The Problem with Hurrying

Having been without internet connection this week for a few days has allowed me the freedom to slow down and do other things, like listen to music and read a few things that had been piling up on my desk. . . . There is something about electronic reading, and writing, that tells me unconsciously to hurry up. I am participating in a rapidly moving world where messages require prompt responses and news flashes are updated often. The internet is not a contemplative tool. . . .The truly cultured Chinese, I am told, never hurry to accomplish things since, according to Confucius, things done in haste cannot be done well. I suspect that today's Chinese take this old wisdom with a large dose of MSG. . . .It's no wonder then that hurrying is OK only in Hell; I refer to the advice Virgil gives to Dante in "Inferno": do not spend too much time talking with or looking at the damned souls in Hell. To do so is to pay them respect, so hurrying along with that crowded realm is wise. Speed in the lower depths is also motivated by fear. . . Fear governs the life of so many people in the real world today, including nearly all of my students, who learned early on to be terrified of grades and criticism by teachers. The high school boy I tutor, who is hyperactive, worries excessively about failure and parental criticism, and so turns to me for calming advice. He knows that he can breathe deeply three times and bring himself a modicum of peace, of what I would call mindfulness: being fully present to each assignment he has and doing one at at time, without worrying about the number of upcoming tests or papers due. . . .I find fear and speed everywhere: in the speech patterns of many people I encounter, professional people who talk so rapidly that they slur their words. I am amazed that a few TV anchors, including Anderson Cooper, never seemed to have studied that old-fashioned thing called elocution. I cannot expect people in the media to slow down, but they must be fully intelligible, especially if they are earning millions of dollars a year. . . .All of which brings to me a book recommended by a friend, a book I have not yet located, by the jazz pianist Kenny Werner, Effortless Mastery, which has to do with mindfulness. The lesson here, says my friend, is to slow down the body and the mind, be fully in the present, and enjoy (if you are prayerful) what Brother Lawrence, a humble worker in a French monastery kitchen in the 17th century, called the "sacrament of the present moment." Lawrence had little education and found that the formal prayers of the monks were not enough: why not, he thought, find God in the little things of a noisy kitchen, honoring the routine tasks we perform there?.....This reminds me of an article by Dr. Jan Chozen Bays, author of Mindful Eating. She recounts eating a lemon tart and savoring fully the flavor, then getting into conversation and losing touch with what she was eating; finally, returning to the tart, she is able to focus on the smell and flavor and textures in her mouth. She has slowed down the thinking function of the mind so as to access the awareness. Whether she considers this attention prayer, it is, at least for me, closely allied with the idea of the present moment as sacred since it alone is real even in its evanescence. Bays's advice: eat slowly, with long pauses between bites. If you do anything else while eating, even think, the flavor diminishes or disappears. She doesn't mention the obvious: digestion is improved....For me, preparing food can be a meditation practice as I clear my mind of everything except the task before me; and I try to do the same when I eat dinner at home, even though I feel obligated to talk, to avoid feeling that the silence my wife and I experience is awkward or unnatural. A meal, I tell myself, is a social occasion; I cannot be expected to eat like a Trappist or Buddhist monk....And so the challenge goes on in fast-paced world where most of us enjoy human company and find it stimulating while at the same time knowing that there is a time for silence, for slowing down, for eating alone, mindfully. . . .The point is that we have to fight for every opportunity to slow down how we talk, how we eat, how we interact with others, so we can really listen and fully savor the gift of the present moment. ...As I notice the tension of others, the anxiety that tends to rule the world, I catch myself in my own anxious patterns and re-learn the ancient wisdom of slowing down. If all the media and the internet were shut down for a week, I suspect the world would be more peaceful.

