Pushkin, "О Байроне и о предметах важних"

An essay ("On Byron and important matters") by this Russian poet, on the 225th birthday of this Englishman.  You can read the original here.

The clan of Byrons, one of the oldest in English aristocracy (which, in turn, is the youngest among European aristocracies), descended from the Norman Ralph de Buron (or Biron), an associate of William the Conqueror.  The name of the Byrons is mentioned with honor in English chronicles.  Their family's title was created in 1643.  It is said that Byron valued his noble birth more than his literary works.  A very understandable sentiment!  The lustre of his forebears and the honors which he inherited from them elevated the poet; on the other hand, the fame he himself earned brought him merely petty insults which often humiliated the noble Baron, consigning his name to the mercy of hearsay and rumor. 

Captain Byron, son of the famous admiral and father of the great poet, won illustrious and seductive fame.  He stole the wife of Lord Carmarthen and married her immediately upon her divorce.  Soon thereafter, in 1784, she died, leaving him one daughter.  The following year, in order to right his upset state of affairs, the calculating widower married Miss Gordon, the only daughter and heiress of George Gordon, a Gight landowner.  This marriage was unhappy: 23,500 pounds sterling (587,500 rubles) were squandered in two years, and Lady Byron was left only with her 150 pounds of annual income.  In 1786, husband and wife departed to France and returned to England towards the end of 1787.

On the following January 22, Lady Byron gave birth to her only son, George Gordon Byron.  (Following some family tensions, the Gight heiress was obliged to bestow upon her son the name Gordon).  His leg was harmed during the birth, to which Lord Byron imputed his mother's bashfulness or obstinacy.  The newborn child was christened by Duke Byron and Colonel Duff.

In 1790 Lady Byron left for Aberdeen and her husband pursued her.  For a while they lived together.  But their characters were too irreconcilable, and soon they separated.  Her husband went to France, but not before bilking his poor wife out of the money he needed for his trip.  The following year, 1791, he would die in Valenciennes.

Once, during his short stay in Aberdeen, Captain Byron took in his small son, who ended up spending the night.  The next day, however, he rendered the fidgety child back to his mother and never again invited him over.

Lady Byron was a simple woman, irascible, and, in many respects, reckless.  But the solidity with which she was able to endure poverty did credit to her rules.  She retained only one servant and by 1798, when she accompanied young Byron to his inheritance of an estate in Newstead, her debts had not surpassed 60 pounds sterling.

It is worth noting that Byron never made any mention of the domestic circumstances of his childhood, deeming them mean and debasing.  Young Byron learned to read and write at an Aberdeen school.  He was among the last in his class, gaining greater distinction in games.  According to his coevals' accounts, he was a lively, irascible, and rancorous boy, always ready to fight and avenge some offense.   

A certain Patterson, a rigorous Presbyterian, but a calm and scholarly thinker, was his mentor then, and of him Byron would always have very good memories.

In 1796, Lady Byron took him to the mountains to recover after he had a bout of scarlet fever.  They settled close to Ballater.  The severe beauty of the Scottish natural surroundings made a deep impression upon the lad.  Around that same time, eight-year-old Byron fell in love with Mary Duff.  Seventeen years later, in one of his journals, he described this early love:

"I have been thinking lately a good deal of Mary Duff.  How very odd that I should have been so utterly, devotedly fond of that girl, at an age when I could neither feel passion, nor know the meaning of the word.  And the effect! – My mother used always to rally me about this childish amour; and, at last, many years after, when I was sixteen, she told me one day, 'Oh, Byron, I have had a letter from Edinburgh, from Miss Abercromby, and your old sweetheart Mary Duff is married to a Mr. C.'  And what was my answer?  I really cannot explain or account for my feelings at that moment; but they nearly threw me into convulsions, and alarmed my mother so much, that after I grew better, she generally avoided the subject – to me – and contented herself with telling it to all her acquaintance.  Now, what could this be?  I had never seen her since her mother's faux-pas at Aberdeen had been the cause of her removal to her grandmother's at Banff; we were both the merest children.  I had and have been attached fifty times since that period; yet I recollect all we said to each other, all our caresses, her features, my restlessness, sleeplessness, my tormenting my mother's maid to write for me to her, which she at last did, to quiet me.  Poor Nancy thought I was wild, and, as I could not write for myself, became my secretary.  I remember, too, our walks, and the happiness of sitting by Mary, in the children's apartment, at their house not far from the Plain-stones at Aberdeen, while her lesser sister Helen played with the doll, and we sat gravely making love, in our way.

