I am reading Roger Kimball’s 2012 book of essays, The Fortunes of Permanence. I’ve barely begun – just the preface
(“Mostly About Relativism”) and the first essay, which is the title essay, so far – and
I am as strongly impressed as I thought I would be. (I have always enjoyed and appreciated Kimball’s work.) I would like to write a thoughtful
essay about his essay, but shall have to be content with lots of quotations for
now. So, from “The Fortunes of
Permanence,” several quotations that probably won’t add up to his main point,
but that particularly caught my attention as worth repeating.
Kimball writes about the sense in which culture is that which
must be cultivated, but warns, in a paraphrase of Cicero: “[E]ven the best care [. . .] does not
inevitably bring good results [. . .].
The results of cultivation depend not only on the quality of the care
but the inherent nature of the thing being cultivated.”
“Culture in the evaluative sense does not merely admit, it
requires judgment as a kind of coefficient or auxiliary: comparison,
discrimination, evaluation are its lifeblood.” Here he quotes
Henry James: “We never really get near a book [. . .] save on the
question of its being good or bad, of its really treating, that is, or not
treating, its subject.” And
Matthew Arnold: criticism is “the
disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and
thought in the world.”
“The point is that culture has roots," Kimball writes. "It limns the future through its
implications with the past. Moving
the reader or spectator over the centuries, in [Hannah] Arendt’s phrase, the
monuments of culture transcend the local imperatives of the present. They escape the obsolescence that
fashion demands, the predictability that planning requires. They speak of love and hatred, honor
and shame, beauty and courage and cowardice – permanent realities of the human
situation insofar as it remains human.”
Writing about Huxley’s Brave
New World, Kimball quotes a section in which the Controller tells the
Savage that reading old works, such as those of Shakespeare, is prohibited
merely because they are old. And
if they are beautiful, it is even more important that they not be read: “Beauty’s attractive, and we don’t want
people to be attracted by old things.
We want them to like the new ones.”
Why? “Huxley’s
brave new world is above all a superficial world." Kimball explains. "People are encouraged to like what is new, to live in the
moment, because that makes them less complicated and more pliable.” Sensation is important, not substance
(Dillard addresses this in The Writing
Life: “the life of sensation
demands more and more”), and “experience is increasingly vivid but decreasingly
real. The question of meaning is
deliberately short-circuited.” As
the Controller explains, “They [experiences] mean themselves; they mean a lot
of agreeable sensations to the audience.”
“In part,” Kimball writes, “the attack on permanence is an
attack on the idea that anything possesses inherent value.”
On the increasingly profane and crude displays in much of what
passes for art these days, Kimball notes, “Hardly anyone is shocked anymore,
but that is a testament not to public enlightenment but to widespread moral
anesthesia.” (He also quotes
Chesterton as one of his chapter epigraphs: “Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was
shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without
being shocked. . . . It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively
and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic.”)
On technology:
“Welcome to the information age.
Data, data, everywhere, but no one knows a thing.” Information is not knowledge. We might be able to find information at
the click of a mouse, but this comes with “a great temptation”: “to confuse an excellent
means of communication with communication that is excellent. We confuse, that is to say, process
with product. As the critic David
Guaspari memorably put it, ‘comparing information and knowledge is like asking
whether the fatness of a pig is more or less green than the designated hitter’s
rule.’ Oops.”
“The problem with computers is not the worlds they give us
instant access to but the world they encourage us to neglect.” The issue is not so much the
developments of the “digital revolution” as “the effect of such developments on
our moral and imaginative life, and even our cognitive and political
life.” (Note, please, he does not say technology is evil!)
On close and careful reading: why memorize when quotations are instantly available? “One reason, of course, is that a
passage memorized is a passage internalized: it becomes part of the mental sustenance of the soul.”
He quotes Henry Kissinger at length: “Reading books requires you to form
concepts, to train your mind to relationships. You have to come to grips with who you are. A leader needs these qualities. But now we learn from fragments of
facts. A book is a large
intellectual construction. You
have to struggle mentally to internalize it. Now there is no need to internalize because each fact can
instantly be called up on the computer. There is no context, no motive. Information is not knowledge. People are not readers but researchers,
they float on the surface. This
new thinking erases context.”
Artists, your work is important, now, today, despite the
chaos that threatens. Kimball
quotes from C. S. Lewis on the idea that we must wait for “normal” life to
engage in cultural pursuits:
“Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely
cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying
injustice put right. But humanity
long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for
the suitable moment that never comes. [. . .] They propound
mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in
condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the latest new poem while
advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopoylae. This is not panache; this is our
nature.”
“Lewis’s meditation,” Kimball writes, “reminds us that
culture, and the humanity that defines it, is constantly under threat. No achievement may be taken for
granted; yesterday’s gain may be tomorrow’s loss; permanent values require
permanent vigilance and permanent renewal.”
