All my life’s buried here, / Heap earth upon it.
͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­

	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Today’s Poem: Requiescat All my life’s buried here, / Heap earth upon it. Joseph Bottum Jul 14 READ IN APP Upgrade to paid Give a gift subscription Henri Blanc-Fontaine, Souvenir de La Grave, 1855 (Wikimedia Commons)

Much obliged to him, started a welcome train of thought for this pew-sitter . .

Question too often is, what works for some worshipers, not for others. Not to mention what offers unwelcome adaptations, even leading to sacrilegious behavior or more often to mockery of the sacred.

Joe also made mention of his novitiate days, when the happy few of them gathered around the altar table in a sort of sacred intimacy. More power to them of course. Many the good thing that stems from such unity of purpose.

Put me in mind of my novitiate days, Milford O., in early 50’s, when one of us, having sat after communion to relieve an ache or pain, was called in by the rector, a WW2 chaplaincy veteran, and chewed out for his irreverence.

No gathering around (in a half-circle) the altar table if only because there was no such thing. Nor happy few, instead the 50-new-ones-a-year on their knees for 15 minutes after mass in the domestic chapel across the haul from a big dining hall.

So it went in those days long long ago. Foreign country really. Can hardly criticize Joe or any of his contemporaries for not doing or even recognizing such behavior or practice. Nor can this survivor deny his recalling it with respect and offering it by way of commentary on his welcome coverage.

That said, there is a problem here. It’s making the mass a vehicle aimed at comforting worshipers. God knows it does that. But via what and ignoring what about its history and its endorsement by the church Jesus made — as God the Son become man, suffering for love of His Father to free God’s creatures from sin with the absolutely necessary help of the Holy Spirit.

That said, some more offered by Brother Joe:

He gives samples:

My novice master often opened Mass with a short disquisition about the saint of the day. He was a good storyteller. I learned about saints I knew nothing about. I wouldn’t trade that for anything.

If he had folded it into the homily, it would have been too long. The beginning of Mass was the right place.

Makes sense.

(The formula [aka ritual, apparently] even invites this moment of improvisation, noting that the priest “may very briefly introduce the faithful to the Mass of the day” after the sign of the cross and the greeting and before the penitential act.)

Indeed, we weekday mass-goers almost always hear that, or in my case try to make it out, hearing not what it used to be. But the effort by the priest varies considerably, both as to announce the day’s message and to say it so all can understand him.

I love Joe’s branding the good, the bad, and awful. Pew-sitters have a right to do that. And ideally he talks up a good thing, which does not turn out that way — which is why he wrote the piece, of course!

Novice masters, he continues,

who are educating young Jesuits into a life in the church are completely allowed to deliver an opening disquisition on a saint. It’s O.K. Our small group always gathered around the altar during the consecration. It was nice; it fit the circumstances.

Ah yes, by the way, I was reminded of an experience I had some years back by meeting a former pastor we had in the very parish at whose church we and dozens if not hundreds of others gathered in a requiem mass, not for parish members but for the entire church building being shut down for lack of pew-sitters!

The former pastor noted in an after-mass gathering in the very building after the mass that he and I had had a private mass on a weekday many years back when I was the only mass-goer to show up for mass in an altar-boy changing room turned chapel.

I’d walked the half mile down Washington Boulevard, middle of the street, traffic nil in the wake of a tremendous snow storm.

He was about to give up when no one had shown up for 15 minutes — I was late – and we had a one-on-one mass after which I never felt the same abut him. It was a mass to remember, for me and him too, he said the other day.

Joe gave instances when an experience like that can happen:

If, for instance, during the opening moments of a funeral for a high school sophomore you only “say the words”—if you don’t make some acknowledgment to the student’s family and friends of the tragedy in front of you—then there is fair evidence that you are some kind of monster..

I recently attended a funeral mass for a grade and high school classmate was another mass to remember, and that of a friend of a relatively few years in our parish of this day.

The priest needn’t do much, Joe says.

Free yourselves, o priests, from thinking you have to re-create what does not need re-creating.

But . . .

. . . even then, even then! For most of the Mass, just saying the words, letting the spirit ride through the text can be enough. Let people grieve through the contours of the liturgy.

To be sure!

In any case “a congregation can tell the difference between reverence and rigidity.