"How the deuce did all this occur so early?  Where could it originate?  I certainly had no sexual ideas for years afterwards; and yet my misery, my love for that girl were so violent, that I sometimes doubt if I have ever been really attached since.  Be that as it may, hearing of her marriage several years after was like a thunder-stroke – it nearly choked me – to the horror of my mother and the astonishment and almost incredulity of every body.  And it is a phenomenon in my existence (for I was not eight years old) which has puzzled, and will puzzle me to the latest hour of it; and lately, I know not why, the recollection (not the attachment) has recurred as forcibly as ever.  I wonder if she can have the least remembrance of it or me?  Or remember her pitying sister Helen for not having an admirer too?  How very pretty is the perfect image of her in my memory – her brown, dark hair, and hazel eyes; her very dress!  I should be quite grieved to see her now; the reality, however beautiful, would destroy, or at least confuse, the features of the lovely Peri which then existed in her, and still lives in my imagination, at the distance of more than sixteen years.  I am now twenty-five and odd months."

In 1798 old Lord William Byron died in Newstead; four years before him, his own grandson had died in Corsica.  As a result, young George Byron became the sole heir to the wealth and title of his clan.  As a minor he was placed under the guardianship of Lord Carlisle, his distant relative, and, delighted, Lady Byron left Aberdeen that same fall for old Newstead with her eleven-year-old son and her faithful servant Mary Gray.

Lord William, the brother of Admiral Byron, the child's grandfather, was an odd and wretched man.  He once stabbed his cousin and neighbor, William Chaworth.  They fought without witnesses in a bar at candlelight.  The case made a great deal of noise and the House of Lords declared the murderer guilty as charged.  He was, however, freed from punishment and from that time on lived in Newstead where his whims, stinginess, and gloomy character made him the subject of slander and gossip.  The most preposterous rumors circulated as to why he divorced his wife.  It was believed that he once attempted to drown her in a Newstead pond.  

He tried to ruin his properties out of his hatred for his heirs.  His only interlocutors were an old servant and a housekeeper who served another purpose as well.  In addition, the house was filled with crickets, which Lord William fed and raised.  Despite his niggardliness, the old Lord was often in need of money and got it by means often reprehensible to his heirs.  But such a man could not possibly care about these matters.  In this same way he sold Rochdale, his family estate, without having any right to do so (a fact known full well to the buyers, who wished to make a profit before his heirs succeeded in demolishing the illegal sale).

Not once did Lord William get in touch with his young heir, to whom he referred only as the boy who lived in Aberdeen. 

Lord Byron's first years, spent in impoverished conditions that did not befit his birth and under the watchful eye of an ardent mother who was as reckless in her displays of affection as in her fits of rage, would have a powerful and lasting effect on the rest of his life.  His injured self-esteem and eternal sensitivity bound his heart with the acrimony and irritability that would later become the marks of his character. 

The strange qualities of Lord Byron were partially innate, and partially bestowed.  Moore has justly noted that Byron's character reflected both the virtues and the vices of his ancestors.  On the one hand, we find his daring entrepreneurship, magnanimity, and the nobleness of his sentiments; on the other, his unchecked passions, caprices, and insolent disdain of public opinion.  Doubtless, the memory of Lord William strongly affected the imagination of his successor: he adopted many of his great-uncle's customs and one cannot but concur that Manfred and Lara recall that solitary Newstead baron.

Trivial circumstance, it seems, had just as great an influence on his soul.  At the very minute of his birth, his leg was injured, and Byron would remain lame the rest of his life.  This physical shortcoming also wounded his self-esteem.  Nothing could compare with the fury he felt when Lady Byron once berated him as a "lame brat."  Although a very fine-looking fellow, he imagined himself ugly and shunned the company of those who did not know him well, all because he feared their mocking leers.  This very shortcoming strengthened his desire to distinguish himself in every feat requiring physical strength and agility.     

