October 17: Balancing Act

The sneaker represents justification!

It's about to get all 17th-century up in here, as Religio Medici, by Sir Thomas Browne, is presented for our delectation. ("Religio Medici," it turns out, means "Religion of a doctor," and doesn't have anything to do with the Medici family who had their own skybox during the Renaissance, which was what I'd assumed whenever I saw the name of this essay, which was seldom.)

I don't often comment on literary style, because it takes me a long time to figure that stuff out, and I tend to want to keep to my more visceral reaction, but today I can't help noticing that Sir T.B. likes to keep things in pairs. Here's a passage where I've put in some line breaks to show what I'm getting at:

Whatsoever is beyond, as points indifferent, I observe according to the rules of my private reason,
or the humor and fashion of my Devotion;
neither believing this, because Luther affirmed it,
or disproving that, because Calvin hath disavouched it.

I condemn not all things in the Council of Trent,
nor approve all in the Synod of Dort.

In brief, where the Scripture is silent,
the Church is my Text;
where that speaks,
’tis but my Comment:
where there is a joynt silence of both, I borrow
not the rules of my Religion from Rome or Geneva,
but the dictates of my own reason.

It's full of hinges, like Home Depot. And this is a case where style = substance, because, as the above passage shows, Browne is a classic Anglican -- we're not this, we're not that, we're just trying to muddle in the middle and keep our eye on the important thing. Which is, of course, Aesthetics:

That allegorical description of Hermes 11 pleaseth me beyond all the Metaphysical definitions of Divines. Where I cannot satisfy my reason, I love to humour my fancy: I had as live you tell me that anima est angelus hominis, est Corpus DEI, [the soul is man’s angel, GOD’s body] as Entelechia; 12—Lux est umbra Dei, [Light is GOD’s shadow] as actus perspicui. 13 Where there is an obscurity too deep for our Reason, ’tis good to sit down with a description, periphrasis, or adumbration...

It is good to curl up with a nice adumbration, especially now that fall is here. Note the footnotes:

Note 11. The description alluded to, “God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere,” is said not to be found in the books which pass under the name of the fabulous Hermes Trismegistus.
Note 12. Aristotle’s word for “actual being.”
Note 13. The active force of the clear.

You can see why Browne never intended this to be published; this was inaccessible by 17th-century standards. I remember trying to read "Urn Burial" many years ago and continually having to scan down to the bottom of the page; it's like constantly going downstairs to try to deal with a leaky faucet. Yet Browne has his fanboys (and girls; one of them was Virginia Woolf), generally other writers. He's a misunderstood giant, I guess, like Ornette Coleman or something.

Photo by flickr user Ted Abbott used with a Creative Commons license.

July 23: Angles

Figuring out your angle is as much a part of writing as looking out the window and wondering if you've done enough work to justify getting a snack. Francis Bacon's angle was being the first person to write essays in English. That's a great angle. It had better be, because the only justification to writing this unremarkable sentence (in "Of Expense"):

But ordinary expense ought to be limited by a man’s estate; and governed with such regard, as it be within his compass...

is that you're the first one to do it in English. He also advises, if you're spending money in one place, why not reduce expenses in another? Move over, Suze Orman -- who's living proof, I guess, that no one ever takes this advice, or there would be no need to build your career on continuing to give it.

Now, it's up to me to find my angle on the other essay, "On Friendship," which has long stretches concerning favorites among the Roman emperors. And where I'm angling is here:

A man cannot speak to his son but as a father; to his wife but as a husband; to his enemy but upon terms: whereas a friend may speak as the case requires, and not as it sorteth with the person.

It's like the Promise Keepers' version of marriage -- it would look bad for your position as Head of Household to mingle with the help. It's not even clear, actually, if Bacon (who was Lord Chancellor) even thinks that the common people can have friends, since the first thing he looks at is how the kings do it. Or maybe he is like one of those bloggers who has to refer everything to politics -- like, what does the big WNBA brawl mean for the election?

