Where in July there was a rampant vigor to all the growing world, in the late sunlight of concluding August the green contains more brown; the sunlight shining through the green and golden leaves has a premonitory yellow; the desiccated shrouds of former wild flowers nod; and the decrepit grasses stoop with broken backs in withering ranks. I looked over the even tableland of reeds and where the green was deep before, the drying tips reflect a yellow sunlight back there too. That gold and yellow is a crown of dignity: the dignity of decrepitude which signals wisdom: the inevitable acknowledging of transience which the exuberance of July with all the spring stretching behind it denied with its suggestion of unending proliferation. A wiser light concludes in August.

All the world is alive with the sounds of bugs: the cicada high above and more monotonous; the cricket in the grass below; and all the rest of the enthusiastic bugs are dinning in the warm to beat the band, forsooth! Ah, August, when the majesty of June becomes august, relenting toward wisdom and the winter that at last will top our graves.

* * *
There are books that we read because they fill us with such longing, or please us so exceptionally being full of everything we like, or take us to new places and amaze us, or they instruct us well—or badly but still instruct us, or they amaze us with the structure of their argument, or annoy us with its confusion and idiosyncrasy, or they delight us with suggestions remote, or perhaps do other things. Not many of the books that I read, and I reckon that I read a pretty good variety, strike me as books that might be almost perfectly characterized as intelligent books, even of writers like CS Lewis or John Lukacs whose style is intelligence. I hope all the books I read are characterized by intelligence to a greater than to a lesser degree, but that is not the same as saying a book is nothing so much as an intelligent book. Such a book must be a book of thinking. In this case, the thinking is the thinking of a book of criticism.

In order to be a critic, a chap, it seems to me, requires a little urbanity, something of the city. A critic must be urbane in that he must be civilized or have the proper tastes and judgments for criticizing, must be sophisticated or have the ability to use abstract thought pretty comfortably, and must be slightly bored or sufficiently acquainted with enough really first rate things that he is not easily impressed. All this the term urbanity suggests. Criticism is not so much about feeling and enthusiasm, though they can be put to good use in a critical way, as it is about thinking and judging in a way that is more dispassionate than enthusiastic. I think the most successful critic is the more urbane, or, to put it another way, the more civilized, sophisticated and slightly bored.* A chap ought not to be sympathetic or concerned for the feelings of the author, but impartial. And for impartiality a lower dose of feeling and attachment is required.

It is with these two considerations above I would like to say that How Fiction Works by James Wood is an intelligent book. I do not know if I will say this again about another book—though I suspect I will, and perhaps I will change my mind before I reach the end—which I intend to do before long, but about this book no description or commendation seems more appropriate than to say it is exactly what one thinks of when one thinks of an intelligent book.

*If you are struggling with the notion of being slightly bored, consider that a good critic must also acquire along the way a more than enviable acquaintance with substandard works.

The rain renewed itself last night. Above us there settled out a war among the clouds. The bolts flickered in the distant inner spaces and thunder crawled menacing at the borders. Then the crooked shafts flashed a pallid, graveyard bright and the thunder smote and echoed. All the while the steady rain made its innocuous, creeping noise. Great things above, small things down here—and here and there a fallen limb among the fallen leaves. It was an end to sleeping. You lie there listening to the steady sound, watching the uncertain light and the flickering of the silhouettes of mighty forms on high, and relaxing to absorb the wanton blow of thunder.

* * *
I have formed a new irritation. I felt it a while back when I tried to read Dorothy Sayers. It renewed itself today as I began Gaudy Night. I believe I am beginning to understand what irritates me. Last time it was the inconsequentiality of the book I did not finish. This time it came to me that she was opinionated and mannered. My notions of fiction have been proceeding along, developing and, as I hope, improving. I read Kingsley Amis and notice everything is necessary. I read Elizabeth Bowen and I notice how important all the lavish descriptions are: not one bit of them is excess; they steer the story. I read Dorothy Sayers and I notice that the descriptions are laced with opinions that reveal nothing of the character because they come from the omniscient narrator and add nothing to the atmosphere: they stand out. She is particularly offensive when describing anything modern, delivering herself of opinions that may be called adequate only by the tendentious. I think this shows the writer cannot restrain her opinions crowding in, or the writer is unaware that everything must have a certain consequence if the test of truth in fiction is coherency. Not that she aimed at literature in her mysteries, but that literature is better writing and that is one of the ways you can tell.

