January 2025
midafternoon thoughts
2 January 2025, around 15.32.
No code of cataloguing could be adopted in all points by every one, because the libraries for study and the libraries for reading have different objects, and those which combine the two do so in different proportions.
Cutter was my favorite part of the library. It was a rather barren little room in the basement, with no exterior windows. Indeed, a narrow strip of linoleum between the rolling steel stacks and the door scarcely left room for one dusty carrel accompanied by a wobbly chair with a cracked vinyl seat, clearly ejected some decades before from the more convenable stacks on the floors above. The door – dark, possibly fireproof, with a small dingy window that I may have merely imagined – had the unnerving tendency to stick shut and open only with ominous reluctance, and the handles to move the stacks had a jaunty nautical character that did not quite hide their disconcerting habit of continuing to move as one ventured between the shelves. The smell of books was concentrated and particularly sweet, because only old editions of out-of-fashion titles congregated there and were rarely disturbed.
I first ended up in Cutter in search of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, which I remember was enrobed in a mysteriously sun-worn mustard-color buckram, the faint reflective sheen of which camouflaged the faded text of both call number and title. It was while searching for that novel that I first encountered Night Thoughts.
A pause on the threshold. One enters the library in ignorance, in innocence, with just a name, a few numbers, half a supposition. You do not know what you will encounter, and you always find more than you can imagine – you intend to borrow a book on usury and walk out with a book on barcodes as well, thanks to the happenstance of a shared name and the catalogue’s caprice. Sometimes you encounter the book you expect, and sometimes you encounter the book you need. Sometimes you need a book for something other than reading.
An eye of awe and wonder let me roll,
And roll for ever: who can satiate sight
In such a scene? in such an ocean wide
Of deep astonishment? where depth, height, breadth,
Are lost in their extremes; and where to count
The thick-sown glories in this field of fire,
Perhaps a seraph’s computation fails.
It’s an evocative title, Night Thoughts. The early nineteenth-century edition that afforded my first glimpse of its (dubious) wonders included the promising subtitle to the first night—‘On life, death, and immortality’—on the title page. But there was something in the setting of the Baskerville that was oppressive, with ‘the heft of cathedral tunes’, as though the rustling pages wanted to intone ‘remember, man, that thou art dust’. Even knowing nothing about what the volume contained, I had the suspicion that if a yew-shadowed churchyard was promised, it was for a funeral at which the author was gawping, not grieving. Still, bold venturer, I turned a few pages in the expectation of prose, but was surprised, perhaps dismayed, by the appearance of stanzas, the lines scissoring across the soft rag of the page: ‘How, like a worm, was I wrapt round and round / In silken thought, which reptile fancy spun, / Till darken’d reason lay quite clouded o’er’ (Night 1, ll. 158–160).
This ‘reptile fancy’ was sufficient to spin interest into incredulity; I closed the book softly and returned it gently, gingerly to the shelf—with a smirk or a snicker, I cannot quite recall. From that moment, Night Thoughts became a touchstone of the risible for me. As the years passed, the faintest fleeting thought of it never failed to make me twist my face into something like a smile, and the phrase ‘Edward Young, the author of … Night Thoughts’ held a secret, horrible hilarity. On the strength of that amusement I even went so far as to purchase a volume of Young’s correspondence at the Strand a decade later. I felt not the smallest urge to read it.
Let me not burst in ignorance, but tell
Why thy canonized bones, hearsèd in death,
Have burst their cerements, why the sepulcher
Wherein we saw thee quietly inurned
Has oped his ponderous and marble jaws
To cast thee up again?
I would have been content to let Young lie quietly interred upon the shelf (forever!), but then I started reading J.G. Hamann’s Socratic Memorabilia. On the first page of the dedication? A footnote referring to Night Thoughts.
O’Flaherty’s edition of Socratic Memorabilia has a nice explanatory note that cites John Kind’s Edward Young in Germany (see pp. 28–40 on Hamann in particular), which contains more noisome titbits about Young’s baleful influence on continental thought than anyone really needs to know (unless, of course, one is interested in (a) Young or (b) German thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries); notable, however, is the statement: ‘Hamann, then, in his views on originality and individualism, owes the greater part of his material to Young’ and it was ‘[h]is own opinion that nearly all his ideas were taken from the “Night Thoughts”’ (p. 40; also qtd. O’Flaherty, p. 193).