Der Husten meines Vaters

An essay ("My father's cough") by this German writer.  You can read the original as part of this collection.

When my father became as old as I am now, he seemed to me (perhaps naturally) to be older than I feel.  Birthdays were not celebrated at our house – this was seen as a deplorable "Protestant habit" – so while I cannot remember a party, a few details come to mind about the mood that reigned in October of 1930.  (My father shared a birth year, 1870, with Lenin, but, I think, nothing more.)

It was a dreary year.  Total financial collapse, and not your run-of-the-mill 'going broke,' either.  Instead, a baffling transaction called an "insolvency proceeding" took place.  It did sound much more noble than "bankruptcy," and was linked to the collapse of a worker's bank whose director, if I recall correctly, ended up behind bars (credit abuses, expired securities, frivolous speculation).  Our house out in the country had to be sold, and not a penny was left over from the amount we received.  Very disturbed by this event, we all moved into a large apartment on the Ubierring in Cologne, at the time directly across from the vocational school.

Bailiff after bailiff, bailiff's seal after bailiff's seal.  We would rip them off provided they had been freshly applied, in defiance of this premature attempt to seize our belongings.  In time, however, we grew indifferent and let the stickers be stuck.  Soon we noticed that some of the furniture had truly become 'seal colonies' (the piano, for example).  We got along with the bailiffs; sardonic remarks were exchanged, of course, but neither party ever strayed into vulgarities.

I also remember the politically-charged design of the four-pfennig coin involving an emergency decree and a tobacco tax.  This four-pfennig piece was a large, beautifully sculpted copper coin, although it may be that the coin first came out in 1931-32.  The Nazis marched triumphantly into the Reichstag; Brüning was still in office then; and the paper we read then was the Kölnische Volkszeitung.  My older siblings, however, swore by the RMV (Rhein-Mainische-Volkszeitung).

No more playing games outside.  Very painful.  In the suburb of Raderberg we used to play street hockey with old umbrella crooks and empty milk boxes, rounders sometimes, football less often, in the park by the promontory.  The park's roses were also snipped with what we called a Flitsch, a crotch, but which in other German regions is referred to as a Zwille.  When tossing tires we would slip old bicycle rims down a mild meadow cliff; the person whose tire rolled the farthest was the winner.  Records were set; tire battles went around the entire extended block; but using purchased wooden tires was considered inappropriate.  Ping-pong on the terrace, scarecrows in the garden; target practice with air rifles on unused light bulbs which still had bayonet screws.  We saw nothing military in these shooting exercises, much less anything war-like.  Ten years of freedom and too many idle games for me to count.  (The blazing torches on St. Martin's Day, the paper kites we would build and launch, the marbles we would play.)

In the long hallway of the Ubierring apartment we continued our target practice, now with standard-issue targets and pins called Flümmchen (which, I find in old Wrede's dictionary, comes from Flaum, "down" or "fluff," which in turn comes from the Latin pluma; looks like our pins had swabs).  Whoever happened to be in or going into the bathroom, kitchen, or bedroom during these exercises had, of course, to be warned.  The general mood was insouciance and fear, so they cancelled each other out.  Of course not all of our income was reported to the bailiff.  We were paid under the table for certain jobs, while also earning money by renting out our appliances for joinery and carpentry work.  Recently, I came across this passage in Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies: A Love Story: "If you wanted to live, you had to break the law, because all laws condemned you to death."  We wanted to live.

Things proceeded modestly and yet modesty did not become our watchword.  We had enough worries and debts as it was: rent, food, clothes, books, heat, electricity.  Against all this only temporary insouciance was of any help, and only because it was temporary.  Somehow money had to be drummed up for the cinema, for cigarettes, for the coffee we could not do without, all of which was met with only occasional success.  It was during this time that we got to know all the pawnshops.

