The Hammock Papers: Clear.

12 November 2023

Clear.

Wyeth, N.C., The Crystal Gazer, 1930

Anthony Esolen on clearing away the noise ...

But there's another source of trouble that I wasn't aware of at the time, and that was not as pronounced then as it is now. That's the ubiquity of the lousy stuff. If you pick up a book published in 1900, chances are that it will have been written in fairly competent English, even at the worst, because otherwise it wouldn't have gotten published at all. My copies of popular magazines from about 1875 to 1920 (I have about 20 years' worth, of The Century, Harper's, Scribners', and a few others) seem sometimes to have been written by members of a lost species of intelligent life.

Noise works its harm. If I look at hymns written since 1965, and I compare them with the hymns in any Anglican, Lutheran, or Methodist hymnal from before that time, I see poetic incompetence, vagueness, sometimes bad grammar, and in general a failure to consider that hymn-writing is an art, and you begin to learn an art by patiently attending to what the masters of the art have done before you. But the noise is everywhere now, and if you're going to start you have to clear away the noise.

Thanks for pointing this out, Kurt.

No comments:

Post a Comment

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL