This has been a good term, though unfortunately deficient in work. Neither ethics nor quantitative economics are stirring subjects, alas – the bulk of my intellectual stimulation this term has been from reading. And by far the best things I’ve read this term have to be Steinbeck’s seminal works – Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden. I am thankful and warmed by the fact that I can still understand and read and cast myself at the feet of my books.
Why bother with philosophy? I demand of myself, setting down Grapes of Wrath yesterday, after closing the book on Rosasharn nursing a man dying of starvation, her own stillborn baby still fresh in my mind. None of the philosophers I’ve read thus far – not Nietzsche, not Kant, not Aristotle, not even the master himself, Plato – none of them manage to philosophise about human nature with as much fluency and lucidity as can be achieved in a passage of the best literature. It’s literature that realises philosophy, especially ethics, that immeasurably complex study of humanity and how we reach out for each other, to hurt or to hunt or to love…
From Steinbeck’s Nobel acceptance speech:
“Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion. My great predecessor, William Faulkner, speaking here, referred to it as a tragedy of universal fear so long sustained that there were no longer problems of the spirit, so that only the human heart in conflict with itself seemed worth writing about… he knew that understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer’s reason for being… he is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.
Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit – for gallantry in defeat – for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe passionately in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”
How not to fall in love? How beautiful the sentiment is! Literature makes life real for me, I think, which is why I am a compulsive diarist, a compulsive writer. Sometimes things don’t seem real to me until I’ve written them down… I was browsing my diary, and this is an excerpt from the day I finished reading East of Eden, several weeks ago:
“Today I read Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and did almost nothing else. I read from two pm to six pm, broke away to cook dinner, went to watch Call of the Wild with Matti, and then came back and read all the rest of it. It gave me back joy and it gave me back erudition, and these gifts were accompanied with something that felt akin to relief; something that I might name gratitude.
It has been a painfully long time since I read a serious novel – a novel that wasn’t afraid to be both a novel about ideas and a novel about men and women. It has been even longer still since the last time I let myself sit down and drown in a book, wholehearted and willing. Oh, I’ve read lots – I think it would honestly hurt me to not read – but I’ve not read with this kind of immersive intensity for a terribly long while.
Part of it may be that it has been a while since I have met a book that desired that kind of determination from me. The last book I read before this was Patti Smith’s Just Kids. I read that over a period of five nights or so, going through a bit and then a bit again, night after night before sleep. And that was fine. It was a conversation that could be put on hold and resumed and put on hold again. Many, many books – and even many very good books – are precisely like that, and perhaps that is the kind of book that is best suited to us today. East of Eden, however, is the sort of the book that allows for you to respond with that kind of wholesale-or-nothing passion, and I am glad, glad beyond belief.
I’ve missed this pleasure. Part of me was quite probably afraid that I’d lost it – reading and writing are skills that have a disturbing tendency to decay without use – and hence the gratitude, the burgeoning relief, that I can still give myself so wholly to this kind of delight. It is a very tiring kind of ease, because it takes discipline to commit yourself to caring about these people. It takes some strange strength to love Cal Trask, and it takes some unusual effort to know his sins in your mind and in your heart. This was probably what Aristotle was getting at when he explored catharsis, and I don’t think I agree with the common definition of the word, but it’s as good a name as any, for this singular and unique fulfillment.”
I didn’t read Grapes of Wrath quite the same way – I read it piecemeal but blazed through just over half of it yesterday. Between the two I think I preferred East of Eden, but perhaps that might be at least partially because of how I read East of Eden in comparison to Grapes of Wrath. Both of them are beautiful and stirring novels, although very alien to me. The characters – these hardened men and women, these creatures of the earth, raw and tough and tied to the soil – what would I know of them, being a city child? And yet, as I said – the words make them accessible. The words make their being something that I grasp, something that I can understand and relate to, and the words make their miserable existence something to be attended to, something to be grasped and celebrated and mourned and emulated.
It makes me feel, very keenly, that I have a long, long way to go as a writer and a poet.
sourdough 
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