Week 2: Of Pointing
Daily Themes is an interactive course in reading and writing, based on the teaching materials of the late poet and critic John Hollander
Dear Subscribers,
Thank you to all who read and took part in last week's exercises! Today, we carry on with Week 2 of Daily Themes: ‘Of Pointing’. In this post, you’ll find:
A series of exercises based on Francis Bacon’s short essay ‘Of Suspicion’
That essay along with a series of other, similar examples
The exercises were designed for Yale undergraduates to carry out over a series of five days, intermittently sharing their work in seminars. We have adapted them slightly to suit this format and we encourage you to try as few or as many as you like, whenever you can make the time.
If you enjoy the exercises, please send us your results! You could send your entire week’s work or just one paragraph that you are especially happy with. If you send them before Friday 22nd September, we can include some examples in next week’s post. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to use the comment section at the bottom of this post. A longer list of examples can be found on our website.
We hope you enjoy these exercises and excerpts and look forward to reading your work!
Exercises
1. Read ‘Of Suspicion’ (Number 1 in ‘Exercises’).
2. Write ‘Of _____________’. Your essay should be about the same length as the Bacon essay. For its subject, choose one of the following:
Departures
Ice
Facades
Red (or Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, or Violet)
Interruptions
Bicycles
Hats
Secrets
Noise
Beginnings
3. Read what you wrote yesterday as if it had been written by some author unknown to you; treat of its strategies in circumscribing the subject, in the ways it opens and concludes, and in what it leaves out.
4. Write either:
(a) Your own discussion of ‘Of Suspicion’
or
(b) ‘Of__________,’ treating of anything you wish, but trying to imitate as closely as possible Bacon's style. Don't use archaisms unless you know them thoroughly, but try to get at his syntax, his overall rhythms, his elegant concentration.
5. Write ‘Of Mondays’.
Examples:
‘Of Suspicion’, Francis Bacon
Suspicions amongst thoughts are like bats amongst birds, they ever fly by twilight. Certainly, they are to be repressed, or at the least, well guarded: For they cloud the mind; they leese friends, and they check with business, whereby business cannot go on, currently, and constantly. They dispose kings to tyranny, husbands to jealousy, wise men to irresolution and melancholy. They are defects, not in the heart, but in the brain; For they take place in the stoutest natures: As in the example of Henry the Seventh of England: there was not a more suspicious man, nor a more stout. And in such a composition, they do small hurt. For commonly they are not admitted, but with examination, whether they be likely or no. But in fearful natures they gain ground too fast. There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little: And therefore Men should remedy suspicion, by procuring to know more, and not to keep their suspicions in smother. What would men have? Do they think, those they employ and deal with, are saints? Do they not think, they will have their own ends, and be truer to themselves, than to them? Therefore, there is no better way to moderate suspicions, than to account upon such suspicions as true, and yet to bridle them, as false. For so far, a man ought to make use of suspicions, as to provide, as if that should be true, that he suspects, yet it may do him no hurt. Suspicions, that the mind, of itself, gathers, are but buzzes; But suspicions, that are artificially nourished, and put into men's heads, by the tales, and whisperings of others, have stings. Certainly, the best mean, to clear the way, in this same wood of suspicions, is frankly to communicate them, with the party, that he suspects: For thereby, he shall be sure, to know more of the truth of them, than he did before; Arid withall, shall make that party, more circumspect, not to give further cause of suspicion. But this would not be done to men of base natures: For they, if they find themselves once suspected, will never be true. The Italian says: Sospetto licentia fede: As if suspicion did give a passport to faith: But it ought rather to kindle it, to discharge itself.
leese: lose check: interfere currently: smoothly
account upon: consider mean: means would: should
2.
Masks are arrested expressions and admirable echoes of feeling, at once faithful, discreet, and superlative. Living things in contact with the air must acquire a cuticle, and it is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts; yet some philosophers seem to be angry with images for not being things, and with words for not being feelings. Words and images are like shells, not less integral parts of nature than are the substances they cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation. I would not say that substance exists for the sake of appearance, or faces for the sake of masks, or the passions for the sake of poetry and virtue. Nothing arises in nature for the sake of anything else; all these phases and products are involved equally in the round of existence, and it would be sheer willfulness to praise the germinal phase on the ground that it is dead and sterile. We might as justly despise the seed for being merely instrumental, and glorify the full-blown flower, or the conventions of art, as the highest achievement and fruition. of life. Substance is fluid, and, since it cannot exist without some form, is always ready to exchange some form for another; but sometimes. it falls into a settled rhythm or recognizable vortex, which we call a nature, and which sustains an interesting form for a season. These sustained forms are enshrined in memory and worshipped in moral philosophy, which often assigns to them a power to create and to reassert themselves which their precarious status is very far from justifying. But they are all in all to the mind: art and happiness lie in pouring and repouring the molten metal of existence through some such tenable mould. Masks are accordingly glorious things; we are instinctively as proud designing and wearing them as we are of inventing and using words.
