By Jorge Luis Borges, trans. M. Picciotto:

Camden, 1892

The smell of coffee and the daily news.
Another Sunday and the Sunday blues.
Morning. Printed on a hazy page,
some happy other poet’s vain displays
of allegoric verse. And in this place,
poor but still well-kept, the old man lies
white and flat in bed. His idle eyes
look in the tired mirror at his face.
He thinks – it doesn’t shock him now – that face
is him. His absent-minded fingertips
pluck at his muddy beard and plundered lips.
The end is not far off. His voice now says:
I almost am not. But my lines keep the rhythm
of life and its splendor. I was Walt Whitman.

More from Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” rapidly shaping up to be the most interesting thing I’ve read this week:

We are dominated by Journalism. In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever. Fortunately in America Journalism has carried its authority to the grossest and most brutal extreme. As a natural consequence it has begun to create a spirit of revolt. People are amused by it, or disgusted by it, according to their temperaments. But it is no longer the real force it was. It is not seriously treated. In England, Journalism, not, except in a few well-known instances, having been carried to such excesses of brutality, is still a great factor, a really remarkable power. The tyranny that it proposes to exercise over people’s private lives seems to me to be quite extraordinary. The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. In centuries before ours the public nailed the ears of journalists to the pump. That was quite hideous. In this century journalists have nailed their own ears to the keyhole. That is much worse. And what aggravates the mischief is that the journalists who are most to blame are not the amusing journalists who write for what are called Society papers. The harm is done by the serious, thoughtful, earnest journalists, who solemnly, as they are doing at present, will drag before the eyes of the public some incident in the private life of a great statesman, of a man who is a leader of political thought as he is a creator of political force, and invite the public to discuss the incident, to exercise authority in the matter, to give their views, and not merely to give their views, but to carry them into action, to dictate to the man upon all other points, to dictate to his party, to dictate to his country; in fact, to make themselves ridiculous, offensive, and harmful. The private lives of men and women should not be told to the public. The public have nothing to do with them at all. In France they manage these things better. There they do not allow the details of the trials that take place in the divorce courts to be published for the amusement or criticism of the public. All that the public are allowed to know is that the divorce has taken place and was granted on petition of one or other or both of the married parties concerned. In France, in fact, they limit the journalist, and allow the artist almost perfect freedom. Here we allow absolute freedom to the journalist, and entirely limit the artist. English public opinion, that is to say, tries to constrain and impede and warp the man who makes things that are beautiful in effect, and compels the journalist to retail things that are ugly, or disgusting, or revolting in fact, so that we have the most serious journalists in the world, and the most indecent newspapers. It is no exaggeration to talk of compulsion. There are possibly some journalists who take a real pleasure in publishing horrible things, or who, being poor, look to scandals as forming a sort of permanent basis for an income. But there are other journalists, I feel certain, men of education and cultivation, who really dislike publishing these things, who know that it is wrong to do so, and only do it because the unhealthy conditions under which their occupation is carried on oblige them to supply the public with what the public wants, and to compete with other journalists in making that supply as full and satisfying to the gross popular appetite as possible. It is a very degrading position for any body of educated men to be placed in, and I have no doubt that most of them feel it acutely.

The first thing I am interested by in this passage is how little has changed in the world of journalism; the second, how much of Wilde’s private life can be read between the lines. This essay was written in 1891; Wilde’s trials would not begin until 1895. But were the papers insinuating then about what Wilde might be getting up to in London? Were they speculating about the precise nature of his relationship with Alfred Douglas, whom he met in the summer of 1891? Does anyone know?

From Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” courtesy of a certain professor always apt with his 19th-century quotations:

And so he who would lead a Christlike life is he who is perfectly and absolutely himself. He may be a great poet, or a great man of science; or a young student at a University, or one who watches sheep upon a moor; or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about God, like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who throws his net into the sea. It does not matter what he is, as long as he realises the perfection of the soul that is within him.

Take that, Congress?

I’m going to go read the rest of the Wilde essay now, and think about, instead of our government’s inexorable slide into insanity, utopias that could or could not have been.

We would all do well to remember today one of the greatest heroes in American history.

