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“A Vast Field in Perpetual Turmoil”

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Paris’s Boulevard du Temple in 1837 or 1838

The above photograph is the first one to show a human being. There he is, in the lower left, having his shoes shined. All the pedestrians and carts and carriages have disappeared because this was an eight-hour exposure, ensuring only that static subjects could be recorded. Below is a description of Paris by Honoré de Balzac at the beginning of The Girl with the Golden Eyes (1835) that is anything but static:

One of those sights in which most horror is to be encountered is, surely, the general aspect of the Parisian populace—a people fearful to behold, gaunt, yellow, tawny. Is not Paris a vast field in perpetual turmoil from a storm of interests beneath which are whirled along a crop of human beings, who are, more often than not, reaped by death, only to be born again as pinched as ever, men whose twisted and contorted faces give out at every pore the instinct, the desire, the poisons with which their brains are pregnant; not faces so much as masks; masks of weakness, masks of strength, masks of misery, masks of joy, masks of hypocrisy; all alike worn and stamped with the indelible signs of a panting cupidity? What is it they want? Gold or pleasure? A few observations upon the soul of Paris may explain the causes of its cadaverous physiognomy, which has but two ages—youth and decay: youth, wan and colorless; decay, painted to seem young. In looking at this excavated people, foreigners, who are not prone to reflection, experience at first a movement of disgust towards the capital, that vast workshop of delights, from which, in a short time, they cannot even extricate themselves, and where they stay willingly to be corrupted. A few words will suffice to justify physiologically the almost infernal hue of Parisian faces, for it is not in mere sport that Paris has been called a hell. Take the phrase for truth. There all is smoke and fire, everything gleams, crackles, flames, evaporates, dies out, then lights up again, with shooting sparks, and is consumed. In no other country has life ever been more ardent or acute. The social nature, even in fusion, seems to say after each completed work: “Pass on to another!” just as Nature says herself. Like Nature herself, this social nature is busied with insects and flowers of a day—ephemeral trifles; and so, too, it throws up fire and flame from its eternal crater. Perhaps, before analyzing the causes which lend a special physiognomy to each tribe of this intelligent and mobile nation, the general cause should be pointed out which bleaches and discolors, tints with blue or brown individuals in more or less degree.

By dint of taking interest in everything, the Parisian ends by being interested in nothing. No emotion dominating his face, which friction has rubbed away, it turns gray like the faces of those houses upon which all kinds of dust and smoke have blown. In effect, the Parisian, with his indifference on the day for what the morrow will bring forth, lives like a child, whatever may be his age. He grumbles at everything, consoles himself for everything, jests at everything, forgets, desires, and tastes everything, seizes all with passion, quits all with indifference—his kings, his conquests, his glory, his idols of bronze or glass—as he throws away his stockings, his hats, and his fortune. In Paris no sentiment can withstand the drift of things, and their current compels a struggle in which the passions are relaxed: there love is a desire, and hatred a whim; there’s no true kinsman but the thousand-franc note, no better friend than the pawnbroker. This universal toleration bears its fruits, and in the salon, as in the street, there is no one de trop, there is no one absolutely useful, or absolutely harmful—knaves or fools, men of wit or integrity. There everything is tolerated: the government and the guillotine, religion and the cholera. You are always acceptable to this world, you will never be missed by it. What, then, is the dominating impulse in this country without morals, without faith, without any sentiment, wherein, however, every sentiment, belief, and moral has its origin and end? It is gold and pleasure. Take those two words for a lantern, and explore that great stucco cage, that hive with its black gutters, and follow the windings of that thought which agitates, sustains, and occupies it! Consider! And, in the first place, examine the world which possesses nothing.

“A Great Earthquake”

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In his novel Dombey and Son (1848), Charles Dickens had a striking passage about the effect that railroad construction was having on parts of London. I remember this passage vividly from when I first read the book decades ago.

The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre. Traces of its course were visible on every side. Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsy-turvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill; there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond. Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing. There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream. Hot springs and fiery eruptions, the usual attendants upon earthquakes, lent their contributions of confusion to the scene. Boiling water hissed and heaved within dilapidated walls; whence, also, the glare and roar of flames came issuing forth; and mounds of ashes blocked up rights of way, and wholly changed the law and custom of the neighbourhood.

In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress; and, from the very core of all this dire disorder, trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilisation and improvement.

