Doesn't/Isn't

Socrates is a philosopher who never wrote down any philosophy. Stanley Cavell once asked if it were possible for this trick to be plied in other fields -- a novelist who didn't write any novels, a poet who didn't write any poems. The idea, I guess, is that someone who fit the bill would just BE those things; agrammic poet X would be a poem, would make his life into a poem in some important way. This is deeply stupid, insofar as what I've guessed the idea to be is the idea; a life is not a poem, or a novel, because in life you keep having to eat dinner and be bored and so on. I have addressed these temporal concerns elsewhere and elsewhen, if I am not mistaken. The idea that a person, by means of not writing, just IS (by the way, all of these conjugations of to be connecting a person to the poem or novel that is her life sound, in my head, to be capitalized, but I'm going to stop doing it from here on because it's typographically annoying) their work is a category mistake. Johnson wrote that you should avoid meeting the authors of works you've liked, because it is like poking a very pretty soap bubble. And persons are not soap bubbles. It can seem here, I think, as if I am being overliteral or picking on a straw man or something, which is a danger of which I am cognizant. But what I'm thinking about is a set of ideas that has come from, among other things, my long and habitual lapses of activity, times in which I am a blogger who doesn't blog. So it's possible that a sturdier-than-straw man, a stick man, maybe, could be built on the figure of a poet who didn't rely on being a poem, but a poet or novelist who had just an endless stack of poem starts or disconnected chapters. What's that work worth? And what's that work worth if the poet or novelist or blogger, as a part of real life, thought constantly about their poem or novel or blog post that seemed, for a critical reason, that it ought to remain unfinished, that there were something beyond laziness keeping the work from getting done?

It certainly seems like a form of entitled laziness to do this sort of thing: it's a bit like, in Johnson's metaphor, to want credit for making a beautiful soap bubble by buying soap, then never mixing it with water, but constantly imagining what you're going to do with your soap once you open it up. The only benefit of no soap bubble over a soap bubble is that you can't poke it and ruin it; and I am a person saying this who played with soap bubbles three days ago. That too, beyond entitled laziness, is the benefit of undone poems and novels and even blog posts that have been sitting unwritten; they can't be fairly poked, or ruined, because they are already ruins. You can't live as a poem or a novel, but everyone who tries to be a poet with no poems or a novelist with no novel is living in a house made out of planned and unborn poems and novels, and that is a thing you can do.

Here's another way of talking about this. I think that the only way to live in anything approaching reasoned comfort is only to live within your nonpublic failures, especially insofar as they are failures of words (poems, novels, blog posts). Something finished, whatever its quality, is in some perfect as itself; but you can't live in a soap bubble house. The ineffable -- because, again, I'm refusing to allow that mere human laziness is preventing these endeavors, and consigning part of their incompleteness to the ineffable -- keeps things from finishes, keeps mere good sense from owning and ordering. Here, we go to Johnson again, this time from the life of Pope:

But good sense alone is a sedate and quiescent quality, which manages its possessions well, but does not increase them; it collects few materials for its own operations, and preserves safety, but never gains supremacy. Pope had likewise genius; a mind active, ambitious, and adventurous, always investigating, always aspiring; in its widest searches still longing to go forward, in its highest flights still wishing to be higher; always imagining something greater than it knows, always endeavouring more than it can do.

Of course, we writers who can't write don't have Pope's genius to give supremacy to our safety; but there's something to be said for endeavouring more than you can do, and especially (this is where Johnson is most perfect, I think) imagining something greater -- not than one can accomplish, but than one knows, even if it's as small in scope as going to work in the morning, rather than writing the Essay on Man. Or even the Essay on Criticism.

The Grown-Up

It's unthinkable, to me, what will happen when I run out of books that are on my bookshelf. The Matthew Schratz Pages to Read number is like the national debt: I know, in theory, what it is, but it is inconceivable in practice. For the last year or so, it has fluctuated around 65,000 or 70,000 pages; I don't know how different that number is, bigger or smaller, from the number when I started the list, or the number from a year ago. Today I finished reading Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, and the number of pages to read that I own went down by two hundred and fifty one. That represents, liberally, one third of one percent of the pages left on my bookshelf in the "To Read" section, a section built by overzealous purchasing, gift giving, and the (very) occasional reassignment of a book that I've already read and already too much forgotten. That is a lot of pages. It took me about a week to read Lucky Jim; assuming that all of the pages remaining are as easily read (they aren't) and that the number will only decrease (it won't), that means that I will have conquered my library in three hundred weeks, or about six years.

To have read all of one's books: not all of the books one wants to read, or needs to read, or ought to read, but all of the books one has on his bookshelf: that is the prospect I see before me, in six years. In six years I will be thirty years old, which means I will be inescapably a grown-up. And to have finished reading all of my books, in the narrow way I mean, is what I have to look at as a number that makes more sense as the number to tick down until I am a grown-up. I own a copy of A Tale of a Tub that I bought, from amazon.com, in 2002, obsessed with getting as much Swift as I could get my hands on after I read A Modest Proposal in high school. I own a copy of Thoreau's selected essays that I bought at the now long-defunct Waldenbooks in the Lockport Mall. And I own a copy of Decline and Fall that I bought at a used book store in Massachusetts, with long term aims of impressing with my knowledge of it a girl whom I knew, at the time, to be enjoying the Loved One, also by Evelyn Waugh. The point about these books, and many others of their near neighbors, is that I cannot possibly imagine ever self-identifying as a grown-up while they sit there, unread. Like Investing, or Quitting Smoking, Reading All of My Books seems like a task impossibly grown-up, like a thing I couldn't possibly currently do.

And yet, and yet, I finished Lucky Jim today on the Q train, around eleven thirty tonight. So there it went. And I currently want a cigarette about as badly as I can remember, and yet I took off my shoes and brushed my teeth instead of going to the bodega. So there that goes. I will whittle my pages down. Man never is, always to be, blest.