Yet all of this was not as much fun as it might sound.  The more modestly life rambled on, the less of a watchword modesty became.  I recall with gratitude the loyalty of my older siblings who spared me, the youngest, from so much, even now and then hiding certain things.  Yet what most distressed me during this time was my father's cough.  He was a svelte man: between the ages of nineteen and eighty-four his body weight fluctuated only by one or two kilos; only when he turned eighty-five did he begin to waste away.  He did things in moderation, but he also liked to smoke; yet he never inhaled and never let anyone take away his Lundis (at least not entirely!), thin, pungent cigarillos in small tins.  In this respect he was sad, as well as powerless against the circumstances, and I think sometimes that we children did not properly take part in his mourning.

His cough even outyelled the powerful roar of the number sixteen streetcar; we could hear the cough then from a good distance.  But his cough most distressed me on Sundays in the overcrowded Basilica of St. Severin.  We never went 'all together' to mass, always individually, and it was rare that two or three siblings shared the same pew.  And so we would wait, each in his seat, full of dreadful tension, to hear our father's cough, which would suddenly break out, rise almost to suffocation levels, then, as my father exited the church, peter out anew.  We also understood that he would then stand outside and smoke a Lundi to better his cough. 

Now that I am as old as my father was then, I see that I seem to have inherited his cough (and I am not alone).  There are a few of them in our household who, if I parked on a street choked with cars, would recognize me by my cough, even during the loudest traffic.  I rarely need to ring a doorbell or stick a key in a keyhole; the door is already open before I can do either one.

My cough must lie on wavelengths which penetrate not only traffic jams and screeching brakes, but also many a tap and tattoo, although I do not think one may call my cough "penetrating."  It is composed of variations of different forms of hoarseness, usually expresses some kind of embarrassment, and is only rarely a sign of a cold.  And there are those who know that it is more than a cough – as well as less.

My one-year-old granddaughter, for example, seems to understand it as a form of language or address.  She imitates it, and the two of us converse in coughs, which assume an amused and ironic character and in which we clearly have something to express.  Here I think of Beuys, who once addressed someone solely by clearing his throat and coughing slightly, a very clever way, as it were, of addressing someone.

Perhaps we should establish throat-clearing schools, at the very least experiment with throat-clearing as a school subject.  We should likewise free throat-clearing from its dumb index finger function – a sort of warning of impending tactlessness during a conversation.  The art pour l'art of coughing and throat-clearing.

We should also consider whether some very smart people might want to devise a throat-clearing letter to the editor.

Borges, "La supersticiosa ética del lector"

An essay ("The superstitious ethics of the reader") by this Argentine man of letters.  You can read the original here.

The destitute condition of our letters – to wit, its inability to seduce readers – has engendered a superstition regarding style, a distracted interpretation by the partially attentive.  What those afflicted with this superstition understand by style is not a page's efficacy or inefficacy, but the ostensible habits of the writer: his similes, his sound, the occurrences of his punctuation and his syntax.  They remain indifferent, however, to his convictions or his emotion; instead they seek out tecniquerías (a word coined by Unamuno), "games of technique," which will tell them whether or not what is written has the right to please them.  They have heard that adjectivizations should not be trivial and will think a page poorly written if it does not contain surprises amidst the junctures of adjectives and nouns, even if its final aim has been realized.  They have also heard that concision is a virtue and deem concise those who restrict themselves to ten short sentences, and not those who write one long one.  (Normative examples of this charlatanism of brevity, of this sententious frenzy, can be found in the diction of the celebrated Danish statesman Polonius of Hamlet, and of the real-life Polonius, Baltasar Gracián.)  They have heard that the close repetition of a few syllables is cacophonous and will pretend that such a phenomenon causes them pain when they read prose, although its appearance in verse gives them a special pleasure, which, I think, is just as feigned.  That is to say, they do not see the efficacy of the mechanism, only the layout of its parts.  They subordinate emotion to ethics – rather, to an undisputed etiquette.  This inhibition has been so generalized that no more readers, in the ingenuous sense of the word, will remain, only potential critics.

