I am reading a biography of Emma Lazarus by Eve Merriam. Lazarus was a small poet but not a poetess by any means. I have been reading the quotations from her work closely and recognize a quality which seems to deserve more durability than the lines quoted on the Statue of Liberty, for instance. The fact that she has been all but forgotten makes me blush for having so often accepted the estimate of posterity with such irreversible respect.

*
In a conversation with S. recently we touched on the private life versus the public life in a poet’s writings. I asked him whether he thought it was right for the poet to submerge himself in noncommittal asocial themes while the world stood on the brink of a catastrophic abyss. Where does the poet’s obligation lie? He thinks it is the poet’s duty to work in both directions simultaneously, keep his eye on the environment which confronts his senses but never lose sight of those simmering events which touch him more indirectly. A poet has but one obligation, S. believes, and that is to do the best he can with whatever material he tackles. He will never be judged, or at least shouldn’t be, by the subjects he chooses to write about, but only on the basis of the success with which he molds them into true poems. This, to my mind, is almost too obvious a truth to even have have been mentioned, but then a poet must nevertheless repeat it to himself periodically in order keep himself on the right track.
*
It is now a half century since my father died. At various times during this period I have thought about him, even dreamed such vivid scenes in which he was a principal participant that I awakened thinking he was still alive. I have written a number of poems about him, one in the form of an elegy which was published by Commonweal. But this poem, whatever merits it might have, deals mostly with the unhappy coda of his life. Death can too easily become the most important event in the life of a person in the eyes of his most immediate survivors. Everything that is remembered about him clings to the image of his dying. And this image stands as a wall cutting off his long years of health, vitality and accomplishment from a deeper hindsight. It is only after the nibbling teeth of time have demolished most of the wall that a disinterested portrait of the deceased can be painted. The most negative aspect of the portrait produced long after the death of the subject has occurred is that there is frequently a complete absence of emotion on the part of the observer. This is probably why the survival rate of elegies is much higher than biographies, since the former are usually composed within the still lingering shadows of the subject’s penultimate gasps for breath.
*
Appreciation of the human need for solitude has been rapidly diminishing in recent years. Nowadays you are out of step with the times if you show a strong preference for being alone. You are suspected of either having autocratic inclinations or perverted desires. Even a dog enjoys the pleasure of a lonely secluded corner most of the time. But man is being amputated from this natural impulse. Certainly it is an exorbitant price to have to pay for the many dubious benefits thrust upon him by the loud gregarious crowd.
*
I don’t think I had five minutes sleep last night. When I was living in the city full-time I often had the same nerve-wracking problem. I can still remember with renewed feelings of misery the many days I was compelled to drag my weary body through the streets following a sleepless night. But the country air, and perhaps even more importantly, the emphasis I have put on physical preoccupations to balance my sedentary occupations, has turned me into a sound sleeper. But last night was an exception to the rule. Good health and good sleeping are synonymous. Among the world’s great writers only Goethe, as far as I know, stressed the direct relationship between physical fitness and works of great creative force.
*
One of the most frightening elements in the character of the American people today is that we take ourselves much too seriously; thus we are burdened with a sense of self-righteousness that poisons virtually all our actions. We actually look upon ourselves as the saviors of civilization. But we are blind to the historical fact that the civilization or tradition we suppose ourselves to be saving has already seen its best days. It is not likely that much in the way of surprises will come from our effete octogenarian culture. We may produce better automobiles and more efficient missiles but hardly a Beethoven or Shakespeare. A healthy injection of primitive barbarism may be all that stands between ourselves and our impending annihilation. The primitive cousin who castigates the sacred logic of the lie we live by may turn out to be the instrument of our salvation. If he does not exactly force his medicinal concoction down our throats, he could nevertheless persuade us to become sufficiently wise to swallow it voluntarily.
*
Carlyle in his early notebooks calls the “metaphorical talent the first characteristic of genius.”
*
Life is not easy for anyone. When we are in difficulty we are apt to dismiss the rest of mankind as happily contented, indifferent animals. Actually, if we were to discover at the apogee of a particular misery from which we are suffering that a million people throughout the world were suffering with equal agony we would certainly be amazed if not comforted. Joy and suffering are the most common of those mutually common characteristics which assail all men.
*
I can’t quite buy the assertion that criticism heightens rather than diminishes the quality of art. The homage done to criticism is greatest when civilization is the most stifling. Natural endowment is the enemy of professorial dogmas.
*
Both past and future are equally impenetrable. We use the past but can never really savvy it.
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John Cooper Powys called Whitman a pagan. He had no metaphysical god. He put all his faith in man and loved him for what he is even more than for what he was likely to be in the future. Nietzsche, on the other hand, had no faith in man as he is presently constituted but placed whatever hope he had for the future in his (man’s) ultimate perfectability. The main difference between the American and the German was that each wore his own particular prescription of rose colored glasses.
*
Sir Thomas Browne wrote in Urn Burial, “A dialogue between two infants in the womb concerning the state of the world, might handsomely illustrate our ignorance of the next.”
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Carlyle quotes Coleridge as saying, “Many men live all their days without ever having an idea; and some of them with thousands of things they call ideas; but an Idea is not a Perception or Image, it cannot be painted, it is infinite.”
