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.

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.

Making fun and having it: In his “Requiem for a Noun, or Intruder in the Dusk,” Peter De Vries pictures “a cold brussels sprout” rolling off the page of the book and lying “defunctive” on his lap. It is held, furthermore, in a “fat, insolent fist” beneath a “bland, defiant face,” above which hung “the shock of black hair like tangible gas.”

He was doing Faulkner with “reverential amusement,” says Gilbert Highet in his 1962 book, Anatomy of Satire. Parody isn’t always reverential, needless to say. Highet tells of Arnold Bennett reading a Max Beerbohm takeoff on him and sinking from writing thousands of words a day to none, “until the shock of this operation wore off, and the scar of Max’s cautery ceased to throb.” Ouch.

So with writers in the U. of Iowa workshop in the ’60s. For quite a while after your work had been criticized by the group, you couldn’t write anything, a veteran told me.

It does take a strong heart, stomach, etc., to survive criticism. One needs a discerning view of readers and critics. Some are not good to listen to and must be ignored. In the after life, fine. Hear them out as angels sing in the background. But for now, find a muse and listen to her. She may lead astray but at least she leads.

Little noted item on Western reading habits: By the mid-18th century, more reading was being done in England partly because houses were warmer in winter and candles were better and gave more light. Thus has the race — human, that is, and in northern climes — developed good habits thanks in part to material progress. Take that, you Luddites.

Go to, you: Robert Benchley, the incomparable American humorist of the 1930s and later, having read in the Book of Proverbs, “Go to the ant, thou sluggard. Consider her ways and be wise,” spent an afternoon in that pursuit and learned that when carrying a large crumb on his head, he should walk sideways.

You make-a me laugh: For the Roman poet Horace, the goal was to tell “the laughing truth,” which is bad translation of good Latin but instructive anyhow. He saw truth laughing at him and responded accordingly in his Satires.

Not very lawyerly: As if lawyers need any more potshots in their direction, Jonathan Swift in his Polite Conversation, the 3rd Dialogue has this: ” . . . he’s a concealer of the law.” Your turn, counsel. (all three items from Highet’s Anatomy of Satire)

Delaying tactic: Consider “anon.” In Shakespeare, as in “Henry IV, Part One,” it’s used by a waiter telling Falstaff he’ll be right there at once. “Anon,” he keeps saying but never comes. So we use it as “by and by” or “in a little while.” But it was short for “at once” and was used to put someone off, as in “right away” or “coming” when someone says, “Come on” and we don’t come because we’re busy. It’s a time-honored dodge.

Gilbert to (Oscar) Wilde to (Jack) 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,” said reviewer X.J. Kennedy in 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 (comical) 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 died well, trying to save a screaming teen-age girl. She’d been screaming but was not in danger. He drowned. His widow doted on fresh fruit and while on holiday had peaches sent her from his sumptuous estate.

Hypertexts and hyperlinks beckon. Point and click, say the Internet salesmen. Indeed. Point and click and get hooked. Seductive, addictive, sometimes 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 Types of Ambiguity. Lots of meaning packed in. 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 the Ale House.

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. The maharishi came and went, and we still have reading.

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.” (I wonder in the same vein with reference to my years as a Jesuit, with little or access to the tube.)

“Context over text” refers to how critical theorists, his “partisans of Resentment,” tear everything apart, eschewing enjoyment in favor of analysis. Bloom analyzes too, but their analysis 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 sounded wistful as he made this point, as if he would like to be able to believe in his age.

— More to come of these Observations of a Literary Bent —