guy, is deputy editor of Harper's Magazine and has written as well for  The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, The Harvard Review, The Paris Review, and other publications.

If you can, have a look at his review in the current edition of The New Yorker (June 8 &15). It's wonderfully witty. Full of choice information about Longfellow, such as the observation that he was a very good man. Oscar Wilde is reported to have said, "Longfellow was himself a beautiful poem, more beautiful than anything he ever wrote."

Marcus also cites the critic Van Wyck Brooks, another writer who writes about books and about writers. Brooks, according to Marcus, has a less benign view of Longfellow's work. "Longfellow is to poetry," he says, "what the barrel-organ is to music."

The potato oatmeal bread I had for breakfast lacked taste, probably because it was a day old. Also the consistency wasn't right somehow. Maybe because of the pandemic the bakeries are not getting the right kind of flour anymore. Or because my taste is following my eyesight and my mind and slipping slowly but surely away.

At least I had the compensation of knowing there are American writers out there writing about writers who know how to write. I just hope the mind lasts longer than the taste buds.

Mark Spitz today

Mark Spitz in 1972

Ever notice how watching people do things well lifts the spirits? The perfect antidote to the blues. I'll never forget watching Mark Spitz, now getting old and grey like the rest of us, back when he had the body of a Greek god and was able to win seven gold medals at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. 

These days I get the same kind of thrill watching Yuja Wang play Prokofief.  Or Igor Levit, the man I have to thank for reviving in me an appreciation of Beethoven, surrender himself to the absurdist task of playing Satie's Vexations.  Vexations, if you don't know it, is a single page of music - four lines - written to be played 840 times in succession. Levit just completed it. Read all about it here. 

Sitting here in splendid isolation, not even going out to go grocery shopping, I'm aware suddenly of how it is that Immanuel Kant was able to come up with all his heavy philosophical ruminations on philosophy, metaphysics, ethics and esthetics without ever leaving the confines of Königsberg, known today as Kaliningrad, reportedly one of the dreariest cities in the world. Or Thoreau, who is often remembered for having said, “I have traveled a good deal in Concord...”

When I first encountered Thoreau in junior high school it was in the context of a thoroughly New England indoctrination at school, where Boston was presented pretty much as the source of civilization, Johnny Tremain as the best boy's book ever written, and Thoreau as the quintessential wise man, a man of the mind. Years later, in an American lit course in college, I was exposed to the notion that he was anything but, and more likely simply a malcontent, what today we'd call a loser. 

No matter. It was the difference of opinion that mattered, the fact that one could enjoy talking about books and authors, what they had to contribute to knowledge and how they opened up your mind to the exciting world of complexity and the need to separate the trivial from the substantial and the satisfaction that came from doing so.

History, for kids in New England, at least in my day, was all about the Pilgrims, the Mayflower, and all those events I picked up, probably less from history books than from the fictional Johnny Tremain: the battles of Lexington and Concord, the midnight ride of Paul Revere, the Whigs and the Tories, the Boston Tea Party.

I used to hate it when people spoke of the army as a good experience for "making men out of boys." I always thought of it as a lousy justification for brutalizing kids. Not merely turning poor kids into cannon fodder, but also a great way to turn sensitive kids into cynics. There is a counter to that, of course, the argument that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, or it takes heat to temper steel. But although my life became infinitely richer because of my time in the army, I refuse to give it credit. It was merely the mold for the statue, not the work of creation itself. I'm now recognizing that this lockdown during the pandemic is a similar period in my life. I'm not going to credit it with being the enabler of rich new experiences with music and with books. It doesn't deserve the credit.

But it is, for all that, a wonderful time in my life. A rich, absolutely wonderful time.