So widespread is this superstition that no one would dare admit an absence of style in any works he comes across, especially if these works are alleged 'classics.'  There is no good book without stylistic attribution, which no one can do without apart from, of course, the writer.  Let us take as our example Don Quixote.  Criticism, Spanish criticism, prior to the proven excellence of this novel, had not wanted to consider that its greatest (and, perhaps, its irrecusably single) value was psychological, and attributed to it gifts of style which would strike many as mysterious.  In reality, it is sufficient to review a few paragraphs of Don Quixote to sense that Cervantes was not a stylist (at least not in the present acoustic and decorative meaning of the word), and that the destinies of Quixote and Sancho interested him far too much to allow himself to be distracted by his own voice.  Baltasar Gracián's Agudeza y arte de ingenio – so laudatory of other prose narratives such as Guzmán de Alfarache  – decides not to remember Don Quixote.  In jest Quevedo versifies his death and forgets about him.  One might object that these two examples are negative;  Leopoldo Lugones, in our time, presented this explicit opinion:  "Style is the weakness of Cervantes, and the ravages caused by his influence have been very serious.  A paucity of color, an uncertainty of structure, gasping paragraphs that never come to an end, devolving into interminable convolutions; repetitions, a lack of proportion, all this was the legacy of those who, not seeing the supreme realization of an immortal work in anything but its form, remained gnawing the helmet whose bumps concealed strength and taste" (El imperio jesuítico, page 59).  Our Groussac also commented: "If things must be described just as they are, we will have to admit that a good half of the work is composed in too lazy and slovenly a form, which very much justifies the 'humble language' that Cervantes's rivals have imputed to him.  And by this I am neither merely nor mainly referring to the verbal improprieties, the intolerable repetitions or plays on words, or the snippets of weighty grandiloquence that overwhelm us, but to the generally unconscious contexture of this afternoon prose" (Crítica literaria, page 41).  Afternoon prose, chatty and not recited prose, this is the prose of Cervantes and he needs no other.  I imagine that this same observation would be justified in the case of Dostoevsky or Montaigne or Samuel Butler.

This conceit of style is hollowed out into an even more pathetic conceit, that of perfection.  There has never been a metrical writer, even with a chance as close to zero as possible, who has not carved out (the verb ought to be part of his conversation) his perfect sonnet, his miniscule moment which contains his possible immortality, and which the novelties and annihilations of time will have to respect.  This is generally a sonnet without fluff, but the whole thing is fluff: that is to say, a residue, a futility.  This fallacy of persistence (Sir Thomas Browne: Urn Burial) was formulated and recommended by Flaubert in the following phrase: "Correction (in the highest sense of the word) creates with thought what the waters of the Styx created with the body of Achilles: it makes it invulnerable and indestructible" (Correspondance, II, page 199).  The judgment is categorical, and yet I have never had any experience that might confirm it.  (I am doing without the tonic virtues of the Styx; this infernal reminiscence is not an argument, it is an emphasis.)  The page of perfection, the page on which no word could be altered without any damage done, this is the most precarious of all pages.  Changes in the language erase additional senses and nuances; the "perfect" page is the one consisting of those subtle elements that wears out with great ease.  Inversely, the page that contains the vocation of immortality may traverse the fire of its mistakes, of its approximate versions, of its distracted readings, of its incomprehensions, without losing its soul in this crucible.  No line fabricated by Góngora can vary without impunity (as confirmed by those who restore his texts); but Don Quixote has won countless posthumous battles against its translators and survives in the most careless of versions.  Heine, who never heard the work in Spanish, was able to celebrate it endlessly.  More alive is the German or Scandinavian or Hindustani specter of Don Quixote than the anxious verbal artifices of the stylist.   

I did not intend for the morality of this verification to be understood as one of desperation or nihilism.  I do not wish to foment negligence nor do I believe in the mystic virtue of the clumsy sentence or the vulgar epithet.  I admit that the voluntary emission of these two or three minor pleasures – the ocular distractions of the metaphor, the auditory distractions of the rhythm, and the unexpected distractions of the interjection or hyperbole – tends to prove to us that the passion of the subject in question is commanding the writer, nothing more.  The asperity of a sentence is as indifferent to genuine literature its softness.  Prosodic economy is no less foreign in art than are calligraphy, orthography, or punctuation: the certainty that the judicial origins of rhetoric and the musical origins of song always remained hidden from us.  The preferred equivocation of the literature of today is emphasis.  Definitive words, words which postulate the wisdoms of a fortune-teller or an angel, or resolutions of a greater than human assuredness – only, never, always, all, perfection, completed – compose the habitual trade of every writer.  They do not think that saying one thing too many times is as unskillful as not saying it at all, and that a careless generalization and intensification is a poverty, which is how it is perceived by the reader.  Their imprudences cause a depreciation in the language.  This is what occurs in French, whose phrase je suis navré tends to mean I won't go have a cup of tea with you, and whose verb of love, aimer, has been reduced to the meaning of like.  This hyperbolic tendency of French is the same in the written language: take, for example, Paul Valéry, hero of lucidity who organized and translated some forgettable and forgotten lines of Lafontaine, then declared them (in an argument with someone): ces plus beaux vers du monde (Variété, 84).

