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Ablative Absolute

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St Peter Chanel High School in Bedford, Ohio

The year was 1958. I began attending a new Roman Catholic high school which had opened the previous year. At the time, there were only a sophomore and freshman class. I was in the latter.

My most memorable teacher was the Rev. Gerard Hageman for English. He was super strict. Some years earlier, he has put together his own summary of grammatical rules which he distributed copies of to the class. Any violation of the rules, and the student received not only a flunking grade, but a zero. Since the numerical grades were averaged out—without any sort of bell curve adjustment—it was possible to get and stay in deep trouble insofar as your English grade was concerned.

Fortunately, I led the pack with an 89% average. I thrived in Father Hageman’s class. Even though I told everyone I wanted to be a nuclear physicist, at the time I did not know that I had no head for the sciences and only an indifferent head for mathematics.

I remember Father Hageman assigned us to write one page essays (graded either 0 or 100—nothing in between). Being a good Catholic, I wrote a whole series of essays on Jesus Christ standing before Pontius Pilate. My writing style was influenced largely by what I gleaned from William Faulkner after reading only The Sound and the Fury and by my class in Latin I.

The only thing I remember clearly is when I actually used an obscure Latin construction called an Ablative Absolute in one of my English essays. The opening phrase of the sentence in question was “Cold sweat covering his dolorous countenance” followed by what I conceived Pontius Pilate was thinking.

Prett6y fancy for a 14-year-old! I guess I’m still the same kind of writer, though I generally avoid obscure Latin grammar. On the other hand, by now I have read all of Faulkner’s novels; so I can copy him with some degree of confidence.

Ten Tens

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Over the last quarter of a century, I have read over three thousand books. Ever since I was a sickly child unable to compete in physical sports with my age group, I have used books to feel good about myself and to ready myself to compete in a dog-eat-dog world. Now that I am retired, I find that reading still has huge benefits, particularly when it comes to keeping on an even keel as I enter my eighth decade.

If you want to see the last two thousand or so books I have read and written reviews for, look me up on Goodreads.Com using as your Google search field: Goodreads Tarnmoor.

In the meantime, here are ten of the best books I have read in the last year and a half presented in alphabetical order by the last name of the author:

  1. Ivan Bunin: Collected Stories. Although he is virtually forgotten today, Bunin has written some of the greatest short stories ever penned by a Russian author.
  2. Alejo Carpentier: Explosion in a Cathedral. If you think that a book about the influence of the French Enlightenment on the Caribbean couldn’t be fascinating, guess again!
  3. Geoff Dyer: Last Days of Roger Federer and Other Endings. Superb essays on the theme of the special quality of an artist’s last works.
  4. Tove Jansson: The Summer Book. A gentle and truly lovely book written by a Finnish author in Swedish, of course. If the name sounds familiar, remember the Moomintrolls.
  5. Clarice Lispector: Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas. This bizarrely beautiful Ukrainian/Brazilian writer wrote short journalistic essays that are a classic for our times.
  6. Lucretius: The Nature of Things. A long philosophical poem by an ancient Roman that, even today, is worth mining for the author’s unique insights.
  7. John Cowper Powys: Wolf Solent. Another great work by an author who is almost forgotten today. Read this and you will think differently about living in a rural English town.
  8. Juan Rulfo: Plain in Flames. This Mexican writer did not publish much, but these short stories will make you sit upright. Like John Webster, Rulfo could “see the skull beneath the skin.”
  9. Georges Simenon: Strangers in the House. He wrote hundreds of mysteries, but writers like William Faulkner Patricia Highsmith, and John LeCarré recognized his greatness.
  10. Olga Tokarczuk: House of Day, House of Night. This Polish Nobelist describes life in rural Silesia. As one reviewer wrote: “What emerges is the message that the history of any place–no matter how humble–is limitless, that by describing or digging at the roots of a life, a house, or a neighborhood, one can see all the connections, not only with one’s self and one’s dreams but also with all of the universe.”

Probably what all these works have in common is that they are not as well known as most books. Sometimes, the surprise of reading an author like Dyer or Lispector or Tokarczuk can take you to more interesting places simply because you have not heard of them before.

The Necessity of Opposites

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John Cowper Powys (1872-1963)

I am in the middle of reading a great novel by British author John Cowper Powys, namely Wolf Solent (1929). In 1960, he added a preface to the Macdonald & Company edition which summarizes what I am coming to see as one of the preeminent works of the last century:

What might be called the purpose and essence and inmost being of this book is the necessity of opposites. Life and Death, Good and Evil, Matter and Spirit, Body and Soul, Reality and Appearance have to be joined together, have to be forced into one another, have to be proved dependent upon each other, while all solid entities have to dissolve, if they are to outlast their momentary appearance, into atmosphere. And all this applies to the difference between our own ego, the self within us, the being of which we are all so vividly aware as something under the bones and ribs and cells and vessels of our physical body with which it is so closely associated. Here we do approach the whole mysterious essence of human life upon earth, the mystery of consciousness. To be conscious: to be unconscious: yes! the difference between these is the difference between life and death for the person, the particular individual, with whom, whether it be ourself or somebody else, we are especially concerned.

