Curing a Fatty Degeneration of the Mind

I note this week Friend Dave's consternation over an admission in Sunday School that I read six books at once but don't particularly finish any of them.

Columnist Leonard Pitts recently addressed this very point, referring to Nicholas Carr's theory, in, Is Google Making Us Stupid, that the Net is rewiring our brains. Carr contends, since search engines retrieve more results than it's possible to read in a lifetime, and the length of a lifetime hasn't increased, exponentially, "it requires a tradeoff in concentration and focus."

Not necessarily.

As William Hurt said in The Big Chill, "I'm not into the completist thing."

In Cultural Amnesia, Clive James presents a hundred short biographies, which are anything but compendiums of births, degrees earned, accomplishments made; they are, instead, ruminations which compel a reader to follow the most intriguing clues -

-like the story of Egon Friedell, philosopher, historian, journalist, actor, critic, who jumped to his death through an upstairs window in Vienna as the Gestapo arrived to arrest him. In the introduction to the 1964 edition of Friedell's, A Cultural History of the Modern World, Alfred Polgar writes, "he was like the dowser, who does not plow the grounds bit by bit but digs only in places where the vibration in his hands indicates that he has found what he seeks."

Following clues further, we find Polgar fled Vienna, finding no real peace for the remainder of his refugee existence. You can't help but think Polgar was considering himself, rather than his subject, when he wrote, "When the Germans came, Friedell was confused, not by physical fear, but because he was afraid of a radical disturbance of his routine. He could not bear the thought that he might have to part with his old-fashioned room, with his books, so endlessly marked in the margins - he could not face the possibility that his files, tens of thousands of excerpts, would be hopelessly messed up."

Restless minds which blaze trails must first be anchored themselves. Friend Jill and I have often debated the strange compulsion I obey to shelve books in descending order, starting with the tallest, on the left. In my defense, I'm not the only one - we find the great 17th century English diarist, Samuel Pepys, built mini-high heels so all the books on his shelves would be shimmed to the same height. (Jill insists this discovery in no way negates my own personal wierdness.)

Is it then merely self-indulgence to construct and inhabit such a private inner world to the neglect of public events? In a New Yorker article, Jonathan Rosen describes the contemporary of Pepys, John Milton, as "a radical poet who, though he had imaginative power to burn, put aside his art for a decade of political activism." Yet, imprisoned in the Tower, after the Restoration, Rosen details Milton's dwindling faith in politics,' noting the devils of Paradise Lost, composed during this time, are failed revolutionaries, just as Milton earlier supported the beheading of a King by Puritan rebels.

It has come to be with distaste that I comment here, at all, on the struggle within our Episcopal Church, as if the topic, in itself, represents an unnerving intrusion into a self-contained small room, harboring shelves of books, arranged, in order of height.

Yet, the elephant barges in, even here. I note this week, after a district court decided for those who've so far already destroyed the serene gentility of all which stood in their way, the question remains, how, and if, to confront them.

Sheriff Taylor, and Mr. Cleaver, would advise Opie and the Beav, respectively, that the only way forward is to stand up to the bully in the schoolyard. My way is less direct. In response to a general "How We're Doing," email broadcast, on the part of the four displaced parishes, I offered only personal words of encouragement to the originator, who then, on his own volition, proceeded to re-broadcast them - reaching a circle, where the mother of Friend Jill, eventually responded, 'it brought tears of joy,' a reaction, knowing the source, which carries greater value than a Pulitzer Prize.

In attendance, later during the week, at a meeting where a Bishop and lawyer expounded upon the ramifications of the decision in terms of property and Constitutional rights, I couldn't help but offer, after an hour and a half, that no one speaks in these forums any longer of human rights; that the lives of people, vulnerable to harrangues of tinpot demagogues, in countries where there are no civil liberties, are at stake.

Confrontation of any sort is out of character. I find balance, an Rx for what Polgar describes as, Fatty Degeneration of the Mind, in a studious inner life, and within the continued existence of our parish, when it might have just as otherwise been erased by bullies as was the Vienna of Friedell. As Polgar wrote, "To reform an evildoer, you must before anything else help him to an awareness that what he did was evil. With the Nazis this won't be easy. They know exactly what they're doing; they just can't imagine it."

It is hopeful to imagine the continuing study of texts which occurs in a cloistered room, or the natural inclusivity of a parish, can, in themselves, stay the murderous hands of would-be dictators in lands far away.

One of the half-dozen books presently open on the Spotsyltuckian's night stand is Don DeLillo's, Underworld, a sprawling fiction, which covers baseball, atomic bombs, and the generation of mountains of garbage by a modern society.

Oddly enough, Underworld returns us to our opening theme - reviewer Gary Marshall writes, "reading the prose can be uncannily like using a web browser; the narrative focus moves from character to character almost as quickly as we are introduced to them, and the time frame regularly changes to show further connections between the key players. This device - literature as hypertext - is particularly effective in the early parts of the novel and the technique never intrudes on the story itself." Here is the perfect blend: passages beautifully crafted; information revealed; connections made - as Thomas Mann described Polgar's prose - lightness that plumbs the depths.

Egon Friedell shatters an earlier conviction, as propogated by John Henry Newman, that true learning may only occur when you discard all preconceptions prior to approaching the text. Friedell blows that away by contending 'we can never know anything but ourselves,' and reading, through the introduction of wholly new subject experiences, allows us to discover new possibilities of our own ego's and enlarge the frontiers of our consciousness.

I can't get there, Friend Dave, reading every book, cover to cover. There's just not enough time.