Now I wish to remember the future and not the past.  Reading is already done in silence, a happy indication.  There is already a silent reader of verse.  There is a tireless journey to be made between this stealthy quality and purely ideographic writing – the direct communication of experiences, not of sounds – but it is always less distant than the future.  I re-read these negations and think: I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end.

Frau und Schauspieler

An essay ("Woman and Actor") by this Swiss writer.  You can read the original as part of this collection.

My dear sir, I am writing to you now because yesterday I happened to be in the city theater and saw you as Prince Max in Hofgunst.  Just so you know in advance, I am a woman of thirty, somewhat past that age, in fact, does this interest you?  You are young and handsome, cut a dashing figure, and must have women falling all over each other to get to you.  By the way, please do not count me among those falling women; and yet I must admit that I like you and feel obliged to tell you why.  This letter is already getting a bit long, don't you think?

When I saw you yesterday on the stage, it immediately occurred to me how innocent you were; that is to say, you certainly possess a great deal of child-like qualities.  And on the stage last night you so comported yourself that I thought I should write to you.  I am doing so right now; but will I actually mail this letter?  Forgive me, I'm sure: you should be proud that you engender doubt.  Perhaps I will not mail these words to you, then you would know nothing and have no reason whatsoever to succumb to unseemly laughter.  Do you ever succumb to that?  Understand that I suspect you have a beautiful, fresh, and pure heart, but perhaps you are still too young to know how important that is.  When you answer me, tell me where you spend your free time.  Or tell me in person, come to me tomorrow afternoon at six; I will be expecting you. 

Most people place the entirety of their ambition in the ignoble impossibility of committing a foolishness.  They do not care for the propriety of behavior, although it seems like they do.  They only respect convention when it may be subjected to some kind of danger.  For dangers are educational, and one becomes conventionless without the proper urge to retain these customs and be educated about important things in some lively manner.  Timidity often seems to be our real convention – what lethargic thoughtlessness!  Are you still listening to me, listening to me sincerely?  Or are you one of those regrettably numerous people who think that everything a bit shameful or stressful is necessarily boring?  Spit upon this letter and tear it into pieces if it bores you.  But tell me the truth: it does excite you, it does interest you, it is not boring.                

My God, how handsome you are, my dear sir!  And so young, hardly twenty if that old.  I found you a bit stiff last night and your fine voice a bit precious.  Will you forgive me for speaking this way?  I am ten years older than you, and it does me so much good to be able to talk to a person young enough for me to feel ten years older than he is.  You have something in your manners that makes you seem even younger than one would reasonably guess; this is the aforementioned preciousness.  Please do not rush to divest yourself of such a comportment, I implore you: I like it and, I would add, it would be a shame for this theater piece of natural unnaturalness.  Children are like this.  Am I offending you?  I am so open, am I not?  Yet you do not know how much joy attends the conceit whispering in my ear: he admits it, he loves it.  How the officer's uniform, the tight boots, the coat, the collar, the pants so suited you!  I was simply enthralled.  And what princely manners you displayed, what energy in your movements!  And how you spoke: you were so superfluously heroic that I almost had to feel a bit embarrassed for you, for myself, for everything.  So loudly and importantly did you hold forth in the salon of your castle or your father's castle!  How your big eyes sometimes rolled here and there as if you wanted to eat up a member of the audience, and how close, how very close you were!  One time my arm flinched and, against my will, I wanted to stick out my hand to touch you where you stood.  I see you before me, so big and so loud.             