But as yet, the neighbourhood was shy to own the Railroad. One or two bold speculators had projected streets; and one had built a little, but had stopped among the mud and ashes to consider farther of it. A bran-new Tavern, redolent of fresh mortar and size, and fronting nothing at all, had taken for its sign The Railway Arms; but that might be rash enterprise—and then it hoped to sell drink to the workmen. So, the Excavators’ House of Call had sprung up from a beer-shop; and the old-established Ham and Beef Shop had become the Railway Eating House, with a roast leg of pork daily, through interested motives of a similar immediate and popular description. Lodging-house keepers were favourable in like manner; and for the like reasons were not to be trusted. The general belief was very slow. There were frowzy fields, and cow-houses, and dunghills, and dustheaps, and ditches, and gardens, and summer-houses, and carpet-beating grounds, at the very door of the Railway. Little tumuli of oyster shells in the oyster season, and of lobster shells in the lobster season, and of broken crockery and faded cabbage leaves in all seasons, encroached upon its high places. Posts, and rails, and old cautions to trespassers, and backs of mean houses, and patches of wretched vegetation, stared it out of countenance. Nothing was the better for it, or thought of being so. If the miserable waste ground lying near it could have laughed, it would have laughed it to scorn, like many of the miserable neighbours.

Throwing Down the Glove

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Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris

As I read today for the first time a play by French Writer Honoré de Balzac, I was reminded of the last scene in his great novel Père Goriot as Eugène de Rastignac attended the poor funeral of his old neighbor Goriot..

But just as the coffin was put in the hearse, two empty carriages, with the armorial bearings of the Comte de Restaud and the Baron de Nucingen, arrived and followed in the procession to Pere-Lachaise. At six o’clock Goriot’s coffin was lowered into the grave, his daughters’ servants standing round the while. The ecclesiastic recited the short prayer that the students could afford to pay for, and then both priest and lackeys disappeared at once. The two grave diggers flung in several spadefuls of earth, and then stopped and asked Rastignac for their fee. Eugene felt in vain in his pocket, and was obliged to borrow five francs of Christophe. This thing, so trifling in itself, gave Rastignac a terrible pang of distress. It was growing dusk, the damp twilight fretted his nerves; he gazed down into the grave and the tears he shed were drawn from him by the sacred emotion, a single-hearted sorrow. When such tears fall on earth, their radiance reaches heaven. And with that tear that fell on Father Goriot’s grave, Eugene Rastignac’s youth ended. He folded his arms and gazed at the clouded sky; and Christophe, after a glance at him, turned and went—Rastignac was left alone.

He went a few paces further, to the highest point of the cemetery, and looked out over Paris and the windings of the Seine; the lamps were beginning to shine on either side of the river. His eyes turned almost eagerly to the space between the column of the Place Vendome and the cupola of the Invalides; there lay the shining world that he had wished to reach. He glanced over that humming hive, seeming to draw a foretaste of its honey, and said magniloquently:

“Henceforth there is war between us.”

And by way of throwing down the glove to Society, Rastignac went to dine with Mme. de Nucingen.

Bad Weather Ahead

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Moscow in the 1920s

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950) was a Soviet writer who, in his own words, was “known for being unknown.” Hopefully, that will no longer be true as New York Review Books releases more of his stories. I have just finished reading his Autobiography of a Corpse, which contains a prescient 1939 story titled “Yellow Coal.” Tell me if the first paragraph of the story, quoted below, reminds you of our present situation:

The economic barometer at Harvard University had continually pointed to bad weather. But even its exact readings could not have predicted such a swift deepening of the crisis. Wars and the elements had turned the earth into a waster of its energies. Oil wells were running dry. The energy-producing effect of black, white and brown coal was diminishing yearly. An unprecedented drought had swaddled the sere earth in what felt like a dozen equators. Crops burned to their roots. Forests caught fire in the infernal heat. The selvas of South America and the jungles of India blazed with smoky flames. Agrarian countries were ravaged first. True, forests reduced to ashes had given place to ashy boles of factory smoke. But their days too were numbered. Fuellessness was threatening machines with motionlessness. Even glacier snow-caps, melted by the perennial summer, could not provide an adequate supply of waterpower; the beds of shrinking rivers lay exposed, and soon the turbine-generators would stop.

Cat

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I am currently reading a collection of short short stories by the Swiss author Fleur Jaeggy. Following is the complete text of the shortest story in her collection I Am the Brother of XX.