A True Gentleman

Timothy Egan in today's NYTimes pays fine tribute to a noted editor, Ash Green, calling him a true gentleman. We are told he never complained....This strikes me as a limited idea of what a gentleman is and an utterly wrong-headed notion of masculinity: the stoic man who neither brags about himself nor whines is a man in trouble....I am glad that Egan knew Mr. Green and was able to honor him at the time of his passing but wonder how healthy it is for men to have old stereotypes of manhood reinforced, especially about keeping feelings to yourself. Psychologically dangerous, I would think....But I applaud Egan for using the occasion to ask the question, Where do we go today to find a gentleman? What sort of mentoring do young men have in the popular culture (see my above comment) or in churches or community? There is no clear answer to such major questions. (I find the new format of these blogspots confusing; it does not allow for paragraph breaks, at least as far as I have yet been able to determine, so I will go back and at least add ellipses to indicate pauses in my last post. It was not intended to be an unbroken blob of print.)

Where are the Gentlemen?

A recent article on the death of the English gentleman (as an ideal) by Andrew Gimson raised a question for me: what do we mean by a gentleman in the US today? Is the idea obsolete?....... In a sense, yes, since the Victorian idea, based on a romanticized view of the medieval knight, insisted that a true gentleman is strong--both morally and physically--respectful of ladies and the elderly, polished and refined, never lies or uses bad language, is loyal, honest, and honorable. Such a man, John Ruskin wrote, should be "perfectly bred": Does this mean he had to be nobly born?.... Not necessarily. As long as he had a good education--Cardinal Newman's Idea of a University insists the a liberal education produces the true gentleman--and speaks well, dresses and acts well, he can pass as a gentleman. Even Pip in Great Expectations can learn to establish himself as a London man of respectability--the key Victorian virtue.... Much of this began, for the Victorians, with Dr. Thomas Arnold at the Rugby School who, between 1828 and 1841, sought to instill gentlemanly conduct along with other criteria at his famous "public" school. A gentleman did things because he instinctively knew they were the right thing to do. He acted with honor (whatever that meant). . . . Of course, such an idea is as impossible to define as it is to live. One advantage of the traditional gentleman was that it could be defined in a way to include yourself. You could behave like a gentleman without having a coat of arms, as in the original idea of the gentry. It was obvious then, as it was for Chaucer, that well-born men did often not behave in a "gentlemanly" way. . . . Actually, the history of the gentleman is more interesting and complex: the English courtesy books of the Renaissance were influenced by the Book of the Courtier by Castiglione, one of those amazing Italians who could do almost anything with a nonchalance he called "sprezzatura," an effortless ease, whether a man was functioning as a soldier, athlete, poet, lover, musician, or scholar. Castiglione, drawing on the chivalric ideal, created in a sense the modern idea of a gentleman, which dominated European thinking until at least World War II. . . . In recent decades, it seems, even if one learned to speak English with an Oxbridge accent, Englishmen, like men in the rest of the world, seem to value money, power, sexual success and all those other assets of the popular culture that are miles away from the noble Victorian notion of impeccable taste and courtesy in the conduct of life, the product of a classical education. . . . In this country, although English ideas of the gentleman had some sway, it is not easy to find the gentlemanly ideal in the popular culture. Our boys are raised on a diet of media warriors, rock stars, drug-enhanced athletes and pitiful politicians; and they certainly cannot learn much about gentle masculinity from their friends. . . . If you pick up a copy of GQ (once known as Gentleman's Quarterly), you are more likely to find images of tough and cool models with designer stubble, mixed in with a few andogynous models from Milan (or perhaps computer-generated). And the articles in the Advice to Men columns, as with Esquire and other such men's magazines, are about how to attract women, what to do with them in bed, how to make big bucks, how to look cool while intoxicated, how to have perfect abs, etc. . . . As I thought about gentlemen in America, I thought for some reason of the old chivalric South in Gone with the Wind, where Ashley Wilkes is a gentleman and Rhett Butler is definitely not, just as Scarlett is no lady: the artificial notions of the lady, proper and prim, seem as out of date, as those of the gentleman in the true sense. . . . So what is the true sense? I asked several friends. Having once taught a course on Masculinity in Literature, I remember how rigid the unwritten code of modern manhood can be, on the streets, in the classroom, at the workplace. The sociologist who designed and taught the course with me writes that there is always, in the idea of a gentleman, a mix of toughness and aggression along with the gentler aspects of manhood. He reminded me that the masculine ideal promoted in our culture does not havae much to say about ideal man, who, in my way of thinking, is strong in character but gentle in spirit. . . . He is not only polite but caring and helpful; education and status have less to do with the contemporary American gentleman than in the past. I have known more than a few professional men--lawyers, doctors, academics--who were well read and knowledgeable but morally unsound and boorish in behavior. . . . Another friend helped me sort out where young men growing up learn gentlemanly arts in today's society. He wrote: "my mother taught me to be a gentleman." And this means for him respecting one's elders, showing good manners, speaking when spoken to, opening doors for ladies and the elderly, standing up when ladies enter, carrying their heavy packages. It is a series of lessons learned in the home, probably with a little help from the nuns who taught him and from Emily Post. This resembles my own growing up. . . . I suspect that Emily Post, inheriting a tradition of etiquette from earlier times,codified the notion of what a lady is, and this trickled down to include her male counterpart--except taht it is more complicated than this. The fear that men have about all the refinement is found in much literature: think of Tom Sawyer and other pieces by Mark Twain, who wants little to do with educational and religious polishing during his rebellious youth. . . . At Rugby School as in Renaissance Italy, the gentleman has to be an athlete, implying competition and physical prowess, yet he must appear in society to be tamed, less the violent warrior of the playing field (or killing field) than the responsible, confident, reliable, knowledgeable, hardworking, steady and of course handsome partner for any girl (do we still call them ladies?). No wonder gentlemen are so hard to find. . . . As in the past, the ideal is impossible to realize, but the educational effort to refine the wild boy into something resembling the well-mannered gentleman goes on. . . . . I would welcome comments on this topic as I prepare to continue the discussion: schiffhorst@yahoo.com.

