Mystical Dimension

The sun is finally warm. It's been a long winter and most of the poets are dead, but I've managed to cling on by my fingertips, piloting headlong through stormy seas my narrow skiff of books. That is, incidentally, the hidden bonus that reveals itself after a few years devoted exclusively to reading: it can get you through anything. Terrible things have transpired in my life over the past 12 months. Unsightly things. Treachery, atomic warfare. Skeletons knocking on my bedroom window at night and waving. Didn't make a dent. None of it could penetrate the adamantine wigwam of literary fascination I'd built myself from the English and French essays I'd stumbled upon and was looking into nightly. There seems also to have been some Sherwood Anderson, the American writer. Turn of the century guy. Power cell from which Hemingway drew, and Faulkner and the other major typewriter pugilists. I'm not used to anything like sublimity from an American production, so I wasn't expecting it when I peered into Anderson's Winesburg Ohio and was clocked by an uppercut and left for dead. Sheer sunlight in that book. Hold it at an angle and you'll see all of literary history waving. Shake it roughly and a different European genius will fall out. Here a young Dante, there a Homer at the top of his bent. It's what we do as Americans: we are the end of the Italian Renaissance, the end of that 600 year experiment in aesthetic teleology that sought to find what was foremost among the themes of human life. It began in hope, split a hundred ways over the centuries, and in the end recodified itself as a spectacular unity of those hundred ways, each gleaming and unique among the massive workings of hybridization. That's the American art, and it's complex, which is why it rarely works. Anderson makes it work, though. He knew that life seen rightly is so powerful that it need but be presented as it is to turn a reader to mulch.

Don't know how the books keep me well, but they do. It's like they know in their old lines what needs to be said in the current day, the current hour. They can do so because they've done that work, that math of hours, and have seen thereby that which underlies all hours; that to which all hours must necessarily return. Makes me believe that the mystic dimension those old Romantics were ever straining to find was closer than they thought.