Observing others is always interesting. On a train, in airports, at conferences, while waiting in line, when sitting across from someone at a table; on any occasion, in fact, that people flow into. Even someone who doesn’t travel or is very much alone will at some point go out on the street for half an hour. And observe a cat terribly concentrated and alert, stalking his prey. Or clawing it. Maybe it’s a butterfly, or a leaf, or a piece of paper, an insect. On reaching the target, suddenly a cat becomes distracted. Animal behaviorists call this movement Übersprung. It happens just before the deadly blow. We see the cat shift and move the prey as if it were a feather. The last moves. The butterfly dances its agony. It vibrates imperceptibly, and this attracts further interest from the cat. And then he looks away. Walks away. Calmly, he changes route. Changes the mental route. It is like a dead moment. Stasis. It’s as if nothing interests him. It’s as though he has forgotten the fluttering wings that only moments earlier had inspired his total dedication. That which had possessed him before, as though it were an idea, a thought. Now he pulls away. Looks elsewhere. With his little paw he rubs his muzzle. With his little paw he scratches behind one ear, head bent. He has many tasks to fulfill. They have nothing in common with the preceding one. With action. The cat is looking elsewhere. He is elsewhere. It is a strategic move. It is part of a mechanism of precision. All of it is reminiscent of the puppets in Kleist’s story. The precision of the assault, the lightness and agility. The detachment, the distance. Maybe the butterfly and the leaf have the same moment of Übersprung. Like the cat. They distract themselves from agony, abstract themselves from their own death. From the idea of death. That’s what the cat does. He distances even himself from the agony. That he has inflicted. We don’t know why it is that the cat turns his gaze away. He knows why. Who knows, maybe this Übersprung is a delectacio morosa. A melancholic doing away with any connection to the victim. Übersprung: a word that involves us, too. It is a turning away, going on to something else, manifesting a gesture of detachment, like a goodbye. Wandering from the theme, escaping from a word—at once hunting for words and doing away with them: these are all a mind’s modes of writing. Some write according to delectacio morosa. Thomas De Quincey, for instance, once hinted at the “dark frenzy of horror.”

Summer Vacation

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The following paragraphs come from the beginning of Chapter Eight in John D. MacDonald’s The Crossroads. In it, he satirizes the typical 1950s summer family vacation.

During the first twenty-two days of July the Crossroads Corporation experienced the normal seasonal change in the character of the business. Summer vacationers clogged the roads. The young families stopped at the restaurants and gas stations and motels. The young husbands, with fourteen days, or twenty-one days of freedom, spent it abrading their souls against the shimmer and stink of fast traffic, counting every night the thinning stack of traveler’s checks. The young wives put on pretty summer skirts and blouses in the morning, and by ten o’clock were stained, wilted, wrinkled and rump-sprung, the victims of the attrition of summer heat, sticky hands and road fumes. They called their husbands darling with iron emphasis. Small, weary, wind-burned children whined and threw up. The young families visited dear friends they had not seen in three years, and found nothing to say to them. They visited the showplaces of the nation, made the proper dutiful sounds of appreciation and found them a litter of gum wrappers, bored guides, and ill-mannered children of the other young families. They careened down the endless stone rivers between the bright thickets of billboards. Virginia Beach was where Junie thumped Russell on the head with a rock. Three stitches. The Suwanee River was where the trunk compartment lock jammed. The Grand Canyon was where Baby broke Mummie’s glasses. Franconia Notch was where Tiffin got into the poison ivy.

Tires burst. Speedometer cables squeaked and died. Pebbles chipped windshields. Pets escaped. (You were the one hadda bring that goddam dog in the first place.) Fan belts snapped. Ten billion pieces of Kleenex tumbled along the dusty shoulders.

The Physicist and the Tortoise

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Small Tortoise and Strawberry

This is a story that the naturalist Loren Eiseley (1907-1977) tells in his book The Firmament of Time. I instantly fell in love with it:

There is a story about one of our great atomic physicists—a story for whose authenticity I cannot vouch, and therefore I shall not mention his name. I hope, however, with all my heart that it is true. If it is not, it ought to be, for it illustrates well what I mean by a growing sense of self-awareness, a sense of responsibility about the universe.

This man, one of the chief architects of the atomic bomb, so the story runs, was out wandering in the woods one day with a friend when he came upon a small tortoise. Overcome with pleasurable excitement, he took up the tortoise and started home, thinking to surprise his children with it. After a few steps he paused and surveyed the tortoise doubtfully.

“What’s the matter?” asked his friend.

Without responding, the great scientist slowly retraced his steps as precisely as possible, and gently set the turtle down upon the exact spot from which he had taken him up.

Then he turned solemnly to his friend. “It just struck me,” he said, “that perhaps, for one man, I have tampered enough with the universe.” He turned, and left the turtle to wander on its way.

Thor the Thunderer

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Storm Off the Island of Hoy, Orkney, Scotland

For many years, Scottish writer and poet George Mackay Brown wrote a column for the local newspaper of the Orkney Islands, The Orcadian. The following column from his collection Rockpools and Daffodils: An Orcadian Diary 1979-1991. describes a once-in-a-generation thunderstorm:

I think we have never had a thunderstorm like it this generation in Orkney.

