Verwante Spinoza-zielen
De eventuele regelmatige bezoeker van dit weblog, zal bemerkt hebben, dat ik mij intensief bezighoud met Spinoza niet alleen, maar ook regelmatig op internet speur naar mogelijke interessante ontdekkingen.
Vandaag kwam ik tegen 'A blog about the intersection of books and life', van iemand, ene Patrick Kurp, die behoorlijk met boeken bezig is en daar ook goed over schrijft. Én die een fan van Spinoza is.
Een deel van zijn stukje van 15 maart 2008 neem ik hier over om het een eventuele 'verwante ziel' aan te bieden, maar ook om het hier voor mezelf te bewaren. Jaloersmakend om zó over je leeservaringen te kunnen schrijven. Denkend aan Spinoza laat ik die jaloezie zich overigens niet echt doorzetten...
`Soul and Mind'
[…]
I also remember reading Guy Davenport’s essay “On Reading” as it first appeared in the Fall 1987 issue of Antaeus. My oldest son was born that August, and that may have contributed to my heightened receptiveness to bliss. The journal had arrived in the mail and, for some reason, I was eating dinner alone in a Japanese restaurant housed in an A-frame structure resembling a ski lodge, just north of Albany, N.Y. Reading a favorite writer on reading is already pleasure doubled, but my pleasure unexpectedly quadrupled on Sunday when I reread the essay, collected in Davenport’s The Hunter Gracchus.
In the pertinent passage, Davenport recalls how he first became aware of style in writing while reading Hendrik Van Loon’s “whimsical history of the world” (presumably The Story of Mankind), which led him to Van Loon’s biography of Rembrandt, in which he first encountered the name of Baruch de Spinoza. That reference, in turn, sent him to Will Durant, who finally sent him directly to Spinoza’s work. Davenport picks it up at that point:
“…and all fellow readers who have ever taken a book along to a humble restaurant will understand my saying that life has few enjoyments as stoical and pure as reading Spinoza’s Ethics, evening after evening, in a strange city – St. Louis, before I made friends there. The restaurant was Greek, cozy, comfortable, and for the neighborhood. The food was cheap, tasty, and filling.
“Over white beans with chopped onions, veal cutlet with a savory dressing, and eventually a fruit cobbler and coffee, I read the De Ethica in its Everyman edition, Draftech pen at the ready to underline passages I might want to refind easily later. Soul and mind were being fed together. I have not eaten alone in a restaurant in many years, but I see others doing it and envy them.”
That’s the quadrupling I mentioned: Rereading an essay by a favorite writer writing about reading a favorite book (his, mine) for the first time in a restaurant, that I first read in another restaurant. That’s convoluted but the pleasure is simple and intense.
I have a dim recollection of first reading Spinoza on West 25th Street in Cleveland, seated on a CTS bus, but no golden glow is attached to it. Like Guy, I seldom eat alone in restaurants anymore, but restaurants are the setting for several bookish memories:
Reading Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones for the first time in a Greek restaurant in a Bowling Green, Ohio, strip mall; Raymond Sokolov’s life of A.J. Liebling in a Rax roast-beef-sandwich joint in Richmond, Ind.; and Jack Fruchtman’s life of Thomas Paine in an Indian restaurant in Schenectady, N.Y.
Interesting that Guy writes “Soul and mind were being fed together,” not “body and soul.”