July 9: A Few Bullet Points About Francis Bacon

• There are times when Bacon (first six essays today) reminds me of an op-ed columnist. There's a kind of on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand style to his argumentation that I find a little muddy. Like when he's talking about the hot-button religious unity issue:

But we may not take up the third sword, which is Mahomet’s sword, or like unto it; that is, to propagate religion by wars or by sanguinary persecutions to force consciences; except it be in cases of overt scandal, blasphemy, or intermixture of practice against the state...

Just wanting to keep all his bases covered.

• Where he is most interesting, though, is when he about lies. This first essay is "Of Truth," but it seems more about its opposite, which Bacon has anything but a recieved opinion on:

...this same truth is a naked and open day-light, that doth not show the masks and mummeries and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. ... A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of men’s minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?

Lying as flattering candlelight is a good image. And then there's this essay which draws a careful distinction between dis-simulation and simulation -- both are lies, but dissimulation, as far as I can tell, means denying you know something, and simulation means pretending you know it. If Bacon really were an op-ed columnist I would expect him to wring his hands and bemoan the fallen state of the world, steroids, etc., but instead he just weighs the options of when you should do it, given that truthfulness is a skill given only to the great ones.

But if a man cannot obtain to that judgment, then it is left to him generally to be close, and a dissembler. For where a man cannot choose or vary in particulars, there it is good to take the safest and wariest way in general; like the going softly by one that cannot well see.

"In seasonable use," though, warns Bacon.

• The final bullet point is that I wished I liked his style better. It feels like operating instructions, like something written from 30,000 feet (maybe that's what makes me think of op-ed columnists). Bacon's not in these essays, the way Montaigne is, and the novelty of the arguments is almost concealed by the plainness of the style. But maybe that's me -- maybe I'm too used to caffeinated internet writing. Via Slate, here's Caleb Crain on internet prose:

text on the internet rarely takes for granted your decision to read it or to continue reading it. There is often, instead, a jazzy, hectoring tone. At home my boyfriend and I use a certain physical gesture as shorthand to describe it. To make it, extend your index fingers and your thumbs so that your hands resemble toy pistols. Then waggle them before you, like a dude in a cheesy Western, while you wink, dip your knees, and lopsidedly drawl, "Heyyy." The internet is always saying, "Heyyy." It is always welcoming you to the party; it is always patting you on the back to congratulate you for showing up. It says, You know me, in a collusive tone of voice, and Wanna hear something funny? and Didja see who else is here? This tone is not absent from print; in fact, no page of New York magazine is without it. Certain decorative effects in language may be compatible with it, but it seems to be toxic to imagination.

I'm not sure it's "toxic" to imagination, but I do think it makes you impatient with prose that tries to sneak up on you, the way Bacon's, I think, tries to do.

June 27: Of "Of Envy"

One thing you can say about Francis Bacon, he is wicked organized:

we will handle, what persons are apt to envy others; what persons are most subject to be envied themselves; and what is the difference between public and private envy.

Bacon was held up as an example when they were trying to teach us essay writing, and the writing is so clear you can practically see through it to the Roman numerals, the letters, and the numbers of his outline. It didn't take with me because I am too disorderly, but I see now that one thing being wicked organized has going for it is that it keeps you from asking questions. If you get swept up in the flow (chart), you start to think, "This person must have thought of everything! But he hasn't, although noting that "bastards are naturally envious" is a nice touch.

What Bacon doesn't cover is why people should be envious, which is the interesting question to me. It's obvious enough that someone should be envious when they haven't got what to eat, but why does envy work its green-eyed magic on someone who has a reasonable amount of cars, and climate control in their house? Perhaps we could express it in an equation:

(Capricious, irrational way that life is) - (Rational way we think life should be) = envy

In other words, envy is our protest against how unfair everything is. There's a lot of envy in show business (not that there isn't in the HVAC industry, it's just that showbiz is what I know), because there is so much luck involved. When I was making a lot of money, I knew there was luck involved, and now that I'm making none, I feel the same way. But that doesn't stop me from railing against my current luck (to my wife, mostly) -- anxiety has a lot to do with it, of course, but I think part of me is just offended at the senselessness. It turns out the music of the spheres is super-discordant, when we thought it should sound hosannas for us.