Report: Januarius 2024

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Havana Street Scene

As I mentioned at the beginning of January, I typically read books in this first month of the year written by authors I have not read before. Well, last month’s total was eleven books:

  • Maxim Osipov: Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Stories (Russia)
  • Dorothy Parker: “Men I’m Not Married To” (USA) – short story
  • Llewelyn Powys: Earth Memories (Britain)
  • George MacDonald: The Princess and Curdie (Scotland)
  • Alejo Carpentier: Explosion in a Cathedral (Cuba)
  • Olga Tokarczuk: House of Day, House of Night (Poland)
  • Joseph Joubert: Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (France)
  • Pedro Juan Gutiérrez: Dirty Havana Trilogy (Cuba)
  • Fleur Jaeggy: Sweet Days of Discipline (Switzerland)
  • Luis Vaz de Camoens: The Lusiads (Portugal)
  • Leonardo Padura: Havana Red (Cuba)

Three of the books were by Cuban authors, and I enjoyed all three of them. Only three were originally published in English. Three of the authors were women, most particularly Olga Tokarczuk, whose House of Day, House of Night was by far the best book I read last month. Second best was Carpentier’s Explosion in a Cathedral, followed by Powys’s Earth Memories.

Were there any clunkers? I am pleased to say “No, not a one!”

Joubert’s Notebooks

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French Thinker Joseph Joubert (1754-1824)

To understand where we are today, I believe it is important to go back in time and read works written in the more distant past. In the middle of reading The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert: A Selection (New York Review Books, 2005), I am confronted by the philosophical fragments of a man who never published during his lifetime. He kept copious notes, however, which were published after his death. During his lifetime, he was best known as Napoleon’s inspector general of French universities.

Following are a number of his maxims which struck my eyes as I was reading his book.

It is not facts but rumors that cause emotions among the people. What is believed creates everything.

All truths are double or doubled, or they all have a front and a back.

What comes through war is given back through war. All spoils will be retaken, all plunder will be dispersed, All victors will be defeated and every city filled with prey will be sacked in its turn.

Clarity of mind is not given in all centuries.

When men are imbeciles, the one who is mad dominates the others.

The only good in man is his young feelings and his old thoughts.

Everything is double and is made up of a soul and a body.

You have searched in vain, you have found nothing but envelopes. Open a hundred, open a thousand, you will always be stopped before opening the last. You think you have touched the essence when you take off the outer skins. You take the homunculus for the animal. But it is much deeper…. In each drop is a drop, in each point another point.

With the Cutlers

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They suddenly appear on Page 207 of Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night (1988), a strange sect known for sharp knives:

They spent their days singing psalms and making knives. They made blades better than anyone in the whole of Silesia and fitted them with carefully polished handles made of ash wood, which every human hand fell in love with instantly. They sold them once a year in early autumn when the apples were ripening on the trees. They held a sort of fair, which attracted people from all over the district; they each bought several knives, sometimes as many as a dozen, in order to sell them on at a profit. During these fairs people forgot that the Cutlers were of a different faith and believed in a different God, and that it would have been easy to produce evidence and drive them away. For who would make such good knives then?

Whenever they bore a child they mourned instead of rejoicing. Whenever someone died, they undressed him, laid his naked corpse in a hole in the ground and danced around the open grave.

About forty pages later appears this poem, called “The Cutlers’ Psalm”:

Futility on all the earth
blessed be barren wombs
holy be all sterility
sacred is decay, desirous is decline
wondrous the fruitlessness of winter
the empty shells of nuts
logs burnt to ashes that still keep the shape of the tree
seeds that fall on to stony ground
knives gone blunt
streams run dry
the beat that devours another’s offspring
the bird that feeds on another’s eggs
war that is always the start of peace
hunger that is the beginning of repletion
Sacred old age, daybreak of death,
time trapped in the body,
death sudden, unexpected.
death downtrodden like a path in the grass
To do, but have no results
to act, but stir nothing
to age, but change nothing
to set off, but never arrive
to speak, but not give voice

Whew!

Currer, Ellis, and Acton

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The Brontë Sisters as Painted by Their Brother Patrick

When the Brontë sisters began publishing their novels in the early 19th century, they did not use their original names. They figured they would find greater acceptance if they used men’s names. Consequently, Charlotte published under the name Currer Bell; Emily, under the name Ellis Bell; and Anne, under the name Acton Bell.

