Mystics or Madmen

Well, I’ll put them somewhere. Then I’ll move about among them, admire them as I pass, and take them every now and then from their shelf or stack. I’ll read a few lines at random; I’ll marvel at how they’re made, and feel their weight in my hands. For now, though, they’re still on my desk. Melville, as it turns out, is rather perfumey — something I didn’t notice at yesterday’s book sale, the crowd being so close. In fact, we were saying afterward how long it’s been since we’ve been in a room with so many people packed together. Good for the immune system, was our mutual conclusion.

“Behind the work of any creative artist,” says W.H. Auden at the beginning of his introduction to The Oxford Book of Light Verse, “there are three principal wishes: the wish to make something; the wish to perceive something, either in the external world of sense or the internal world of feeling; and the wish to communicate these perceptions to others. Those who have no interest in or talent for making something, i.e., no skill in a particular artistic medium, do not become artists; they dine out, they gossip at street corners, they hold forth in cafés. Those who have no interest in communication do not become artists either; they become mystics or madmen.”

And so on, all of which can be debated, if one is so inclined. I’m not. I take whatever I read in stride and leave the arguing to others.

Like all countries, there’s more than ample reason to believe this one won’t last forever. But the people will remain, and so will the land, and the sky above it. A few decades, a few hundred years, or even a few thousand — what’s the difference? Why should one need to believe that the country one lives in is better than any other, and is therefore entitled to special consideration? Why should one need to believe in countries at all? If one is really so desperate to believe in something, it makes far more sense to believe in the sun — and even that won’t last forever.

Read the forty-seventh and forty-eighth chapters of Middlemarch.

October 7, 2023.

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