“They know if you are celebrating Mass with healthy piety or if you are worshipping a fierce Roman god called “Rubric.”

Yuck to that!

He defines a rubric as “the methods of the Mass, the guidebook.”

And likens it to a “pagan worship . . . sometimes, literally, being rigid; focusing more on the proper and mechanical raising of the hands than on what the raising of the hands are doing.”

Yuck.

“Rigidity is tension,” he says. “If you [the priest] are tense, we in the congregation will become tense. Mass will suddenly become all about you.”

Oh boy.

“We will take into ourselves the stress in your body. It will flow out into the sanctuary.”

Look out!

“And if you breathe, O priest, we will breathe. Your peace will become our peace.”

We can only hope so.

And you needn’t improvise.

Even at a children’s Mass you can “just say the words.” Yes, a regular Sunday children’s Mass, the very temple of improvised prayers and gestures! Even here you can follow the text and the text alone and get away with it! You won’t come off as distant and unfeeling.

He’s seen it done.

I recently watched a priest celebrate such a liturgy. He didn’t give opening remarks that showed how young at heart he was; that demonstrated he can speak to the children’s level. He reserved his personalism for the homily. For the prayers of the Mass, he just did the words.

Routine, structure, the same thing that is always said. This is what children want. And they were with him. The kids were engaged the whole way. You could tell. Children feel safe with structure. They like knowing what is coming next. Most of us do.

Count me in.

Structure does not shackle anyone, it frees them. In fact, freedom cannot even exist where there are there no boundaries. Free yourselves, o priests, from thinking you have to re-create what does not need re-creating. Let the words do the work. Let the liturgy do the work. Trust your mere presence to do the work. You are enough.

Yes. And fitting end to satisfying statement.

There goes Francis 2 again, and he’s just getting started.

Fr. Thomas Hennen helped draft LGBT pastoral guidelines that sidestep chastity, affirm “gender minorities,” and speak the language of synodality. Leo XIV didn’t just approve, he promoted him.

