false fan,

A fan of nothing if

he’s honest

Flash over fealty

fool’s gold fool’s gods.

Let this begin and

end

in congruence with my fickle will.

I am the captain of my soul

I said, not so much as a

first lieutenant.

The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar, is, the mind of the Past,–in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get at the truth,–learn the amount of this influence more conveniently,–by considering their value alone.

The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him, life; it went out from him, truth. It came to him, short-lived actions; it went out from him, immortal thoughts. It came to him, business; it went from him, poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.

Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone, of transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the completeness of the distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the product be. But none is quite perfect. As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.

Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation,–the act of thought,–is transferred to the record. The poet chanting, was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled, the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly, the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry, if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although, in almost all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In this action, it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its essence, it is progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they,–let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his;–cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. There are creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative words; manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind’s own sense of good and fair.

On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it receive from another mind its truth, though it were in torrents of light, without periods of solitude, inquest, and self-recovery, and a fatal disservice is done. Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence. The literature of every nation bear me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized now for two hundred years.

Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must,–when the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining, –we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, “A fig tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh fruitful.”

 

It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books. They impress us with the conviction, that one nature wrote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of Dryden, with the most modern joy,–with a pleasure, I mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of all time from their verses. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said. But for the evidence thence afforded to the philosophical doctrine of the identity of all minds, we should suppose some preestablished harmony, some foresight of souls that were to be, and some preparation of stores for their future wants, like the fact observed in insects, who lay up food before death for the young grub they shall never see.

I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exaggeration of instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know, that, as the human body can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge. And great and heroic men have existed, who had almost no other information than by the printed page. I only would say, that it needs a strong head to bear that diet. One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, “He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies.” There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. We then see, what is always true, that, as the seer’s hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part,–only the authentic utterances of the oracle;– all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato’s and Shakespeare’s.

Of course, there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious reading. Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,–to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year.

About a week ago my family was cleaning the basement up, and I came across a Titanium* back issue commemorating the soon-to-graduate class of 2008 (which somehow was almost four years ago now).

*The Titanium is our school newspaper, which, but for a single glorious year of great writing and editing (last year, in which I and my friends may or may not have been on staff) is a rather dark spot in the world of journalism.

The class of 2008 was easily half the size of my current senior class, so the issue had a short article on each students, somewhat poorly describing (and for some reason or another using the past tense, making them sound like eulogies) their regrets, favorite moments, advice to younger students, and hopes for the future. And while there was nothing particularly profound (there was an abundance of “Savor every moment”s and “Friends are more important than grades”s) it was enough to get me pontificating on my own life.

Time is a truly weird thing; I can’t so much as ably pretend to understand it. We have these arbitrary standards of measuring it: seconds, hours, months, millenia, but they’re just that, arbitrary. They don’t actually get at what time really is. All that to say it is profoundly interesting to me that some three and half years ago, at some other point on this seemingly endless line of time; at some moments that then was just as much the present as the moments I spend writing this are my present, these then-seniors were thinking about their legacies, what they want to be remembered for.

And now, in that past’s future, here I am, not remembering them. And some three and half years from this present, I could be in the same situation, with some equally precocious now-freshman then-senior commentating on my thoughts of legacy.

It can all seem a bit arbitrary, a bit like trying to grasp the wind, trying to determine a legacy. But it’s evident they exist. We remember people, and we remember them for specific things, ways in which they lived in the present.

And it’s enough to make me want to leave a meaningful legacy. I have ideas of who I want to be, but those can often cloud the reality of who I am now and what people are remembering me as. I’m not even so much concerned with how I’ll be remembered in the future but how I am thought of in the present.

There’s this quote from Annie Dillard that I love: “How we spend our days, is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

If I want to reflect back one day on those youthful days when I wrote and thought deeply, I have to write and think deeply today. If  I want fond memories, I need to have fond experiences now. If I want to come to the end of my life and say that I have drunk deep the cup of life, I should start sipping.

The weight of the present is often too much to bear, considering its import on the rest of my existence.

What I do now, who I am today, will translate over time into my legacy. Not some pithy quote that’s printed with several spelling erros in a commemorative senior issue of a school newspaper.

If I intend to make my legacy meaningful, I need to make today and tomorrow meaningful.

And I intend to.