If you come to my place tomorrow will you also appear upon my stage with such gravity?  You should know that in my room everything is very quiet and simple; I have never received an officer at my place and there has never been a scene.  How will you behave?  But your entire, high-placed, beanstalk-like being appeals to me; for me it is new, fresh, good, noble, and pure.  I would like to get to know it because I feel that within it lies something innocent and unbroken.  Show it to me the way it is; I sensed it in advance and I believe that I love it. 

There is no arrogance in your so seemingly arrogant being.  You are incapable of anything deceitful; you are too young and I am too experienced to be wrong about you.  And now I no longer have any doubts that I will mail you this letter, but let me just say a few more things.  You are coming to see me; this we agree upon.  Wipe your boots off before coming up the stairs and entering the house; I will be standing by the window watching your actions.  How I so look forward to being so dumb and doing all this.  You see how much I'm looking forward to this.  Perhaps you are scurrilous and will punish me for provoking in you an interest in me.  If you are such a person, come and have your fun, punish me, I fully deserve it. 

But you are young, isn't that the opposite of scurrilous?  How clearly I see your eyes before me, and I have to tell you something: I do not think of you as very clever, but as very right, very exact, which can be more than clever.  Am I barking up the wrong tree?  Do you belong to the sophisticated and refined?  If this is so, then in the future I shall sit alone and abandoned in my living room because I do not understand people any more.  I shall stand by the window and open the door for you; you will not need to ring for long.  And then you'll see me, so soon now.  Actually, I wish – no, I do not want to say that much.  Are you still reading?  I should alert you in advance to the fact that I am rather pretty so that you will make somewhat of an effort and wear your finest and best-brushed attire.  What would you like to drink?  You will tell me without any embarrassment; I have wine in the cellar, my maid will go fetch it.  But perhaps it would be best if we first drink a cup of tea, what do you think?  We will be alone: my husband always works at the store at this time, but do not comprehend this as an invitation to be disrespectful; on the contrary, this should make you shy.  This is how I want to see you, shy and beautiful; otherwise I'll chase down the postman tasked with bringing these lines to you, yell at him, call him a robber and a murderer, commit enormities, and end up in jail.  How I long to see you, to have you near me!  I speak thus because I so insist on having a good opinion of you.  And if, after all that's been said, you still come to me, then you will be courageous, and the hour and a half that we spend together will be nice.  And then it would be of no use to tremble as I am doing now, because inviting you to my place will have been no daredevil act on my part.  You are so slender that I would recognize you even if you were standing down on the street before the garden doors.

What are you doing at this very moment?  What do you think, should I stop writing now?  If I stepped before you and imitated you as Prince Max standing there, you would surely laugh. 

I adjure you, bow deeply before me when you look at me and be stiff and behave yourself normally; permit yourself no free movements.  I warn you and I will thank you for having obeyed me like no one in your life has ever thanked you.

Dynamics of Faith

In the act of faith every nerve of man's body, every striving of man's soul, every function of man's spirit participates.  But body, soul, spirit, are not three parts of man.  They are dimensions of man's being, always within each other; for man is a unity and not composed of parts.  Faith, therefore, is not a matter of the mind in isolation, or of the soul in contrast to mind and body, or of the body (in the sense of animal faith), but is the centered movement of the whole personality toward something of ultimate meaning and significance.  Ultimate concern is passionate concern; it is a matter of infinite passion.

                                                                                                                           – Paul Tillich

It seems like cheating for a student of theology to read more popular works on the subject, works that hold an inevitable appeal to the common reader – until, of course, that student realizes that no book in world history has held more appeal than the Christian Bible.  The pundits of contemporary nihilism or relativism or oneupmanship have proclaimed with no small smugness that theology, as a critical field of inquiry, is on its way out.  Why would anyone bother with this type of stuff anymore, they scoff, and we are reminded that medical science often attributes religious visions to phenomena "only found now in very primitive cultures."  Religion was the shroud that kept the world in darkness; science is the light that has made everything clear as day – so clear, in fact, that sending an unmanned spacecraft to a neighboring planet in a universe of billions of planets is considered a technological breakthrough.  If something about such complacency perturbs you, you may enjoy the pithy brilliance of this famous book.