­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­͏   ­

	Literature and all that . . . Jim Bowman Mar 14 READ I Writing, how to: Zeno, the third-century B.C. Greek, cited five qualities of good (more or less formal) speech and writing:* Language faultless in grammar and free from “careless” vulgarity * Lucidity – presenting thought so it’s easily understood * Conciseness – using no more words than necessary * Appropriateness – using a style akin to the subject * At least semi-formality, avoiding colloquialism. Reporting as art form: Henry James said it took imagination “of a very high order” to “extract importance” from events while remaining faithful to them, “free only to select and never to modify or add.” Writing as medicinal: 18th-century cleric Laurence Sterne wrote in a “constant endeavor to fence against the infirmities of ill health,” he said in the dedication of his novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. He wanted to “beguile (the reader) of one moment’s pain,” since “every time a man smiles . . . it adds something to this Fragment of Life.” Cutting: The first of Stephen King’s ten ways to better writing is to write less in revision. Yours becomes the incredible shrinking essay. And it’s better that way. Hanging in there . . . In “To Charles Cowden Clark,” John Keats, feeling uninspired and “not oversmitten” by what he has just written, adds, “Yet, as my hand was warm, I thought I’d better/ Trust to my feelings, and write you a letter.” He goes with the flow, trusting his warm (hot?) hand. Like the three-point-shooter, basketball’s once unique practitioner of confidence and skill; make half of them, you lead the league. You have to be good and trust yourself. What friends are for . . . Keats wrote poetry after social outings, flushed with the joy of them, as in “On leaving some friends at an early hour”: “What a height my spirit is contending!/ ‘Tis not content so soon to be alone.” Or leaving his friend Leigh Hunt’s cottage, walking five miles at night to his own lodgings: “I have many miles on foot to fare./ Yet feel I little of the cool, bleak air.” Or in “To my brothers,” where Keats and his brother Tom, 17, sit at night in their lodgings, one composing, the other studying: “And while for rhymes I search around the poles,/ Your eyes are fixed, as in poetic sleep,/ Upon the lore so voluble and deep. . . . Many such eves of gently whispering noise/ May we together pass and calmly try/ What are this world’s true joys . . .” Hear, hear. Not carved in stone? . . .“Constant Revision” is a book title I am considering. About writing. Shakespeare’s plays were undergoing revision while performed by his troupe. Poetry of a century or two ago is considered in its various versions. Sometimes we prefer an earlier version. But things get revised all the time, even after they are in print. So why shouldn’t we scribblers have that approach to what we do: constant revision until we die. There goes Nancy again . . . Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford “like all writers, put entertainment first and exaggerated for effect,” says WSJ reviewer Florence King, reviewing The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh. She exaggerates for effect, but the point’s made. Mitford tweaked Waugh about his Catholicism, comparing the resurrection of the body to “finding your motor car after a party” and marveling at how mourners say of the departed, “‘She must be in heaven now’ — as though she’d caught the 4:45.” Waugh called this “a fatuous intrusion” into a world she knew nothing of. Clever, though. The death question . . . A friend concerned about the noncommercial aspects of Blithe Spirit asked if I have gotten any work from it, meaning corporate work, which pays more than work for publication in most cases. (You should read Ben Jonson’s correspondence with his lordly patrons. “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” he told Celia, but he still had to live.) No work from it, I said, and he wondered what people will say when they bury me, implying they would not say much if I’d gotten no assignments from it. Actually, it will little affect me one way or the other at that point, which he surely realizes, but like most people insufficiently. Indeed, even if by slip of lip, it’s strange to speak of point-of-death achievement in terms of work for hire. I love work for hire, but Blithe Spirit is the sort of thing you squeeze in before you die. The night cometh, after all, when no man stirs, which I just made up. No woman either. Now you see me, now you don’t . . . Do not assume that I am rushing to beat a short deadline, though in the scheme of things we all labor under a short one. Neither the day nor the hour has been announced to me. I await the thief in the night like the rest of you. Still, the uncovered manhole is out there. Ditto drive-by machine-gunning by drug-crazed hippies — the usual assortment of Sudden Happenings. Eternity lurks at every corner. Or as Hector says in Chapman’s Homer, in his goodbye to wife Hecuba before the final battle, “the solid heape of night.” Well, when the solid heap of night o’ertakes me, will people bemoan my getting few or no assignments? Or will they happily recall the nonsense here displayed under guise of art and journalism, to name just two of many possible cover stories for all this? The Shadow knows, but who else? The source of our problems . . . You’ve heard of blaming it all on television, especially when Elvis danced on Ed Sullivan. Or on Prohibition or the Reformation or the Edict of Constantine. Well I have found one who blames it on the Earl of Shaftesbury (1621-83), that well-known apostle of sentimentalism, which I define as the mood that makes one unable to understand a news story without “human interest” thrown in. Sentimentalism is only half the problem, however. The other half is association-of-ideas, a philosophical doctrine from Hobbes and Locke and a hot item of discussion by 18th-century talk-show hosts. The pinpointer of these seminal ailments is Yvor Winters (1900-68), a U.S. literary critic who shook up his Stanford students in the ’30s and ’40s and later with anti-Romanticism and would be strung up by students or other teachers if he tried it today. Winters’ problem would be the primacy he gives reason — in poetry but one suspects in all of life — over emotion. For him emotion is a deep pit, something faced as “the brink of darkness,” as he called his only short story, published the year his friend the poet Hart Crane jumped ship in mid-ocean without a lifejacket, 1932. Crane, a tortured soul by any measure, ordered (and apparently ate) a big breakfast before taking the final leap of despair, a victim of what Winters identified as rampant emotionalism. What do you expect? Winters asked about Crane and any number of other mad poets, the 18th century’s Blake among them, who bought the primacy of feeling and scorned reason. This was an idea “to break the minds of . . . men with sufficient talent to take the theory seriously.” One is reminded of Janis Joplin and other performers, tragic spirits, who give their all for chaos, saints “of the wrong religion,” as Winters identified Hart Crane. The crime of sentimentalism . . . This association of ideas seems to absolve the thinker of a need for coherence and unity, leaving him with nothing but emphasis — lots or less of it depending on the weather. In other words, your ideas are great, kid, even if they don’t hold water. They’re yours, aren’t they? And who am I to say you’re wrong? Etc.