And as I think about what we think we should deserve, it occurs to me that one of the advantages of Original Sin as a doctrine is that it teaches that the only thing we deserve is judgement (or Judgement) -- everything else is playing with the house's money.

Well, this is not very Baconian, and kind of gloomy besides, so I will close with my favorite part of this essay, which is Bacon, slightly, as Machiavelli:

Those that have joined with their honor great travels, cares, or perils, are less subject to envy. For men think that they earn their honors hardly, and pity them sometimes; and pity even healeth envy. Wherefore you shall observe that the more deep and sober sort of politic persons, in their greatness, are ever bemoaning themselves, what a life they lead; chanting a quanta patimur [how great things do we suffer!]. Not that they feel it so, but only to abate the edge of envy.

Apr 9: The Old New Atlantis

Pre-space science fiction today in Bacon's New Atlantis -- the beginning of it, of course, because if the Daily Reading Guide isn't the Handbook for Dilettantes I don't know what is. The strange people and their customs are in space, in a way -- the wide open, uncharted desert isles of the South Seas.

I don't read science fiction, which I admit is more a judgement on me than it, but one of the advantages of setting your alternative world on Earth is that your people don't have to have invented Klingon-like ridges on their skulls, or anything. They can even be Christian:

At which answer the said person lifted up his right hand towards Heaven, and drew it softly to his mouth (which is the gesture they use, when they thank God;) and then said: “If ye will swear (all of you) by the merits of the Saviour, that ye are no pirates, nor have shed blood, lawfully, nor unlawfully within forty days past, you may have licence to come on land.” We said, “We were all ready to take that oath.”

They're just a little different with the gestures, but otherwise they're just like us! Only, I also note, more credulous: Wouldn't a pirate also swear that he is not a pirate? (They've got a lot of sick people on board and have run out of food, though, so maybe they think that even if they are pirates they're not very formidable.) I was amused at the end of this paragraph, too:

So he left us; and when we offered him some pistolets, he smiling said, “He must not be twice paid for one labour:” meaning (as I take it) that he had salary sufficient of the State for his service. For (as I after learned) they call an officer that taketh rewards, twice paid.

I don't think there's enough works of science fiction that really get at reform of the Civil Service.

UPDATE: Title added -- I write them last, as you may have guessed (thanks, dad!)

Mar 7: Bacon's Op-Ed

One of my little ploys, I've noticed, is to translate the readings into pop culture terms. I suppose I do it to make it relevant -- even to myself. But not "relevant" in the "cool" sense -- if I say Shakespeare play is like a summer blockbuster (to make up an analogy; I don't have any idea if that's a supportable idea), I don't mean that people should like it as much as they do summer blockbusters, it's just that it let me think about Shakespeare in a way that makes him seem less foreign, so I can have a more honest response. The past is another country, after all. ( And a lot of times it's from another country too, which makes it doubly hard.)

So when I point out that Francis Bacon's essay Of Judicature strikes me as basically an Op-Ed from a guy who knows a lot of Latin, I'm not trying to talk it up. I'm saying it's obvious:

Judges ought to be more learned than witty, more reverend than plausible, and more advised than confident. Above all things, integrity is their portion and proper virtue.

And I argue the opposite! Integrity is the worst quality a judge could have! The whole thing, which is short, is like that -- judges shouldn't talk too much! Courthouses shouldn't have corrupt dealings in them! Etc.

There are two things to say in its favor: 1. Of course, the Op-Ed hadn't been invented yet, so there was much less of a history of pieces where judges are urged not to be corrupt. At least pieces written in English, anyway. Op-Ed writers of today have less of an excuse. And 2., the piece is wicked organized. Bacon gives four areas of concern for the office of judge. Each gets a paragraph. One paragraph (the administration of the courts), has four sub-areas. Each area gets a sentence.

I think they tried to teach this to me in high school, but as you see it didn't take. It couldn't be less like Montaigne. Whom I prefer -- but then I am not a practical person.