Nu ik dan toch bezig ben neem ik ook de volgende mee van
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
`A Witch's Ride'
At age 14, the first fiction writer I consciously imitated was Bernard Malamud. I had just read The Fixer (1966) and brazenly named one of my protagonists Yakov Bok after the novel’s title character. A friend who read my story after reading Malamud’s bestselling novel made fun of the pointless plagiarism. There was plenty more to make fun of. I was a goyische teenager in mid-sixties suburban Cleveland writing stories set in a 19th-century Russian shtetl. The memory is embarrassing but I have no regrets. It was through either The Fixer or Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “The Spinoza of Market Street,” which I first read around the same time, that I first learned of Baruch de Spinoza. Bok’s reading of The Ethics contributes to his moral evolution, his movement from passivity to action. Asked if he read Spinoza because the philosopher was a Jew, Bok answers:
“No, your honor. I didn't know who or what he was when I first came across the book -- they don’t exactly love him in the synagogue, if you've read the story of his life. I found it in a junkyard in a nearby town, paid a kopek, and left cursing myself for wasting money hard to come by. Later I read through a few pages and kept on going as though there were a whirlwind at my back. As I say, I didn't understand every word but when you're dealing with such ideas you feel as though you were taking a witch's ride. After that I wasn't the same man. That's in a manner of speaking, of course, because I've changed little since my youth.”
Bok starts out isolated but reminds himself Spinoza “was out to make a free man out of himself…by thinking things through and connecting everything up.” Today, I prefer The Assistant (1957) and Malamud’s stories to The Fixer, but I thought about it when I read a poem by Willis Barnstone, “Spinoza in the Dutch Ghetto,” in his collection Life Watch:
“Smoking his pipe he takes a beer with friends
at a close eating place, or back at home
and shop he grinds the glass to make his end
meet needs. Lean life. Then drops down to a dome
of Latin thought and pen. Why ask for more?
He trades his work with Leibnitz who is keen
as calculus to open every door
and wheel him into Germany to teach
and make him known. The lens grinder has seen
that greater world only in spheres that reach
the end of mind, and all mind plus all sphere
is God for him, a take that by itself
could set his life on fire. Baruch is not
a scrapper but all peace, all sky, no fear.
A Spanish Jew safe on his Lowlands shelf,
a bird on the North Sea, floating in thought.”
Spinoza too often is portrayed as bodiless, abstracted into pure mind, so I like the idea of him smoking a pipe and drinking beer with friends. I take “make his end” to be a play on words, for the glass dust from lens-grinding probably contributed to his death at age 44. In his note to “Spinoza in the Dutch Ghetto,” Barstone writes:
“Though close to mathematical Descartes whom he translated, he does not split mind and body which for him are distinct qualities of a single substance he calls God or nature. God is nature in its fullness, suggesting, perhaps by coincidence, the gnostic pleroma (fullness) that represents the gnostic deity.”
Books, like the Internet, are a limitless landscape of links. To add two more to the chain, here are sonnets about Spinoza written by Jorge Luis Borges and translated by Barnstone. First,
“Baruch Spinoza”:
“A haze of gold, the Occident lights up
The window. Now, the assiduous manuscript
Is waiting, weighed down with the infinite.
Someone is building God in a dark cup.
A man engenders God. He is a Jew.
With saddened eyes and lemon-colored skin;
Time carries him the way a leaf, dropped in
A river, is borne off by waters to
Its end. No matter. The magician moved
Carves out his God with fine geometry;
From his disease, from nothing, he's begun
To construct God, using the word. No one
Is granted such prodigious love as he:
The love that has no hope of being loved.”
And “Spinoza”:
“Here in the twilight the translucent hands
Of the Jew polishing the crystal glass.
The dying afternoon is cold with bands
Of fear. Each day the afternoons all pass
The same. The hands and space of hyacinth
Paling in the confines of the ghetto walls
Barely exists for the quiet man who stalls
There, dreaming up a brilliant labyrinth.
Fame doesn’t trouble him (that reflection of
Dreams in the dream of another mirror), nor love,
The timid love women. Gone the bars,
He’s free, from metaphor and myth, to sit
Polishing a stubborn lens: the infinite
Map of the One who now is all His Stars.”
[hier de hele verzameling blogs waarin Spinoza voorkomt]
Ik was al een tijd van plan om over Borges en zijn Spinoza-gedichten te schrijven. Dat hoop ik nog eens te doen, maar heb er langs deze weg via Engelse vertalingen dan toch alvast enige aandacht aan gegeven.