Mundabor, purveyor of Catholicism without compromise, says:

Color-blind, religion-blind, politics-blind . . . It’s said we can’t be a color-blind society, because there are too many skeletons in our closet. But we’re religion-blind, aren’t we? Don’t we gloss over religious differences for the sake of religious peace? Where would we be if we drove home religious differences with the same zeal with which we drive home supposed racial differences? Call it your revolutionary thought for the day.ur closet. But we’re religion-blind, aren’t we? Don’t we gloss over religious differences for the sake of religious peace? Where would we be if we drove home religious differences with the same zeal with which we drive home supposed racial differences? Call it your revolutionary thought for the day.

For example . . . Senatorial candidate Al Salvi’s law partner, a state rep from Wheaton, has a bill up to outlaw censorship of American history “based on religious preference.” It has the ACLU and American Jewish Committee up in arms, who say it opens the doors to special religious pleading in the classroom by creationists and other true believers.

But what about the authority higher than George III mentioned in the Declaration of Independence? What about the thinking behind the Mayflower Compact? The 4/2 Sun-Times asks this. But the bashful Pilgrim John Alden is not around to speak for himself regarding the latter, and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, so what does he know?

This is a can of worms the Wheaton man is opening, but apart from the fact that religion matters a lot, like it or not, this was bound to happen. Push long enough and hard enough for cultural etc. awareness, and some are bound to say sauce for the secular goose is sauce for the religious gander. I hope I have that right. If I don’t, sue me.

The Unabomber and the office painter. . . The ’60s came back to roost this week in two incidents, one of them Oak Park and River Forest-related: the Unabomber suspect from Evergreen Park and the cop-killer from Philadelphia captured in River Forest and Oak Park office-painter. Both are tragedies on their face, but below surface too: the Unabomber man was a gifted kid with a great academic future, the cop-killer has for years been a solid citizen, likable and reliable. Now what are they?

The ’60s took their toll, didn’t they? The bomber man was in Berkeley, teaching, when he dropped out. The killer man was in the middle of black-liberation radicalism. The times were a-changing, and change kills, sometimes.

You could find it anywhere.

In Cincinnati a young church worker, idealistically helping inner-city blacks, was asked by a visiting black-studies professor to buy guns for “the movement.” She didn’t.

A young college teacher listened meekly while the prof talked up violent militancy to a few earnest black students, including a great running back on a fair football team.

“Is he OK?” the professor asked the students, looking over to the white teacher (me). Yes, they said, and you know something? None of us knew each other that well, nor did we have much of an idea what the hell we were doing listening to that guy from California with his black-revolutionary ideas. Maybe he didn’t either, but he had less excuse than the rest of us.

What a stitch! There in a meeting room on a Jesuit campus, we were all nodding to each other as if we knew what we were talking about!

A few years later, in Oak Park, my wife and I declined to make monetary donations to a bail fund for Black Panthers — hardly a punishable offense, to be sure. We thanked the hostess for her hospitality — in a very nice north Oak Park home — and slunk away in the night. We also declined on another occasion to put up draft-evaders, but that’s another story.

The point is, the ’60s and early ’70s made for tricky situations. A web of cautionary tales, to be sure.

Rally. Really? A rally against ageism is set for May 1 at Spertus Institute on Michigan Avenue. Couldn’t believe my eyes. I’m all for it. At 60-something I have only 30 or 40 years to live. A panel of distinguished speakers will raise awareness. Limited seating. Several Oak Park and River Forest agencies sponsoring it. Sigh.

It solves a problem for many white males my age: how to gain identification as part of an oppressed group.

Right? Who among us has not yearned for the notoriety, the distinctiveness, the sense of being somebody that comes from belonging to such a group? We’re talking hype here, not the reality, which is no fun but has gained cachet. Thus hyped — or mau-maued, as Tom Wolfe put it — we wonder: Everyone else is, why not us?

A rally no less. No march?

Funny stuff in California . . . Football players Keyshawn, Kyle, and Deion got A’s in a snap course at U. of S. Calif., we read in the newspapers. This helped them and others to stay in the running for dear old USC, which beat Northwestern in the Rose Bowl. They didn’t even have to attend class: it was the ultimate dumbing down, in this case for wide receiver, quarterback, and tailback in that order.

Watching Notre Dame on the tube some months back, I joined in criticism of the quarterback, who had tripped or done something else foolish. I was told we should stay off the kid’s back. Can’t stand heat, stay out of kitchen, I muttered. The kid is on his way to being a millionaire, and I should stay off his back?

Every move he makes is a business proposition, and I’m supposed to excuse him when he trips?