Slow Reading

"I am the slowest reader you will ever meet," writes novelist Benjamin Percy in a recent issue of The Rumpus.

"After taking in a paragraph, I might pause and stare into space for fifteen minutes." He goes on to say that he will read it again, maybe two or three times, if it's good, examining its construction with his legal pad handy. It might take Percy two to four weeks to complete a novel, but the time is well used. He knows it completely, the way readers in earlier times, having few books to choose from, read and re-read and re-read the classics again, making these texts part of themselves.

Percy is not only a writer but a teacher of writing who believes, as I do, that good writing begins with reading. He has no patience with aspiring writers who say they have no time for reading or don't want to be influenced by another's style because they want to find their own voice.

You find your voice, first, by immersing yourself in Flannery O'Connor, as Percy did, or Hemingway, then writing a short story imitating the pattern and style of the original. You are trying out various voices, Percy says, until you find your own.

You will never find it in isolation.

This is refeshing for me to hear. In my own workshops, students, overly anxious to become published before they know their craft, look puzzled when I emphasize reading and paying careful attention to other stylists. They are unaware that all of us write in the company of other writers, past and present, whose web of influence is essential if you are to develop an ear for what works in dialogue or description or structure.

Do they think you can make a film without having seen and studied thousands of classic movies?

Underlying this advice is the more general need to slow down and remind ourselves to be patient, both with ourselves and with our craft. I have written about the slow movement in food and other areas before, along with the problems that come with the face pace of everyday life in which reflection becomes impossible. Reading, I have said, is a spiritual act, type of prayer; and writing, too, can be contemplative.

I am always learning more about slowing down--and more about writing, having been at it for more than 50 years; I am always finding stylists that entertain, impress or delight me, whose work becomes part of the well I dip into. I am grateful to Mr. Percy for coming my way and sharing his experience of slow reading.

Where is Civilization Going?

Roger Kimball is a thoughtful conservative, author of Tenured Radicals and most recently The Fortunes of Permanence. I have read an article summarizing this new book, which sounds a bit like Alan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind.

As such, it should appeal to anyone concerned about the trendy nature of much academic work, about who is teaching what at universities and how this affects education as a whole.

Scholars in my field of English literature and language have been, for at least thirty years, preoccupied with theory (gender, cultural, political, colonial) as it illuminates the writing of the past, which they don't see as containing necessarily permanent values. Reading fiction or poetry of the past, then, is for them (not for Kimball or me) chiefly a means of understanding the treatment of women and minorities or the oppression of third-world cultures.