We had almost forgotten what a thunderstorm was. A few warnings lingered in the memory. ‘Cover the mirrors’ … ‘Don’t take shelter under a tree’ … Someone had said to us as children, ‘The lightning won’t strike if you wear rubber boots.’ … (Old wives’ mutterings beside the fire, half-forgotten.)

I suppose we ought to have been prepared for thunder—day after day of sunshine, a still brooding loaded atmosphere, no rain for weeks.

We were so thankful for early tokens of a good summer, no-one was complaining.

It came with dramatic suddenness, between breakfast and lunch. The darkening sky, the first vfew rain-drops heavy as coins, a low growl across the sky (as if Thor wasn’t in the sweetest of tempers). But Thor, in the last two or three decades, has occasionally given a growl or two on a summer day, and turned over to sleep again.

Thor the Thunderer had urgent things to do today, it soon became obvious. He had business on his hands. His mighty hammer thudded on the hills, amid flashings.

The clouds were torn apart. Black bags of water, they emptied themselves upon the town. The gardens, at least, must have loved it, after the long drought. One could sense the roots gorging themselves.

The stones of Stromness [Brown’s home town] could do nothing with the sudden weight of water. The gutters gushed and spluttered. Down the Distillery close came a river of water, and swung south. The lightning was mostly vivid blinks, followed at once by peal upon peal. Hundreds of tons of coal were being shifted along the horizon. There was a mighty furniture removal in the sky: grand pianos and huge Victorian sideboards. And sometimes it was as if a cannon had exploded by accident in a close or down a pier, a hideous ripping of hot metal.

The cosmic electricity had quelled the little expensive electricity that man makes. I switched on the light in the eerie darkling room—nothing doing.

A candle responded with a tranquil flame.

A golden fork stabbed down and singed Hoy Sound!

After a time it seemed that Thor had finished his mighty labours for the day. The sky brightened, the thunder grumbled under the horizon.

But Thor must have forgotten some tool in his sky-smithy. Back he came and blew up his forge and struck the anvil a few more mighty blows: while we nervous earthlings below trembled. By early afternoon it was all over. We looked at each other in the cleansed air, we spoke to each other, like folk who had had some wonderful, frightening new experience.

Moral Unease

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American Writer Renata Adler (Born 1937)

I found the following in Renata Adler’s Pitch Dark, which was published after her first novel, Speedboat:

We have the sins of silence here. Also the sins of loquacity and glibness. We have the sins of moderation, and also of excess. We have our sinner gluttons, and our sinner anorectics. We have the sins of going first, and of After you, Alphonse. We have the sins of impatience, and of patience. Of doing nothing, and of taking action. Of spontaneity and calculation. Of indecision, and of sitting in judgment on one’s peers. We try to be alert here for infractions, and when we find none, we know we have fallen among the sins of oversight, or of smugness. We have the sins of disobedience, and of just following orders. Of gravity and levity, of complacency, anxiety, indifference, obsession, interest. We have the sins of insincerity, and of telling unwelcome truths. We have the sins of ingratitude for our many blessings, and of taking joy in any moment of our lives. We have the sins of skepticism, and belief. Of promptness, and of being late. Of hopelessness, and of expecting anything. Of failing to think of the starving children in India, of dwelling on thoughts about those children, or to Uncle Bill, or Granny, or poor Joel, or whomever we are being asked to take another spoonful for. We have the sins of depression, and of being comforted. Of ignorance, and being well-informed. Of carelessness, and of exactitude. Of leading, following, opposing, taking no part in. Very few of us, it seems fair to say, are morally at ease.

Prose Poem

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William Blake Illustration from the Book of Job

The following prose poem by Wisława Szymborska is the best treatment I have ever read of the Old Testament Book of Job.

SYNOPSIS

Job, sorely tried in both flesh and possessions, curses man’s fate. It is great poetry. His friends arrive and, rending their garments, dissect Job’s guilt before the Lord. Job cries out that he was righteous. Job does not know why the Lord smote him. Job does not want to talk to them. Job wants to talk to the Lord. The Lord God appears in a chariot of whirlwinds. Before him who had been cloven to the bone, He praises the work of his hands: the heavens, the seas, the earth and the beasts thereon. Especially Behemoth, and Leviathan in particular, creatures of which the Deity is justly proud. It is great poetry. Job listens: the Lord God beats around the bush, for the Lord God wishes to beat around the bush. Job therefore hastily prostrates himself before the Lord. Events now transpire in rapid succession. Job regains his donkeys and camels, his oxen and sheep twofold. Skin grows over his grinning skull. And Job goes along with it. Job agrees. Job does not want to ruin a masterpiece.

—Wisława Szymborska. Poems New and Collected 1957-1997