Southern Cal’s Keyshawn did not trip but ran beautifully and was the Rose Bowl’s most valuable player. A TV announcer called him “a man among boys,” the boys being Northwestern players. The announcer was very respectful of this A-student in a snap course.

Seneca again, on anger . . . The old Roman Seneca, Emperor Nero’s disappointed tutor, urges talking yourself out of the anger habit. Wants us “repeatedly (to) set before ourselves its many faults,” and thus head it off at the pass. “We must search out its evils and drag them into the open,” the better to see anger as “damnanda” — “to be condemned.”

Good Stoic that he is, he believes in mind over matter, that as human beings we can talk ourselves into things. We just (just?) have to concentrate, work our way through things, think a lot about it, review reasons.

Garbage in, garbage out again, in this case good things in, good things out. What you concentrate on, you can become. Like Jesse Jackson’s leading kids in saying, “I am somebody,” though that’s more autosuggestion or mantra-recital than reasoning. The Senecan practice is easily mocked and can be too glibly endorsed. Never mind that. Such objections don’t get to the heart of the matter.

More Seneca on anger: controlling it . . . The best cure is to wait it out. “Dilatio” is the Latin word, related to our “dilatory.” Use delaying tactics. Do nothing until you hear from sweet reason. Plato caught himself in the act of bashing a slave — sorry, folks, that’s what they did in those days — and held the pose, looking silly. “I’m punishing an angry man,” he explained when someone asked what the hell he was doing holding a stick in mid-air. Himself, that is. The slave got off, Plato having found someone else to punish — someone whose actions he had something to say about.

This is Stoic thinking, not that Plato was a Stoic. This is Seneca’s account, remember. Namely that you are responsible primarily for yourself. All your grand ideas about reforming the world? Great. But know yourself and reform yourself.

Francis Bacon on marriage and the single life, passed on as good analysis and nothing more, believe me . . . “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. . . .

“Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men, which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public. . . . .

“Unmarried men are best friends, best masters, best servants, but not always best subjects [in the royal sense], for they are light to run away. . . . .

“A single life doth well with churchmen . . . .

“Certainly wife and children are a kind of discipline of humanity; and single men, though they may be many times more charitable, because their means are less [exhausted], yet, on the other side, they are more cruel and hardhearted . . . because their tenderness is not so oft called upon.” #

Title is a sort of pig Latin for items of short length and who knows? Of  lasting importance but don’t bet the house on it.

You wake up and can’t get back to sleep right away. It comes from being a thinking creature. As you lie there, unhappily reviewing the day’s events and the next day’s prospects, an apt first line comes to mind. Not “As I pondered weak and weary,” etc. from Poe. But “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” from you can’t remember who. The line addresses the very problem that arises to haunt you. But what are the next lines?

Finally, sleep comes. In the morning you rush to your Treasury of Great Poems, compiled and edited by Louis Untermeyer. You look up first lines and there it is. Keats is the poet. But it’s not about dying. It’s about “love and fame” sinking to “nothingness” when the poet considers (a) his mortality, (b) his missing out on stars in the sky, and (c) his never again relishing “the faery power of unreflecting love.”

He names three fears. The first is for himself as a writer. Will he “cease to be” before his pen has “gleaned [his] teeming brain” and deposited in “high-piled books [that] hold like rich garners [granaries] the full ripened grain” — what’s been growing in the mind of this man, this writer.

He’s bursting with things to say, and he worries about never giving them form to outlast him and enrich those to come.

He delivers the closer after three “when” scenarios that set us up for it: ” . . . then on the shore/ Of the wide world I stand alone, and think/ till love and fame to nothingness do sink.”

It’s like his “stout Cortez . . . with eagle eyes” for the first time beholding the Pacific Ocean while “all his men [look] at each other with a wild surmise — / Silent, upon a peak in Darien” [Panama].

That was about a translation of Homer. Keats and a friend had read passages to each other on a long autumn night. Next morning at 10 o’clock, the friend, who had slept little, got a message from Keats, who had slept not at all. It was the 14 lines written “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”

Gilbert to Wilde to Benny . . . Among “unkillable hymn-tunes” by the composer Sullivan, Gilbert’s partner, is “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Sullivan has a following today, but not Gilbert, with all his “colossal verbal skill and prodigious industry,” per reviewer X.J. Kennedy (New Criterion, January, 1997).