Hamann’s sense of his ideas and his communication of those ideas is a topic I have attempted, with no real success, to unravel. (Why I have done so remains a mystery to me – perhaps it is the pure joy of rummaging in the shadows of enlightenment.) Confronted with this Gordian knot, how could I resist taking up the absurd notion that anything in Night Thoughts would have the force to cut through the tangled shroud of allusion, word play, whimsicality, tetchiness, and obscurity to lay bare the bones of some sort of meaning?
None has hitherto boasted to have received his academical instruction from the author of the Night Thoughts.
I’ve been so long remember’d, I’m forgot.
Long did I remain in happy ignorance of the details, but now it is my misfortune (and yours, too, I suppose) to know that Edward Young’s Night Thoughts is a didactic poem in blank verse, divided into nine ‘nights’, which, in a marvelous illustration of the relativity of time, are of varying lengths (ranging from 459 to 2,434 lines), although all of them manage to seem too long. The first ‘night’ was published in 1742, and further editions that same year (in different formats) included Nights 2 and 3. (These first three nights were—and probably still are—generally the most widely known, as they were printed in several separate editions; they were also shorter. The experience of later readers of this trifecta would also be augmented by Blake’s illustrations.) The reception was positive, and further editions were published, with further accretions, until Night Thoughts reached what is essentially its final form, in nine parts, in 1745. One has the strong sense that Young would have continued, but either public interest changed or he ran out of sympathetic notables to whom to dedicate his psychological embrocations. 1
The poem itself enjoys a sort of pompous religiosity so thoroughly larded with deeply relished morbidity that it often seems more than a little silly. The gist of its lesson is that man is mortal, that one’s time on earth is best spent in the contemplation of that mortality, and that faith in whatever Young imagines deity to be is the only thing that could sweeten death’s sting. In his critical reflection on the poem in the Lives of the English Poets, Samuel Johnson rather charitably observes: ‘The excellence of this work is not exactness, but copiousness; particular lines are not to be regarded; the power is in the whole, and in the whole there is a magnificence like that ascribed to Chinese Plantation, the magnificence of vast extent and endless diversity’ (vol. 4, p. 419) – and, the modern reader might remark, like an eighteenth-century Chinese plantation, it perhaps taxes excessively anyone condemned to work through it. The expansive character of the work can perhaps be ascribed, as Johnson does, to Young’s philosophy of composition: ‘His plan seems to have started in his mind at the present moment, and his thoughts appear the effects of chance, sometimes adverse, and sometimes lucky, with very little operation of judgement. He was not one of the writers whom experience improves’ (vol. 4, p. 416).
The failings of the poem one could forgive, did they not seem to mark the character of the poet (‘with reverence be it spoken’). George Eliot’s comments on Young focus on this point, and she makes a strong case for Young’s lack of moral character and essential parasitism based on a fairly wide range of sources (e.g., ‘His religion exhausts itself in ejaculations and rebukes, and knows no medium between the ecstatic and the sententious. If it were not for the prospect of immortality, he considers, it would be wise and agreeable to be indecent or to murder one’s father; and, heaven apart, it would be extremely irrational in any man not to be a knave’, p. 206, – and that is merely her comment on Young as narrator); were her observations not echoed even by people one would assume to be favorable to the poet, one would be tempted to think it an exercise in character assassination. Yet even Croft, in a biography supplied for Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets, is forced to observe that Young ‘was not the ornament to religion and morality which he afterwards became’ (vol. 4, p. 343)—and he never provides evidence that the poet became ‘an ornament to religion and morality’ in later life, noting instead that he was a poor clergyman and a mediocre parent, who was somewhat lacking in human feeling: indeed, ‘The poet seems to dwell with more melancholy on the deaths of Philander and Narcissa, than of his wife’ (vol. 4, p. 378). Would this matter if the poem were a sustained masterpiece? Probably not:
In a man under the immediate pressure of a great sorrow, we tolerate morbid exaggerations; we are prepared to see him turn away a weary eye from sunlight and flowers and sweet human faces, as if this rich and glorious life had no significance but as a preliminary of death; we do not criticise his views, we compassionate his feelings. And so it is with Young in these earlier Nights. There is already some artificiality even in his grief, and feeling often slides into rhetoric, but through it all we are thrilled with the unmistakable cry of pain, which makes us tolerant of egoism and hyperbole.
Do his personal failings come to matter for one’s reading of Night Thoughts? Does one become less tolerant of his egoism and hyperbole? Unfortunately, yes. And untangling Young from his poem seems an impossible task; as narrator, the irruption of his character spoils any sentiment or mood he may, as poet, try to elicit: ‘Man smiles in Ruin, glories in his Guilt, / And Infamy stands Candidate for Praise’ (Night 5, ll. 45f.). One is never quite certain if he is bragging or complaining.