While such new approaches have produced some revealing studies, Kimball is right to be concerned that so much of the world of academia and art are biased in favor of what's new and opposed to traditional values, including cultivating students' minds in what we used to call the humanist tradition.

My own teaching emphasis on Milton and the 17th century, as well as Dante and Shakespeare, was in large part an effort to understand the best that has been passed down over the generations, even if the voices of women. It is no surprise that no one in my old department of English has taken up the courses I taught prior to my retirement.

While I do not share all of Kimball's ideological biases, I am glad this often scathing critic (who edits The New Criterion) maintains his stance vs. the academy since, as a New York Times reviewer stated, his tirades are usually justified and he is intellectually rigorous.

Yet Kimball, like most polemicists, overstates things, as when he insists that contemporary scholars see the past as support for the "superiority and self-satisfaction" of today's readers and students. We neglect today, he says, the deep wisdom of tradition with its "answers to the human predicament."

In evoking the Judaeo-Christian tradition, as it was often called, Kimball is insisting on permanment values, including ideas of good and evil that do not change, and answers to often unanswerable questions. Yet our understanding of these values must develop and grow; we cannot fear change or the knowledge that continues to double every few years, often jarring our settled ideas about everything from the mind to the universe.

I share Kimball's concern about relativism, about a curriculum that emphasizes innovation and theory rather than the core of Western civilization. Yet I also share the more optimistic stance of Walter J. Ong, my Jesuit professor at St. Louis University, who had one solid foot in the past, the other grounded in the present as he looked forward with excitement, like Teilhard de Chardin, to an unfolding future of new knowledge and understanding.

In other words, humanists of the 21st century must have open minds, be interested in everything, fear nothing, yet be able to separate the trendy from the traditional and always value those thinkers who have made Western civilization what it is.

Understanding Barack Obama

People we know well often remain mysteries to us, just as we can sometimes be mysteries to ourselves. So it is not surprising that complex public figures we think we know are (and may remain) enigmas.

So it is with Barack Obama. All the photos and interviews and press conferences and speeches in the world only give us facets of this unusual man.

I notice that Maureen Dowd in the NYTimes, along with many other pundits and politicians who are able to observe the president up close, have been trying for the past four years to psychoanalyze him or understand what makes him tick. Dowd found the Bushes easy to skewer with that father-son rivalry, but Obama is a frustrating puzzle for her, elusive, hard to satirize because he is not simple.

Without analyzing Obama's policies, I decided to sort out for myself how I understand this complex man because I see history as a record of people and how they have shaped events, rather than of economic forces or military decisions. What is history but the human story?

Obama first impressed me as an Un-politician back in 2008 as he thoughtfully responded to interviewers' questions with an intelligence rarely found in pols. So I became intrigued with the man, his books, his family, the way his bi-racial past made him the cautious, cool outsider even while functioning as the ultimate insider.

In reading a recent piece in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer on Obama's distaste for fundraising and the belief of those around him that "big money is corrupt," a light bulb went on for me: he started to make sense. Obama is wary of the strings attached to big donations and keeps his distance from big donors, even at the risk of insulting them. I applaud his ethical standards, even though he knows he has to attend a Beverly Hills or Park Avenue bash and play the game he finds morally tainted. But he won't have his picture taken with the big donors, won't send thank you notes to them or invite them over. His parameters are clear just as his private time is private. Good for him.

The insight I had into the real Obama, as far as this can be discerned, comes from David Maraniss in his recent biography; he describes Obama as a man "with a moviegoer's or writer's sensibility, where he is both participating and observing himself participating": he sees much of the political circus that surrounds him as ridiculous, even as he is deep in the center of it.

What interests me is the ambivalence of such a man and the kinship I can identify with as a writer and teacher (as he was), one who likes the life of the mind probably as much as his family. I am intrigued by his ability to distance himself from his own life.

This will make him a superb future autobiographer, after all the hoopla is over, as he looks back on what he has achieved. Whether it will translate into political success with a hostile Congress is quite another matter. Somehow I think his eye is really on what history will say about him.

I think it will say he was a highly disciplined man who, without much background as a leader, has done fairly well in uncommonly difficult times because he pays meticulous attention to details; this often results in delays in announcing decisions that have disappointed many, but it also results in an almost gaffe-free spoken record. Contrast this with his VP.