Since Tillich is not a mystery writer, we can come straight to the point: Faith is the meaning of life.  Or, at least, it is what we perceive the meaning of our particular life to be.  Restricted by his desire to be epigrammatic, Tillich concerns us with what we have to come to call our ultimate concern, that is to say, the conclusion we make actively or passively about why we keep ourselves alive in the first place.  An alcoholic may declare – and openly demonstrate – that the bottom of the next bottle is his only aim; yet his true goal may be far more profound, even when attended by the usual psychological poppycock.  Despite his addiction or weakness, the alcoholic has faith in the machinery that fills his body and mind with intoxicants.  These intoxicants may make him forget or make him remember; they may ease physical or emotional pain; they may render him more palatable to others or others to himself.  Whatever the case, he is convinced every morning that he rises without taking his own life, that his actions and motivations correspond to a system that runs the entirety of his existence.  His faith is embodied in that system the same way that the entirety of a Christian is embodied in his faith in the Cross.  That both remain abiding symbols for what they represent does not diminish the impact of faith in either of those two lives.  The only question we need to ask is what on earth or beyond the faith of an alcoholic might entail.  As it were, the answer is as simple as the idolatry that has pervaded the majority of our culture: Faith in things not of ultimate concern.   

Critics may stop after a few short pages with the retort: How is everything we believe in construed as faith?  But again, they will not have understood the crux of the argument.  Belief is not faith because belief can be expressed by an act of the will and, as it were, expressed in detail in language that need not be symbolic.  Faith for Tillich is what moves us to move; in a way the dynamics of faith is a pleonasm.  You may have faith in money because you perceive money to be the means by which you can acquire what you really want; you may also have faith in money because it, unlike faith or language, appears to enjoy universal acceptance.  You may also construct a world in which you could never be disappointed with anything except the world itself, since you take no risks so as to endure no potential for suffering or regret.  Tillich suggests, however, that it is impossible to separate man from faith if man is seen as having any direction or willpower at all.  Whatever activities a man may pursue, he is bound by intractable faith.  The difference again between one man and another resides in the difference between their ultimate concerns.  For a Protestant like Tillich, the subject of his concern is the subject of all concern:

Religiously speaking, God transcends his own name.  That is why the use of his name easily becomes an abuse or a blasphemy.  Whatever we say about that which concerns us ultimately, whether or not we call it God, has a symbolic meaning.  It points beyond itself while participating in that to which it points.  In no other way can faith express itself adequately.  The language of faith is the language of symbols.  If faith were what we have shown that it is not, such an assertion could not be made.  But faith, understood as the state of being ultimately concerned, has no language other than symbols.

There are other approaches: that of skepticism, broadly rooted in scientific advancement or simply in doubt that anything could be greater than a human mind; and that of Catholicism, Islam, and Judaism, all of which at least promote an ultimate concern that is not irreconcilable with the ultimate concern that gnaws at Tillich.  True enough, Islam and Judaism will organize their efforts to provide guidance and sacrament, while Catholicism builds an impregnable and infallible city of God.  Their sense of the beyond, of man's ultimate meaning nevertheless cannot possibly be as shallow or "demonically self-destructive" as that of materialists, atheists, so-called secular humanists (secretly unbrave agnostics) or those who choose the concrete world as their realm of faith – but I think that much we already know.   

Nineteen years have passed since I first read Tillich, but he should be absorbed again and again for the same reason that a painting can be admired at numerous shades of day from numerous angles over the course of a life.  It may seem amazing that I can enjoy this masterpiece, whose basic tenet Tillich implicitly refutes, at the same time that Tillich's cogent bricklaying builds something more than a house and something less than a palace.  This is, of course, a tribute to the genius of both men.  The courage that is promoted at length in another work will surface as the lesser of the two attributes of man, and as well it should.  We are alive and happily so, but the shroud looms.  And as we grow older, we become less capable of staving off the doubts that afflict the skeptic, the heretic, the indifferent layabout.  Not that, mind you, any of this is really a sustained or ultimate concern.