EY: To recriminate is just.
ME: I’m glad you think so, Dr. Young. You do your topic too brown, embrowned in Melancholy as you are, for any reader to enjoy, though I suppose it’s taken me long enough to say so.
EY: Procrastination is the Thief of Time, / Year after year it steals, till all are fled, / And to the mercies of a Moment leaves / The vast Concerns of an Eternal scene.
ME: Is that intended to be helpful? Instructive? Illuminating?
EY: Will Toys amuse, when Med’cines cannot cure?
ME: Unlikely.
Voracious Learning, often over-fed,
Digests not into Sense her motley Meal.
This Book-Case, which dark booty almost burst,
This Forager on others’ Wisdom, leaves
Her Native-Farm, her Reason, quite untill’d.
With mix’d Manure she surfeits the rank Soil,
Dung’d, but not dress’d; and rich to Beggary.
A Pomp untameable of Weeds prevails.
- As Croft observes, ‘He had not yet weaned himself from Earls and Dukes, from Speakers of the House of Commons, Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, and Chancellors of the Exchequer. In Night Eight the politician plainly betrays himself’ (p. 389). The invidious lust for fame is also apparent in Young’s ‘Conjectures on Original Composition’, a discussion of the art of writing in the form of a letter to Samuel Richardson; if some modern jackanapes has not called the literary scene of eighteenth-century London the Samual Richardson era (following Hugh Kenner and The Pound Era), there is certainly an opening to do so. To return to the point, insofar as there is one: Stephen Cornford’s introduction to his edition of Night Thoughts (Cambridge UP, 1989) provides an overview of the work’s publication history that is more detailed than I care to rehearse here.[↩]
dogmatici
23 January 2025, around 17.21.
Appetite, fear, hope, and the rest of the passions are not called voluntary; for they proceed not from, but are the will; and the will is not voluntary. For a man can no more say he will will, than he will will will, and so make an infinite repetition of the word will; which is absurd, and insignificant.
* * *
Though words be the signs we have of one another’s opinions and intentions: because the equivocation of them is so frequent, according to the diversity of contexture, and of the company wherewith they go (which the presence of him that speaketh, our sight of his actions, and conjecture of his intentions, must help to discharge us of): it must be extreme hard to find out the opinions and meanings of those men that are gone from us long ago, and have left us no other signification thereof but their books; which cannot possibly be understood without history enough to discover those aforementioned circumstances, and also without great prudence to observe them.
Adversaria (22)
31 January 2025, around 4.15.
‘When ideas are dead their ghosts usually walk; but no ghost walks for ever, and the main thing is for the people they haunt to remember that they are only ghosts’ —R.G. Collingwood (The Idea of Nature, p. 149f.; cf. another ghost)
‘For when a master is instructing his scholar, if the scholar understand all the parts of the thing defined, which are resolved in the definition, and yet will not admit of the definition, there needs no further controversy betwixt then, it being all one as if he refused to be taught. But if he understand nothing, then certainly the definition is faulty; for the nature of a definition consists in this, that it exhibit a clear idea of the thing defined; and principle are either known by themselves, or else they are not principles’ —Thomas Hobbes (De Corpore, VI.15)
‘Rembrandt’s scenes of the Old Testament permit us to trace the course of the artist’s own life, since the ancient stories become real to him only through the medium of his own experiences; but vice versa, the old figures furnish him with a better approach toward his own life. Just so the Greek discovered the human intellect—by reading it into myths’ —Bruno Snell (Discovery of the Mind, trans. T.G. Rosenmeyer, p. 206)
‘…this kind of metaphor may be appropriate, it may be striking, and even witty, but it lacks the element of necessity which would make it philosophically profitable’ —Bruno Snell (Discovery of the Mind, trans. T.G. Rosenmeyer, p. 198)
‘According to the eudaemonistic theory of ethics the guilty conscience proves that moral conduct may safely be founded on a refined and intelligent understanding of happiness and unhappiness. […] The upshot of these reflexions was that those who speculated on the subject of happiness and morality, like those who talked of profit and morality, did not content themselves with the promise of ease and complacency as the rewards of a moral life. Instead, they granted virtue the prospect of a permanent “inner” happiness, that that is simply the assurance of having done no wrong’ —Bruno Snell (Discovery of the Mind, trans. T.G. Rosenmeyer, p. 163f.)