Now and again I enjoy glimpses of glorious futures of information access. Today’s case in point was inspired by the morning bathroom reading of the Introduction to George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life, in which Thomas Noble quotes the opening passage of an essay George Eliot published in Westminster Review in October 1855 (bolding especially choice bits):

GIVEN, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society ? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety? Let such a man become an evangelical preacher; he will then find it possible to reconcile small ability with great ambition, superficial knowledge with the prestige of erudition, a middling morale with a high reputation for sanctity.

My god but that woman could write. I got to wondering if I could lay my hands on the whole text of the article (“EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR CUMMING”), and a few quick searches brought me a Google Books scan from George Eliot’s Works, which was almost completely satisfactory… the penultimate page of the article was illegible, but Google offered a “Flag this page as unreadable” link, and politely thanked me for reporting the deficiency.

For those with a taste for literary skewering, I continue with some more (winkled out from the pdf thanks to copyable plain text view), but heartily urge download of the whole text. You’ll find this not irrelevant to our present circumstances:

Let him shun practical extremes and be ultra only in what is purely theoretic: let him be stringent on predestination, but latitudinarian on fasting; unflinching in insisting on the Eternity of punishment, but diffident of curtailing the substantial comforts of Time; ardent and imaginative on the pre-millennial advent of Christ, but cold and cautious towards every other infringement of the status quo. Let him fish for souls, not with the bait of inconvenient singularity, but with the drag-net of comfortable conformity. Let him be hard and literal in his interpretation only when he wants to hurl texts at the heads of unbelievers and adversaries; but when the letter of the Scriptures presses too closely on the genteel Christianity of the nineteenth century, let him use his spiritualizing alembic and disperse it into impalpable ether. Let him preach less of Christ than of Antichrist; let him be less definite in showing what sin is than in showing who is the Man of Sin, less expansive on the blessedness of faith than on the accursedness of infidelity. Above all, let him set up as an interpreter of prophecy, and rival Moore’s Almanack in the prediction of political events, tickling the interest of hearers who are but moderately spiritual by showing how the Holy Spirit has dictated problems and charades for their benefit, and how, if they are ingenious enough to solve these, they may have their Christian graces nourished by learning precisely to whom they may point as the “horn that had eyes,” “the lying prophet,” and the “unclean spirits.” In this way he will draw men to him by the strong chords of their passions, made reason-proof by being baptized with the name of piety. In this way he may gain a metropolitan pulpit; the avenues to his church will be as crowded as the passages to the opera; he has but to print his prophetic sermons and bind them in lilac and gold, and they will adorn the drawing-room table of all evangelical ladies, who will regard as a sort of pious “light reading” the demonstration that the prophecy of the locusts whose sting is in their tail is fulfilled in the fact of the Turkish commander’s having taken a horse’s tail for his standard, and that the French are the very frogs predicted in the Revelations.

I’m a lifelong if somewhat desultory student of Landscapes at various scales. A couple of delightful books showed up under the Christmas tree, and I’m gleefully anticipating their consumption:

Chet Raymo’s The Path: A One-Mile Walk Through the Universe teaches valuable lessons by attending to this bit of landscape

FOR THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS I have walked the same path back and forth each day from my home in the village of North Easton, Massachusetts, to my place of work… Step by step, year by year, the landscape I traversed became deeper, richer, more multidimensional, always overflowing the mind that sought to contain it. Ultimately, almost without my willing it, the path became more than a walk, more than an education, more than a life; it became the Path, a Tao, a thread that ties one human life and the universe together… Any path can become the Path if attended to with care, without preconceptions, informed by knowledge, and open to surprise. (pp 1, 4-5, 6)

Another explores a landscape element that I’ve often thought of documenting myself: William Hubbell’s Good Fences: A Pictorial History of New England’s Stone Walls (see some examples).

On son John’s recent recommendation, Betsy bought and read Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Once she surfaced, she insisted that I’d love it. I do. It’s interesting for the qualities (flavor, savor, fibre) of its writing and for its relentless and multifarious takes on Family, and it sheds polychrome lights on various recent passages with members of my own extended Family. Rueful chuckles and sympathetic snortings are sure to be evinced from most readers, and some will experience the Scream of Recognition here and there… A couple of passages:

(of the Pater Familias, who is losing it)
…the panic of a man betrayed deep in the woods whose darkness was the darkness of starlings blotting out the sunset or black ants storming a dead opossum, a darkness that didn’t just exist but actively consumed the bearings that he’d sensibly established for himself, lest he be lost; but in the instant of realizing that he was lost, time became marvelously slow and he discovered hitherto unguessed eternities in the space between one word and the next, or rather he became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped by without him… (pg. 11)