Mannered, now, is a term I am learning to use; a concept that is dawning on me with greater clarity. This is when, I fancy, one has quirks and embellishments for which there is no satisfactory accounting; they bits that come up which are not commendable to good judgment. They may arise because the writer is exploring something, but they need to go during revision. In an experienced writer they are a sign of a flaw, and probably one of character. Certain habits of expression for which I do not at this moment have examples are what I have in mind. These are gratuitous expressions such as ‘hither and yon’ and other failure of description used without any particular aptness but simply in the way of a cliché. Not altogether cliché, perhaps, not always at least, but always limp or otherwise obnoxious.

Economy in writing is important because the more properly economical your words are, the more they will suggest. And it is really in the realm of suggestion, when your reader is engaged so that the words operate in the reader’s mind and the mind is supplying what is being suggested, that the real pleasure comes. Then there is the living meeting of the minds, the satisfactory coming together of the author and his reader in reaching a mutual understanding by mutual labor.

There is nothing I have written, with the possible exception of a rare episode of the Chron of F. that is free of a breach of the rule of coherence. I am made painfully aware that there are excesses of opinion, of gratuitous description, of prolongation of a scene because it has usurped its original purpose, and probably other faults along these lines. I know, when I am done with poetry, what I need to turn to next.

Welcome to another installment of the Unexamined Life. I might be tempted to say it is ‘exciting,’ another cliché thrown in, such as, say, the word ‘important’ might be elsewhere, but then it would have absolutely no meaning. I have come to regard the word ‘exciting’ as being nearly as pointless as the word ‘fun.’ When asked if I do not want to do something because it is fun, at this present time . . . Perhaps that should instead be: were anybody to ask me at this moment whether I would like to do something fund my reply would be that I am not into fun. As a general rule I will not be found expressing enthusiasm for anything that strikes anybody as fun and it is not an affectation. I really do not relish it in the least. It is a peculiar condition, I admit, but not one I find at all inconvenient to myself. The only thing the suggestion of fun or excitement causes me is a pedantic urge to examine the event or thing so characterized by subjecting it to scrutiny it was never intended to withstand. Another point worth making in regard to the otherwise unnoticed omission of the word ‘exciting’ is simply that it would not be true. The Unexamined Life, as we all know, is not worth living.

This is, nevertheless, another installment of the Unexamined Life and as such, one carrying with it something of a momentous announcement. The announcement is that I have had a policy of asking persons who used to link to my old blog to refrain from doing so to this blog. I did not want to be followed, you see. At one point, that was nearly ruined, but apparently the interest formerly excited is no longer excited by the content of this blog–I am happy to report. The Unexamined Life, you see, really is not worth living. And so, while I am not suggesting anybody add me to their list of links, lists which most of us do not consult anyway, I will probably voice no objections as I do not any longer care. If you link to me, there is no chance that I will return the favor, but then, it will not have been any great favor you missed out on. I have reached my goal of falling below fifty hits a day by somewhat artificial means and I would like to improve on that or at least maintain it but without other means than posting rather well-known poems for two weeks in a row and similar tactics.

I have no idea if there will ever be another post appearing on this blog, actually. That is not a threat to stop, it is just a bit of information. Every once in a while one comes to an end of things, or perhaps one just needs a rest, or perhaps one really has finished blogging and this time for good. I would not take this as an indication of anything definite, but I should say that I did not post yesterday and that sometimes I do not post for several days running either because I cannot be bothered, or I have nothing to say, or because I am working on something. This also must not be taken as an indication of anything: the list is just a list of possibilities but no indication of actual states of affairs. In short, Dear Reading Public—and I really cannot put it any better than this: if things on this blog do not change, they will continue to be the way they are.