It may be that after Winter Break the administration will realize their legacy-talk has been lacking and heavy-handedly dump it on us with the energy of those on a mission from God. They may implore us to “think about how you want to remembered, what legacy you want to leave.” But I will sit passively and smile, knowing that any worthwhile legacy doesn’t come from thinking about how I want others to remember me in the future, it comes from taking seriously who I am right now.

—–

I actually wrote that on the 21st, and while intending to post it never got around to it. It makes for, interestingly enough, a somewhat fitting New Year post. This is a big year. The biggest year of my life. I’ll actually make life-altering decisions for the first time. I’m excited. I’m determined. And I want to write about it. I want to catalog it. I want to reflect on the present in the present, not some time in the future when it’s too late to fully appreciate the fullness and beauty of the life I can live now. I’m from a generation that as far as I can tell places no value on reflection, but I still value it. And I value it more the more I do it. Which would make sense.

So in the great human tradition of making empty resolutions on the occasions of arbitrary timetables, I hope to write and post here more regularly this 2012. Stay with me. There’s still a beating heart somewhere down here.

They have cradled you in custom,
They have primed you with their preaching,
They have soaked you in convention through and through;
They have put you in a showcase; you’re a credit to their teaching –
But can’t you hear the Wild? — it’s calling you.
Let us probe the silent places, let us seek what luck betide us;
Let us journey to a lonely land I know.
There’s a whisper on the night-wind,
there’s a star agleam to guide us,
And the Wild is calling, calling. . . let us go.

Authoritative whispers

Timid yawp

Silent resolve.

Heat, so much heat!

from the friction of ten thousand

pressing thoughts.

–

I want your heart

but mostly I want my heart

given away.

Beat, my heart! (snare kick crash)

Conquer the blood.

Race through my veins,

around my working hands.

but mostly return to my heart,

violent lifeblood; sustaining

from atrium to ventricle, ventricle to atrium,

a rhythm assuring and destructive

–

I, a lonely cloud,

a speck(tacle) on an infinite blue.

Surrounded, tangled, breathing in blue

but never becoming.

postscript: the last post felt a little bitter, even though that wasn’t the intent. it’s down.

“The Search” is the name of my blog, but it’s hardly meant to be a celebration of the act of searching in itself. I’m always searching, not aimlessly or without purpose, but to find answers. To find truth. To see how it all connects and to progress in life.

More and more these days, however, I see “searching” held up as a value unto itself. I see “discussion” and “dialogue” becoming fetishized as the most valuable end, as if the suggestion that they were merely a means to an end was somehow naïve or demeaning.  I see my elders patting my cynical, intellectually fragmented peers on the back saying, “great questions,” but not offering wisdom or guidance in the direction of answers or truth. It’s sad, really.

Sometimes I want to shake the shoulders of the baby boomers in my life and remind them, “You have something to say to us! Me and my generation have a lot to learn from you! Help guide us out of this postmodern aimless wandering!”

We are a generation of navel-gazing, pseudo-intellectual youths who enjoy hearing ourselves speak and love sounding intellectual and playing at discourse. We are born searchers, but we don’t know what we are searching for. We like the idea of intellectual discussion. But we don’t trust truth, facts, and answers, and thus prefer to dwell in the land of questions. Furthermore, we don’t have the proper boundaries, foundation, or directional motivation to make any sense out of anything anyway.

That’s why we need guidelines, structure, purpose, a raison d’etre. To set off on a journey without a destination in mind is not to journey; it’s to wander. And in this world—with its collapsing empires, volatile markets, surging unemployment and widespread suffering—we don’t have the luxury of just wandering.

This is not to say that what the world needs are dogmatic assertions of certainty or recklessly rigid, partisan solutions. Rather, it needs a populace who is capable of and committed to a discourse that goes beyond argument, performance and circularity and actually moves things forward productively. It needs politicians who are willing to stop arguing and start looking for answers that work, from whatever side of the aisle they come from. It needs teachers and preachers and leaders who are willing to tell younger folks when they are wrong and when they are right, or at least on the right track.

I don’t want to live in a world where there are no wrong answers, where all ideas are good, where expressing an opinion is elevated above understanding the truth. No, I want to live in a world where seeking is thrilling only insofar as a prize–a goal, an epiphany, a discovery–is in sight; where discourse is valuable only insofar as it moves the conversation forward; where the space between me and my other pontificating peers is charged with the electric awareness not of our own individual brilliance, but of the collective inkling that maybe, just maybe, we are on to something.

Check out the post on his blog here.