The two didn’t get along, and each longed to do more serious work on his own. But they stayed together, bound by financial needs: Sullivan was supporting a mistress and Gilbert an expensive wife, yacht, and country estate. Neither could make as much money separately.

Gilbert invented the straight face, setting the stage for Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest.” And Jack Benny, for that matter. As a dominant writer-director, he set the stage also for the dominating writer-director George Bernard Shaw. He also sued people a lot, having been a barrister.

The book under review was W.S. Gilbert: A Classic Victorian and His Theatre, by Jane W. Stedman (Oxford).

Gilbert’s widow doted on fresh fruit and had peaches sent her while on holiday from that sumptuous estate. Gilbert had died well, trying to save a screaming teen-age girl. But he’s the one who drowned; she’d been screaming though not in danger.

Another one-eyed monster . . . We can’t digitize whole libraries, so we should be careful about weening kids away from books to the computer screen. There’s far more out there than has ever been keyed or scanned onto the screen, says Francis Morrone in the New Criterion. He speaks as a user, warning against abuse. Digital information is seductive, he says — info from the Internet, compact disc, however it hits the screen, some of it with blinding speed.

I’ll say. I have trouble getting past books on a shelf. I’m an inveterate discoverer of things while looking up other things. Call me Distracted. So when the screen fills up with seemingly endless possibilities (there is an end to it, but no one has found it yet), I am seduced beyond my fondest dreams.

Hypertexts and hyperlinks beckon. Point and click, say the Internet salesmen. Indeed. Point and click and get hooked. Seductive, addictive, enervating, the whole package. It’s a jungle in there. Be careful.

So much and so little time . . . A great poem has “a general sense of compacted wealth,” says Wm. Empson in Seven Kinds of Ambiguity. Lots of meaning packed in there. You needn’t know all of it or have it all in mind at once, no more than you have to know all the notes of a symphony. What you want is awareness of a poem’s “elaborate balance of variously associated feeling.” Just as I was saying the other night at a Forest Park bistro.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. tried meditating in the ’60s, using a mantra, a Sanskrit word which he thinks may mean $85, what he paid for it. Later it dawned on him that “in our civilization” we meditate using “a medieval object, a book,” putting ourselves in touch with people in ages gone by. This kind of meditation, he says, gives “access to brains better than our own.”

Ah the mystery of it all. Some guy 500 years ago had a great thought, and it’s ours to ponder, with or without the Internet.

As for the joys of reading, Dr. Ken Cooper, the meditation-for-relaxation specialist of the ’70s decided at one point that relaxation was as much obtained by quiet reading as by meditation-with-mantra. (But most of all, exercise, he tells in his life story here.)

Secret sharing: People say, “My, you do a lot of reading,” as if I steal from sleep or eating or prayer. It’s time for a little secret: I generally don’t watch the tube, that’s what. The tube I figure is for mind-vacating. A movie works that way too.

The time-snatcher television relates to schooling too. Kids who go for the tube with every free moment, reading only what’s required even in demanding school programs, are culturally deprived. TV, sedative or stimulant, is in any case a drug, sez I.

Some fairly complicated stuff: Harold Bloom touches on TV in The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, his unapologetic appreciation and promotion of what the West has given mankind. Discussing “Shakespeare, Center of the Canon,” he says “partisans of Resentment” object that only an elite can read in the way he recommends. Bloom isn’t sure even about that. It’s gotten harder to “read deeply” he concedes, adding that “even the elite tend to lose concentration.”

Wondering if his generation represents the last of the close-reading public, he asks whether his not owning a TV set until age 40 might be relevant. He wonders “if a critical preference for context over text does not reflect” impatience with “deep reading.”

“Context over text” refers to how critical theorists, his “partisans of Resentment,” tear everything apart, eschewing enjoyment in favor of analysis. Bloom also analyzes, but theirs is a peevish pecking away at things to satisfy a craving for upset, he says. Armed with Freud, whom Bloom much respects, and far lesser lights such as the eminence noir Michel Foucault, whom he does not, they take off into a literary sky-blue yonder with anarchistic intent.