I am having fragmentary visions of wet, fallen leaves on sidewalks, of wet weather and the dark limbs of trees, of scattered rains, persistent rains, and in these visions also come cool winds and slamming doors, abandoned cobwebs drenched, and neglected grass all long and wet and having leaves, and fragmentary visions of clear skies and with them comes the smell of books.

If all of the fall fragments of my life were to be gathered like a pile of leaves what mould of memories would there commingle? O Autumn! O return of life!

Poetry has brought me through the summer, and a pleasant mild summer mostly, but I have learned to make it shorter with anticipation.

I’ve been listening to CS Lewis. He refreshes me, and there are no Christians living who have ever made me more long for heaven than he does in his books. And he does it by speculating that there probably will be pain in heaven or by refusing to be comforted by the notion that we will meet loved ones in heaven—a notion that he does not find particularly Scriptural. And then he is visited by the intelligence of his dead wife and the communion he then experiences is extraordinary and extraordinarily described. Even when he is not right he is so far more sensible and desirable than most of the suburban religion one is used to being exposed to.

I think he must have expressed most of the ideas for the society of Malacandra in The Problem of Pain. And I really think there is nothing more tedious and embarrassing than Madeline L’Engle’s interminable foreword to A Grief Observed.

* * *
I have wanted, since reading Phantastes, to see what it was about ash trees MacDonald found particularly sinister. I have recently learned what they look like and after a few months I can identify them all on my own. But it was not till this evening that the light was right to see exactly how suitable for the graveyard is the ash, how unsettling the patterns of the ridges of its bark can be, how sinister are the bare branches most of them seem to have a few of, hanging down, seeming to clutch, seeming in a dead way more alive than the branches with leaves. Now I realize I’ve never been fond of the tree even when I could not identify it.

* * *
The poetry will continue, never fear. I think I need to write more, but I am enjoying thinking about the poem and working my thoughts into some kind of written sense.

Marriage has many pains but celibacy has no pleasures. —Samuel Johnson

A nice soft wife on a sofa, with good fire and books and music perhaps— —Darwin

* * *
After this life we will no longer, we are given to understand, enjoy marriage. The maturity of a person can be described, it seems to me, as a deepening and properly, an improving of his tastes and pleasures. It is not something about which we ought to be frantic as it is not the sort of thing, when done properly, one ought to do hurriedly or in a harried state of mind—if one can help it. And so we have to enjoy what we are able to enjoy knowing that as we grow into better pleasures we grow out of others and we must enjoy the ones we leave behind while they are still ours.

* * *
I went by the creek behind the library tonight, that place that has given me so much about which to write. I was going to write but I fumbled my Parker pencil and inadvertently donated it to the mud under the waters. Well, I owed it one.

* * *
It was borne in on me today what broken creatures our race consists of. I sat in a meeting watching us and what we talked about and planned to do and labored after. Were I Dante and had before me the task of imagining and depicting hell in all of its successive horrors, I think I would be strongly tempted to set it in successive business conference rooms. They come in enough variety, I believe. What I hear people saying frequently is that there are not enough conference rooms, and nothing convinces me more of the aptness of such a setting to describe such a place.

* * *
I am sorry if you are not enjoying or are not interested in my short attempts to probe at the poetry I have been posting. I find it one of the most helpful things to do right now and I intend to continue. Tomorrow is Kipling. I have achieved quite a giddy level of understanding—at least for me—but have the certainty that pressing on will show me it was meager, and that there is more.

* * *
I recommend to you a collection of essays by Randall Jarrell called No Other Book. It is criticism of significance and of significant poets. The greatest of all Jarrell’s virtues as a critic is his hearty enthusiasm. If you can have a bit of his spirit and relish for his subjects you will, it seems to me, learn something very valuable about poetry.

* * *
I certainly wondered if by August my interest in poetry, which has grown to engulf all my blogging, might be expected to wane a little. Quite the contrary, I feel that I have only begun to taste and that much lies ahead of me, that I have only begun to understand (and that is true, I have at last begun to understand but only begun) and that I must have much, much more.