In the archive of the evanescent

"...a certain silvery grace of fancy, nearly all the pleasure of which is in the surprise at the happy and dexterous way in which a thing slight in itself is handled. The sweetness of it is by no means to be got at by crushing, as you crush wild herbs to get at their perfume....A sudden light transfigures some trivial thing, a weather-vane, a windmill, a winnowing-fan, the dust in the barn door. A moment--and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again." -- Walter Pater, "Joachim du Bellay," from The Renaissance

It's probably a travesty of modern literary studies that people think that all you have to read of Pater is the Introduction and Conclusion to The Renaissance. This last line to me seems to be worth a hundred gemlike flames and I'm not sure we understand that either.

A few days into our correspondence, I told him that I was writing a secret dissertation motivated by the question of walking on water. This is true. It has already developed here, it is still developing--and I am slowly, belatedly, beginning to find it everywhere in Browning. It is the place where my life and my work--very long estranged, breached by teaching and other alienations--strain back to touch each other, promising the kind of coherence that I used to take as a kind of birthright, back when life looked a lot easier because we didn't know a damn thing about it. It's something with moments, like the Browning sonnet I posted last month, to get beyond asserting and against...I am sitting at my desk right now and looking at the quote I wrote out from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind a few months ago, the quote about "losing its balance against a background of perfect balance." The right to a beginner's mind not entirely recognized where I am, except in matters that are convenient to others. (A brush with triggermemories of the Worst Job I Ever Had this morning reminds me that I will never volunteer to organize an academic conference if I can help it.) And yet. Finally clearing spaces, a few at least, and this is all I can do for now. Withdrawing from the world, from excuses to spend money taking car services instead of just walking in silence, a withdrawal from talking to people all the time so that I can come back to my archive of the evanescent, to start thinking again.

"And what does the spirit need in the face of modern life? The sense of freedom....For us, necessity is not, as of old, a sort of mythological personage without us, with whom we can do warfare. It is rather a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network, subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world. Can art represent men and women in these bewildering toils so as to give the spirit at least an equivalent for the sense of freedom?" -- Pater, "Wincklemann"