*
Carlyle insisted that man lives by reason rather than by understanding. While the latter changes from age to age, the sources from which it derives remain static. But reason is a factor in constant movement. Man survives by doing the reasonable thing from day to day. Yet culture would not be possible without understanding.
*
I have not only discussed and argued about the pros and cons of many topics with people but have often carried thoughts about fundamental philosophical issues around in my head for days without putting any of them down on paper. If notes are not made as soon as the thought is engendered in my mind it is unlikely that it will ever influence my writing unless it is one of those ideas which keep recurring in my brain so persistently that it becomes absolutely unavoidable. Yet for no other reason than the fact that every man’s range of ideas is extremely narrow, I believe I can rely on a certain degree of consistency in my thinking. Still, I suspect myself at times of being able to switch sides too easily in a controversy. If this is true, then a further suspicion arises regarding how conscientious I am about the point of view I am espousing. What I really believe to be true is that my degree of conscientiousness varies according to the subject’s relationship to my private moral sense of right and wrong. In other words, I am assuming that I am a man of strict principles. When these principles are involved in my espousal of a point of view, I am conscientious. Otherwise, I may be simply committing myself to a kind of dialectical exercise.
*
What separates men from each other on basic issues is not that they entertain different philosophic approaches, but that they come to these issues armed with unequal emotional intensities.
*
Quiet reflection is often an antidote for extreme views. Yet there are certain moral compunctions which reach with long claw-like tentacles into the very center of the heart and cannot be shaken loose even by the most powerful probes of reason.
*
Time flies, but my own time seems to fly twice as fast.
*
The realization that nationalism is already outmoded is today fundamental to the survival of man. Is the idea that mankind is of greater importance than the United States of America still too bitter a pill for most Americans to swallow?
*
Perhaps it is a congenital weakness in man to surround himself with a set of rules governing his thoughts and then insist that they are logical expressions of natural or divine law. The most difficult person to deal with is one who seriously believes that within the narrow confines of his own skull sits a universal truth. The habitual doubter may be exasperating but in a sense he is the only one among us who can be called civilized.
*
Every society becomes stratified in its own customs or mores. This is a development which does not reach the extremes of rigidity until late in the existence of the said society. But the danger signs of approaching inflexibility are everywhere apparent long before this crisis stage sets in. If only men did not attach higher importance to their own customs than to any of the more obviously contrived artifacts which originated in the brains of their ancestors, nations and civilizations might have longer life spans.
*
History has been a poor teacher of mankind. The pedagogues of history tell us that the primary reason for studying the subject is to discover the mistakes of the past in order to avoid them in the present. On the surface this sounds like a pseudo-sagacious piece of cheap advertising copy. It implies that most historians work from a rather limited range of thought. They should not be taken too seriously because they are men of breadth instead of depth. Their main purpose is to entertain our curiosity about the past. The philosopher of history, on the other hand, is a man of a very different stripe. His mission is on another plain, higher in altitude and thus closer to the stars. Although his margin of error is far greater than his fact-finding colleagues he is the one who really has lessons designed more appropriately for the conduct of current affairs than for the satisfaction of our historical curiosity. He reveals tendencies, causes and effects. He places an abundance of red flags along the edge of the abyss towards which our present inertia is propelling us. He generalizes while his less daring brethren warn us to beware of his idiosyncratic exaggerations. But to demolish his theories because of inaccurate minutiae is to cut off the nose to spite the face.
*
I feel certain that history will record the failure of capitalism in America and attribute this failure to a plain and simple fact embedded deeply in the character of far too many of us, namely, greed. This is the seed with which man destroys not only himself but with the multiple effect of his contagion drags the entire structure of his society down with him to an inextricable doom. A society which thrives on greed is living off the top of its head. Its values are valueless, its truths delusions, and its most stupendous efforts no more ennobling than those of the intuitively mechanistic ant. Even the materiality which stands as a golden calf before the bent knees of piety will rapidly disintegrate until the gold begins to peel and shows itself to have been only a fake tint veneering the supreme ugliness of the basest metal. But by this time the end will be too close at hand and habits so stratified that retribution and reform will be less possible than an invasion from another planet.
*
Lincoln’s birthday. Regardless of how loud the super-patriots shout, I have a feeling his name would hardly fit their definition as a paragon of the ideal American. In Bruce Catton’s A Stillness At Appomattox, I read of how he journeyed up to Fort Stevens near Silver Springs to watch the IV Corps thwart Jubal Early’s attempt to descend on Washington in the summer of 1864. The towering Lincoln with his stove pipe hat atop a parapet with bullets flying all around him despite the entreaties of commanding General Horatio Wright to take cover. A surgeon standing only a few feet away was in fact wounded. Even after the president finally descended to safety he kept popping his head over the parapet to catch a view of how things were going. This was the first and only battle he actually witnessed and his reaction in the face of fire was complete fearlessness. Although the battle was insignificant in terms of numbers, Early might have made it through the ill-manned defenses of the capital if he had made his thrust before the arrival from the south of Wright’s VI Corps veterans. Lincoln saw men wounded and killed with his own eyes. He no doubt was the last president to expose himself to an active battle front.