Obama has a quality I greatly admire: he is a patient listener who can skillfully think through complex issues as well as a speaker who can rise to great oratorical heights because, I think, he is, as Maraniss says, a writer (and reader) at heart, with a respect for language, thought and precision.

To his liberal supporters and many others, he has proven himself a disappointment because he has never fully revealed how essentially conservative he is at heart, which means in today's world of extremes that he is what moderate Republicans once were. With a touch of intellectual arrogance, he has not fully explained his policies as he should nor defended them with the vigor that comes with old-style politics.

But he has the historical good sense to know something important: that the founding fathers cared as much about discussing ways to advance the common good as they did about ensuring freedom. This concern with the common good, which he shares with the Catholic tradition of social teaching, says that we measure our success in the public sphere by how the working class and the poor are doing. This means that the government must in some ways be caring; Obama understands this and often references this. His policies may be called liberal, but his philosophy is more traditional and more difficult to categorize.

Obama is the postmodern politician, wary of the very process he has tried to re-fashion, as he re-defines his role as a national and world leader while also responding to the daily crises that arise. He has done so with admirable poise and dignity, much to the dismay of his many critics, even though he has made mistakes; at the same time he has raised many unanswerable questions about who he really is.

As frustrating as it may be to the pundits, he will doubtless remain, as all complex personalities are, forever interesting in his ambivalent responses to a world that is not (and never has been) black and white.

The Violet Hour

Much has been written about the various meanings of the color blue, none as memorable as the recent introduction to the book Blue Nights. There Joan Didion has a lyrical two-page reflection on expectation and anticipation, a kind of timeless waiting, during certain evenings of the year when "you think the end of day will never come."

In certain latitudes, she says, there is a span of time in late May when the long twilight turns blue. The French call it 'l'heure bleue,' the name of my mother's favorite perfume. Didion has seen the blue hour in New York; I can't recall experiencing any such intensely blue twilight. I remember the singer Sissel in her video "Northern Lights" referring to the magical blue hour in Norway, but this seemed to describe something quite different, a winter spectacle of the northern lights.

All of this suggests something a bit mysterious and romantic, a state of mind as much as an actual light. I recall the "violet hour" of T. S. Eliot, which to me means
a time of anxiety, anticipation, even suffering as night brings its terrors to those in the Wasteland of modern civilization. It's the dying of the light and the arrival, finally, of dreaded darkness.

Didion often analyzes anxiety and finds the blue night a useful metaphor for her memoir about the "dwindling of the days" and other recollections of sad beauty.

I was reminded of the blue hour again last night when watching a fine sleeper of a movie by Terence Davies, The Deep Blue Sea, set in foggy London town in 1950when literal blue nights would be impossible. But the somber atmosphere and slow pace of this film capture a sense of dread and depression that is turned into art. It unfolds in soft-focus episodes like impressionist paintings.

Rachel Weisz is the superbly rendered main character in this adaptation of a Terence Rattigan play on an old theme, older than Anna Karenina: a beautiful married woman finds doomed love with a younger man; but in this case, he is immature and incapable of giving her the full love she longs for. Her intense feelings, restricted by social custom in 1950s England, and by her class, take us almost into the realm of melodrama except that the emotions are convincingly real.

The film moves slowly backward and forward in time, aided by the intense violin concerto of Samuel Barber, as an otherwise predictable story becomes an original look at romantic despair. Like the blue hour that almost never seems to end, leading finally to the dying of the light, we watch the drama unfold, knowing that the darkness will eventually descend, the couple must part, and her life will somehow go on even as we are reluctant to have the movie end.

Such works of art interest me because in them we seem to experience moments "in and out of time," in Eliot's words. In reading or watching such fiction, we are aware of the unreality of the artifice but become totally engaged with the story, as our own intense feelings become one with those of the characters. In such cases, we as readers or viewers can enter a timeless present that lasts briefly, then vanishes as soon as the story ends. This, for me, is a spiritual dimension in art that is hard to articulate, and we have to be grateful to gifted filmmakers like Davies for allowing us to experience it.