(and Frantzen does Lists like nobody else)
…Gary took a morning to inspect the whole property slowly, inside and out. He found cracks in the grouting, rust lines in the bathroom sinks, and a softness in the master bedroom ceiling. He noticed rain stains on the inner wall of the back porch, a beard of dried suds on the chin of the old dishwasher, an alarming thump in the forced-air blower, pustules and ridges in the driveway’s asphalt, termites in the woodpile, a Damoclean oak limb dangling above a dormer, finger-wide cracks in the foundation, retaining walls that listed, whitecaps of peeling paint on window jambs, big emboldened spiders in the basement, fields of dried sowbugs and cricket husks, unfamiliar fungal and enteric smells, everywhere he looked the sag of entropy… (pg. 172)

I’ve enjoyed Brideshead Revisited as novel and film, multiple times. Lately the Penguin version has been reposing in the bathroom, recovering from the latest bout of reading, and recently it was joined by another Penguin edition, The Best of Betjeman, which I picked up as a give-away in a roadside restaurant. I was planning to blog a so-English verse I just happened to read last night:

And Nurse came in with the tea-things
Breast-high ‘mid the stands and chairs–
But Nurse was alone with her own little soul,
And the things were alone with theirs.

(from “Death in Leamington”, pg. 15)

…and I thought I should inform myself about the details of Betjeman’s life. I knew he’d been Poet Laureate, but I didn’t know that Waugh had modeled Sebastian Flyte’s bear Aloysius after Betjeman’s Archibald Ormsby-Gore, or that C.S. Lewis had been Betjeman’s (much-despised) tutor. Don’t miss the 1959 BBC interview (1:45, on life at Oxford, hearties and aesthetes, being sent down). And The Times offers a picture of Archie and Jumbo, and more delicious details.

In preparation for an impending visit to a high school classmate who is an Episcopal priest, I bought Trollope’s Barchester Towers, which I’ve read several times but not recently. It’s a delight of well-drawn characters and sly invective, of which I might quote any number of passages. Here’s one, describing Mrs. Stanhope, to give something of the flavo[u]r:

The structure of her attire was always elaborate, and yet never over laboured. She was rich in apparel, but not bedizened with finery; her ornaments were costly, rare, and such as could not fail to attract notice, but they did not look as though worn with that purpose. She well knew the great architectural secret of decorating her construction, and never descended to constructing a decoration. But when we have said that Mrs. Stanhope knew how to dress, and used her knowledge daily, we have said it all. Other purpose in life she had none. (pg. 63)

Oh well, just one more quote:

There is, perhaps, no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind in civilised and free countries, than the necessity of listening to sermons. No one but a preaching clergyman has, in these realms, the power of compelling an audience to sit silent, and be tormented. No one but a preaching clergyman can revel in platitudes, truisms, and untruisms, and yet receive as his undisputed privilege, the same respectful demeanour as though words of impassioned eloquence, or persuasive logic, fell from his lips. Let a professor of law or physic find his place in a lecture-room, and there pour forth jejune words and useless empty phrases, and he will pour them forth to empty benches. Let a barrister attempt to talk without talking well, and he will talk but seldom. A judge’s charge need be listened to per force by none but the jury, prisoner, and gaoler. A member of Parliament can be coughed down or counted out. Town-councillors can be tabooed. But no one can rid himself of the preaching clergyman. (pp 46-47)

The June Harper’s arrived yesterday and is, well, fierce. I’m very glad that I subscribed a few months ago, though I feel a bit flayed by Garret Keizer’s “Climate, Class and Claptrap”:

If I sound bitter it is partly because I have been vouchsafed a glimpse of the new carbon-trading world order in the New England villages where I have lived, taught, and buried the dead for close to thirty years, and where any egress from one’s house now risks collision with an eco-fluent carpetbagger. Apparently, this place that has never had much use to the larger world beyond that of hosting a new prison or a solid-waste dump turns out to be an ideal location for an industrial “wind farm,” ideal mostly because the people are too few and too poor to offer much in the way of resistance… (pg 10)

There’s also an absolutely essential article by Sallie Tisdale: “Chemo World: Surviving the cancer unit” that tells me more than I would have thought myself comfortable with knowing about chemotherapy and cytotoxic drugs. It’s right up there with Atul Gawande’s “The Way We Age Now” from last week’s New Yorker as a must-read, especially for those of us who notice that we and others around us are somehow older than we used to be…