A 1956 letter from Lionel Trilling to Allen Ginsberg, responding to the manuscript of “Howl”:

Dear Allen,

I’m afraid I have to tell you that I don’t like the poems at all. I hesitate before saying that they seem to me quite dull, for to say of a work which undertakes to be violent and shocking that it is dull is, I am aware, a well known and all too easy device. But perhaps you will believe that I am being sincere when I say they are dull. They are not like Whitman—they are all prose, all rhetoric, without any music. What I used to like in your poems, whether I thought they were good or bad, was the voice I heard in them, true and natural and interesting. There is no real voice here. As for the doctrinal element of the poems, apart from the fact that I of course reject it, it seems to me that I heard it very long ago, and that you give it to me in all its orthodoxy, with nothing new added.

Sincerely yours,
Lionel Trilling

Other fun facts to do with Trilling and Ginsberg that I discovered from the annotated edition of Howl edited by Barry Miles: Ginsberg took Trilling’s on Romantic literature and wrote a paper comparing Rimbaud and Keats; Ginsberg wrote in a letter to Richard Eberhart in 1956 that “I suffered too much under Professor Trilling, whom I love, but who is a poor mental fanatic after all and not a free soul”; in 1958 he told John Hollander that Trilling had a “tin ear” for poetry. Gasp!

I am struck by how young Ginsberg seems as he mails “Howl” manuscripts off to famous poets and professors, and then I remember that when he began to write “Howl,” he was only 28. I wonder if when I am 28 I will have already begun work on what people will consider my magnum opus, and I wonder if when I am 28 I will speak with such a naïve tone of self-assurance.

Peter, Paul & Mary:

If you take my hand, my son/All will be well when the day is done.

I wish this were true, but it’s a nice thought, anyway.

Don’t worry; I’m on break now, so at some point I will post something other than a quote. But, until then, from the third essay of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, in which he’s discussing the importance of the “ascetic ideal”:

Thus the philosopher abhors marriage, together with all that might persuade him to it,—marriage as hindrance and catastrophe on his path to the optimum. Which great philosopher, so far, has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer—were not; indeed it is impossible to even think about them as married. A married philosopher belongs to comedy, that is my proposition: and that exception, Socrates, the mischievous Socrates, appears to have married ironice, simply in order to demonstrate this proposition.

I just love the idea—particularly in light of having recently read the Symposium—of Socrates getting married ironically (the world’s first hipster?).

Already breaking the resolution I made five minutes ago to think about nothing but H.D., Plath, Kant, and Hegel until my English and politics papers are turned in, I was listening to a 1954 episode of The Goon Show and heard this gem:

Listeners who are listening will, of course, realise that Minnie and Henry are talking rubbish, as erudite people will realise, there are no elephants in Sussex. They are only found in Kent. North of a line drawn between two points thus making it the shortest distance.

I’m pretty sure this is hilarious.

More from Lytton Strachey’s chapter on Florence Nightingale in Eminent Victorians:

It was not until July, 1856—four months after the Declaration of Peace—that Miss Nightingale left Scutari for England. Her reputation was now enormous, and the enthusiasm of the public was unbounded. The Royal approbation was expressed by the gift of a brooch, accompanied by a private letter.

You are, I know, well aware [wrote Her Majesty] of the high sense I entertain of the Christian devotion which you have displayed during this great and bloody war, and I need hardly repeat to you how warm my admiration is for your services, which are truly equal to those of my dear and brave soldiers, whose sufferings you have had the privilege of alleviating in so merciful a manner. I am, however, anxious of marking my feelings
in a manner which I trust will be agreeable to you, and therefore send you with this letter a brooch, the form and emblems of which commemorate your great and blessed work, and which I hope you will wear as a mark of the high approbation of your Sovereign!

“It will be a very great satisfaction me,” Her Majesty added, “to make the acquaintance of one who has set so bright an example to our sex.”

The brooch, which was designed by the Prince Consort, bore a St. George’s cross in red enamel, and the Royal cypher surmounted by diamonds. The whole was encircled by the inscription, “Blessed are the Merciful.”

I love reading about the Victorians; I feel like I’m learning huge swathes of this really important, sort of traditional history that’s been learnt by generations of school children. It’s empowering to feel like I’m actually gaining some cultural literacy.