For most of history, there have been precious few women writers whom we know by name. Among the ancient Greeks of the 6th Century BCE, there was Sappho of Lesbos. Then we have to skip forward to the Middle Ages to find Christine de Pizan. In the 17th and 18th centuries, there were a handful of names, including Aphra Behn, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Anne Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, and Charlotte Smith in England as well as Mme. de Lafayette and Mme. de Staël in France.

In the first thirty years of the Nobel Prize in Literature, there were only three women: Selma Lagerlöf, Grazia Deledda, and Sigrid Undset. More recently, the distribution of Nobels is more equitable. Partly, that is because good literature is becoming increasingly female. I am currently reading Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night. In the recent past, I have enjoyed the work of Wisława Szymborska (Poland), Svetlana Alexievich (Belarus), Annie Ernaux (France), and Toni Morrison (U.S.A.)—all winners of the Nobel Prize.

No doubt about it, the future of literature is looking ever more female.

Glimmers

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The Archangel Raphael in the Style of the Cuzco School of Painting

Currently, I am reading Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night, an early (1988) novel by the 2018 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. I came across the following passage and thought I would like to share it with you:

Quite out of the blue a bizarre and compelling idea came into my head today: that we have ended up as human beings through forgetfulness, through lack of attention, and that in reality we are creatures participating in a vast, cosmic battle that has probably been going on since time immemorial, and which, for all we know, may never end. All we see of it are glimmers, in blood-red moons, in fires and gales, in frozen leaves that fall in October, in the jittery flight of a butterfly, in the irregular pulse of time that can lengthen a night into infinity or come to a violent stop each day at noon. I am actually an angel or demon sent into the turmoil of one life on a sort of mission, which is either carrying itself out without my help, or else I have totally forgotten about it. This forgetfulness is part of the war—it’s the other side’s weapon, and they have attacked me with it so that I’m wounded, invalided out of the game for a while. As a result, I don’t know how powerful or weak I am—I don’t know anything about myself because I can’t remember anything, and that’s why I don’t try to look for either weakness or power in myself. It’s an extraordinary feeling—to imagine that somewhere deep inside, you are someone completely different from the person you always thought you were. But it didn’t make me feel anxious, just relieved, finally free of a kind of weariness that used to permeate my life.

“A Butterfly Secret”

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Bats Head in Dorset

I have just finished reading the essays in Earth Memories by Llewelyn Powys (1884-1939), one of three literary giants in a family that included John Cowper Powys (1872-1063) and T. F. Powys (1875-1953). The essays in the book are mostly nature studies with an occasional jaunt into the philosophical implications of his everyday reality. The following is from his essay “A Butterfly Secret”:

And, indeed, as one walks over these downs at nighttime, under the fathomless pricked dome of infinity, one receives but one answer, The matter is as plain as a child’s sum in a dame’s school. Life is its own justification. There is no other aim to it, no other meaning, no other purpose, and if we think otherwise, we are foolish. Let the truth be spoken. Each one of us, each intellectual soul among us, advances steadily and surely toward the grave. Abdel Krim and his Rifis, General Feng and his soldiers, are all marching down the same road—a road that leads to oblivion and that for a thousand years has been trodden by a procession of all nations. Every religion is as brittle as an empty snail shell in dry weather, as quick to disappear as cuckoo-spit in a summer hedge that conceals at its center no green fly. The secret to be remembered is that nothing matters, nothing but the momentary consciousness of each individual as he opens his eyes upon a spectacle that knows nought of ethics.

Let us, as best we may, reconcile our minds to the fact that all our self-imposed tasks, our political engineering, our brave talk have actually, under the shadow of Eternity, no consequence. Our idealism is treacherous. It is a moonshine path over a deep sea. We are cursed souls each one of us and resemble nothing so much as jackdaws flying about he radiant cliffs of God pretending to be seagulls.

And yet there is no cause to despair. Merely to have come to consciousness at all constitutes an inestimable privilege. The past is nothing, the future is nothing, the eternal now alone is of moment. This is understood well enough by every living creature but man.

The Tadzhik Woman

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RUSSIA – CIRCA 1984: shows Tadzhik Soviet Socialist Republic flags and arms, circa 1984

I am currently reading a book of stories by the Russian writer Maxim Osipov entitled Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Stories. In the title story is an incredible Tadzhik woman who kills an official of a small rural town in Russia who tries to rape her. Her name is Ruhshona Ibragimovma. Although working in a menial position at a restaurant, she is a highly educated woman, which, in the position she finds herself, becomes increasingly unimportant to her.

[D]eath’s omnipresence is no accident, no unhappy mistake. Everyone fears death, just as they fear misfortune, yet death is inescapable, which means it is real. And that we did not invent it. At this very moment Ruhshona begins to see death as the most important thing that can exist within a person. She views those who don’t carry death within themselves—who don’t live by it—as empty, like wrapping paper, like candy wrappers. Hollow, soulless people. She can pick them out at a glance.