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Reading for the Pleasure of the Language
My natural urge to keep up with every development in what is known in journalism as "nervous news" is waning. It may be that season after season of immersion in issues, conflicts, political intrigue, any given day's report of killing and maiming by gunshot, of wars and rumors of war brings on a kind of fatigue.
As an antidote, I have taken refuge yet again in the good writing of other times -- nothing that is new or news. I've recently read for about the 10th time in 50 years Anthony Trollope's novel Barchester Towers -- being Trollope's amused reaction to the foibles and sillinesses among the movers and shakers -- and would-be movers and shakers -- of the mid-19th century Church of England.
For every character Trollope created, no doubt out of some exposure to an actual person or persons, I am always able to find types in today's ecclesiastical world who probably have not read the novel, else they would not behave as Trollope had his churchy characters behave, e.g. Archdeacon Grantly; Mrs. Proudie, wife of the incumbent bishop of Barchester but, in reality, its de facto ruler; and not least the chaplain to the actual bishop, one Rev. Mr. Obadiah Slope with the likes of whom every diocese of every church for the past two millennia has had to suffer. I dare say that others familiar with the novel would see me in the fatuity of one or another of its characters.
Done with Barchester Towers (for now), I turned to my paperback copy of Thucydides' History of The Peloponnesian War, having not done so for 25 years. I had spent some time, not happily, with it in my undergraduate days but decided to read it again in 1990 because then-U.S. Senator Sam Nunn, who was uncompromisingly opposed to the first Gulf War, suggested that his fellow solons do so before they voted to support George H.W. Bush in starting it.
I doubt many of them read it, but since I agreed with Nunn, I thought I should. At one time I could have stumbled through it in the Greek with a lexicon close at hand. However, last time I read the Richard Crawley translation and am doing so again.
Once again I am reminded of Thucydides' insistence that any war -- its beginning, its waging and its ending (usually bitter for all concerned) -- is entirely of human origin. He would look for no divine intervention on behalf of any belligerent involved. Message? Don't be led by religious sentiment into war or think one will get you out of it. Either way, it never ends well.
Withal, I love the language both of what little of Thucydides' original text I can still get through and the excellent Crawley translation.
The professor who taught creative writing in my senior year of college was very clear about the connection between writing and reading. His perennial advice was "Writers read, and good writers read a lot." It was he who exposed me to two authors of whose work I have since read "a lot" -- the aforementioned Trollope and the 20th century American novelist John P. Marquand.
I have five of Marquand's novels: The Late George Apley, Point of No Return, So Little Time, B.F.'s Daughter and Sincerely, Willis Wayde. I re-read a couple of them each year and do so for their use of the language and Marquand's pitch-perfect way of describing characters simply by putting the exactly right words on their lips. In that respect, his work reminds me of Trollope's.
When I read Trollope, Thucydides and Marquand, I find myself far from the madding crowd and secure for a while in other very different times. It's too bad I have not turned often enough to the Thomas Hardy novels that are on my shelves. However, just now I am once again reading through the novels of W. Somerset Maugham and have just recently taken up Cakes and Ale -- a novel, appropriately enough, about writers' lives and writing itself.
These days, I find myself scanning the newspapers sparingly. I listen to little radio news. "Television news" is an oxymoron. The foofaraw thrown up like dirt in a windstorm by the antics of the 247 Americans who think that they -- each one -- can succeed Barack Obama has become a laughing matter in my life. To alter Macbeth's soliloquy a tad, I dismiss it as "a tale told by idiot(s), full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Consequently, my blood pressure registers at 130/72, and I smile more.
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