When times weren’t a-changing: We take it for granted that times are changing, but Shakespeare didn’t. Nor did his contemporaries, whom we call Elizabethans and Jacobeans, after Queen E. and King James, of Bible fame. Therefore, Shakespeare et al. could talk of human nature as a timeless universal. They were not tempted to political correctness as we know it, incessant politicizing, or analysis of their society, which they took for granted.

Their times were changing, of course, and we can analyze them. But apart from recording the “rise of [merchant] families and their ambition to ally themselves with needy peerages and to acquire country estates,” Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists had no sense of it, T.S. Eliot observes in his Selected Essays, 1913-1922 (London, 1950).

They were “blessed,” said Eliot, because it meant they could “concentrate their attention . . . upon the common characteristics of humanity in all ages, rather than upon the differences.” The same went for Dante and the ancient Greeks but not for writers “in periods of unsettlement,” as Petronius in the 1st century and Lucian in the 2nd.

Elizabethans and Jacobeans “believed in their own age,” as “no nineteenth- or twentieth-century writer of the greatest seriousness has been able to believe in his age,” said Eliot, whose “Waste Land” was no happy-ending Broadway musical. Eliot seemed wistful as he made this point, as if he would like to be able to believe in his age.

The beckoning breach: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,” begins Henry V‘s stirring pre-battle exhortation. “Or close the wall up with our English dead!”

Thirty lines later, he concludes,

“The game’s afoot!

Follow your spirit; and upon this charge,”

Cry, ‘God for Harry, England and Saint George!'”

I thrilled to that, though I’d read it long before re-reading it of a Sunday at Einstein Brothers Bagels after mass at St. Vincent’s up the street.

Meantime, I’d associated “the game’s afoot” with Sherlock Holmes, who says it to Dr. Watson when going after the criminal. Another lesson in how Shakespeare created our language.

Another language lesson comes when Exeter, Henry’s ambassador, asks the French king to “overlook” what he gave him, meaning to look it over – just the opposite of what we mean by the word. Four hundred years make a difference.

For the groundlings: Another aspect of Shakespeare’s genius is the pace of things. The scene right after the stirring exhortation mocks it. “On, on, on, on, on, to the breach, to the breach!” says Bardolph, a friend of the late Falstaff, the king’s fellow roisterer in his Prince of Wales days.

Bardolph and Nym and Pistol, two other roisterers, decide the hell with this fame and honor business, leaving the stage to the servant boy who thinks about it aloud, then decides to “leave them, and seek some better service.” Later Bardolph is caught stealing from a church. Pistol tries to get him off, but Bardolph is hanged for discipline’s sake. The servant boy is one of those slaughtered by looting French soldiers while he guarded the baggage.

“We would have all such offenders so cut off,” says Henry of Bardolph. “And we give express charge that in our marches through the country there be nothing compelled from the villages . . . for when lenity [leniency] and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.” He intended to rule this land and saw no point in angering its people.

It’s part of the whole awareness of Shakespeare. He was so far from going whole hog imperialist a la Kipling or whole hog skeptic a la James Joyce, that he seemed to keep 19 possibilities in his head at once, touching base here, there, wherever it seemed good, to give us in one fell swoop a panoramic view of the proceedings, and all of course in a few extremely well chosen words.

= = = = = = = =

As for these (I think) fairly well chosen words, kind reader, fare thee well, and you’re not so bad yourself, of course, else you would be reading something else? Original of all this dates from three decades ago, by the way.

The source of our problems: You’ve heard of blaming it all on television, especially when Elvis danced on Ed Sullivan. Or on Prohibition or the Reformation or the Edict of Constantine. Well I have found one who blames it on the Earl of Shaftesbury (1621-83), that well-known apostle of sentimentalism, which I define as the mood that makes one unable to understand a news story without “human interest” thrown in.

Sentimentalism is only half the problem, however. The other half is association-of-ideas, a philosophical doctrine from Hobbes and Locke and a hot item of discussion by 18th-century talk-show hosts.

The pinpointer of these seminal ailments is Yvor Winters (1900-68), a U.S. literary critic who shook up his Stanford students in the ’30s and ’40s, etc. with anti-Romanticism and would be strung up by students or other teachers if he tried it today.

Winters’ problem would be the primacy he gives reason — in poetry but one suspects in all of life — over emotion. For him emotion is a deep pit, something faced as “the brink of darkness,” as he called his only short story, published the year his friend the poet Hart Crane jumped ship in mid-ocean without a lifejacket in 1932.

Crane, a tortured soul by any measure, ordered (and apparently ate) a big breakfast before taking the final leap of despair, a victim of what Winters identified as rampant emotionalism. What do you expect? asked Winters about Crane and any number of other mad poets, the 18th century’s William Blake among them, who bought the primacy of feeling and scorned reason.

This idea was “to break the minds of . . . men with sufficient talent to take the theory seriously.” One is reminded of Janis Joplin and other performers, tragic spirits, who give their all for chaos, saints “of the wrong religion,” as Winters identified Hart Crane.

The crime of sentimentalism: This association of ideas idea seems to absolve the thinker of a need for coherence and unity, leaving him with nothing but emphasis — lots or less of it depending on the weather. In other words, your ideas are great, kid, even if they don’t hold water. They’re yours, aren’t they? And who am I to say you’re wrong? Etc.

Romantic poets — one of whom coined or made memorable the phrase “blithe spirit” — looked in their hearts and wrote (as the Elizabethan Sir Philip Sidney was advised by his muse when worried what he would tell his girl friend). Winters favored “a logical, plain-spoken poetic,” as reviewer-commentator David Yezzi put it in the New Criterion. This meant he vastly preferred the far less known and honored Barnabe Googe to Sidney, both 16th-century poets, which is like preferring the plain-spoken Harry Truman to the oratorical FDR in political terms, or whole wheat to raisin walnut in Prairie Bread Kitchen terms.

In his poem “Of Money,” Googe says he’d rather have money than friends because with the first he’d always have the second but not vice versa, which is an arresting consideration:

Fair face show friends, when riches do abound;

Come time of proof, fare well they must away.

The appeal of this to Winters lay in its restraint of feeling and rhetoric “to the minimum required by the subject,” as opposed to “rhetoric for its own sake” as practiced by other Elizabethans.

Another of Winters’ favorites, Fulke Greville, a good friend of Sidney, said his own “creeping genius” was “more fixed upon the images of life, than the images of wit” and thus wrote for “those that are weather-beaten in the sea of this world.” An earthier sort, in other words, and not sentimentalistic by any stretch.

In Winters, discontent: Winters’ own poetry was on the money in Greville terms. In his “A Grave,” he has this: “Life it seems is this:/ To learn to shorten what has moved amiss;/ To temper motion till a mean is hit . . . ”

And translating from the 17th-century French of Mme. des Houlieres: “Pathetic plaything of a witless chance,/ Victim of evils and of laws,/ Man . . . must suffer life’s impertinence.” Facing death, he is to “regard it with unhurried breath,/ And know this outrage for the last.”

Or the stunning motto on the back of a bicycling youngster the other day in River Forest: “It’s not the pace of life that bothers me, but the sudden stop at the end.” Only in River Forest.

Winters held feeling in suspicion and wanted it served up with restraint. This is art, to tell the tale, describe the experience, emotion and all, trying to understand it and then presenting it with the feeling it deserves and not a gulp more.

It’s the poet’s duty to take a fix on the feeling and put it in its place. He is to control emotion, “releasing it through constraint,” in Yezzi’s words.

An excess of emotion “obscured the experience” to be communicated, which is why we call sentimentalism sloppy. Bad poems are “slipshod” in their rendering of experience. They are inaccurate.

Ralph Waldo who? Winters clearly thought there was something to be said about the world. Unlike those theorists engaged in “the killing of history” as Keith Windschuttle tells it in his book of that name, he thinks we can get at the truth, or at least get close.

He defended an “absolutist” theory of literature, by which literature “approximates a real apprehension and communication of . . . objective truth.” This alone would get him laughed out of many a classroom today, if we are to believe higher education’s critics.

Interestingly, one of his absolute bad guys in the literary realm was Ralph W. Emerson, who said things like “No man, no matter how ignorant of books, need be perplexed in his speculations.” Oh? This is somewhat like what current educationists say, “Every child can learn,” without saying what it is he or she can learn. But theirs is a slogan.

Emerson saw art, Winters said, as resting “on the assumption that man should express what he is at any given moment,” regardless (apparently) of what he is at that moment. Spit it out, and it’s good, because it’s you. Makes one wonder what did happen to the handsome Narcissus when he fell in love with his reflection in the pond. He pined away and died, that’s what.