(George Santayana, ‘The Tragic Mask’)
3.
For in general mortals have a great power of being astonished at the presence of an effect towards which they have done everything, and at the absence of an effect towards which they have done nothing but desire it. Parents are astonished at the ignorance of their sons, though they have used the most time-honoured and expensive means of securing it; husbands and wives are mutually astonished at the loss of affection which they have taken no pains to keep; and all of us in turn are apt to be astonished that our neighbors do not admire us. In this way it happens that the truth seems highly improbable. The truth is something different from the habitual lazy combinations begotten by our wishes.
(George Eliot, Daniel Deronda)
4.
Innocence so constantly finds itself in a false position that inwardly innocent people learn to be disingenuous. Finding no language in which to speak in their own terms, they resign themselves to being translated imperfectly. They exist alone – through anxiety, through desire: to impart and to feel warmth. The system of our affections is too corrupt for them. They are bound to blunder, then to be told they cheat. In love, the sweetness and violence they have to offer involves a thousand betrayals for the less innocent. Incurable strangers to the world, they never cease to exact a heroic happiness. Their singleness, their ruthlessness, their one continuous wish makes them bound to be cruel, and to suffer cruelty. The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet – when they do, their victims lie strewn all round.
(Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart)
5.
My first glance around me, as the man opened the door, disclosed a well-furnished breakfast-table, standing in the middle of a long room, with many windows in it. I looked from the table to the window farthest from me, and saw a lady standing at it, with her back turned toward me. The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays. She had not heard my entrance into the room; and I allowed myself the luxury of admiring her for a few moments, before I moved one of the chairs near me, as the least embarrassing means of attracting her attention. She turned toward me immediately. The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window – and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps – and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer – and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!
(Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White)
6.
One caution, first of all, we should take along with us, and it is this: that all those persons who hold the powers of government without having an identity of interests with the community, and all those persons who share in the profits which are made by the abuse of those powers, and all those persons whom the example and representations of the first two classes influence, will be sure to represent the community, or a part having an identity of interest with the community, as incapable in the highest degree of acting according to their own interest; it being clear that they who have not an identity of interest with the community ought to hold the power of government no longer, if those who have that identity of interest could be expected to act in any tolerable conformity with their interest.
(James Mill, ‘Essay on Government’)
7.
Generally speaking, the word culture is used in a sense which approaches the honorific. When we look at a people in the degree of abstraction which the idea of culture which applies, we cannot but be touched and impressed by what we see, we cannot help being awed by something mysterious at work, some creative power which seems to transcend any particular act or habit or quality that may be observed. To make a coherent life, to confront the terrors of the outer and inner world, to establish the ritual and art, the pieties and duties which make possible the life of the group and the individual--these are culture, and to contemplate these various enterprises which constitute a culture is invariably moving. And, indeed, without this sympathy and admiration a culture is a closed book for the student, for the scientific attitude requisite for the study of cultures is based on a very lively subjectivity. It is not merely that the student of culture must make a willing suspension of disbelief in the assumptions of cultures other than his own; he must go further and feel that the culture he has under examination is somehow justified, that it is as it should be.
(Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture)
8.
That it [Johnson's Dictionary of the English Languagel will immediately become popular I have not promised to myself: a few wild blunders, and risible absurdities, from which no work of such multiplicity was ever free, may for a time furnish folly with laughter, and harden ignorance in contempt; but useful diligence will at last prevail, and there never can be wanting some who distinguish desert: who will consider that no dictionary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some falling away; that a whole life cannot be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be sufficient; that he, whose design includes whatever language can express, must often speak of what he does not understand; that a writer will sometimes be hurried by eagerness to the end, and sometimes faint with weariness under a task, which Scaliger compares to the labours of the anvil and the mine; that what is obvious is not always known, and what is known is not always present; that sudden fits of inadvertency will surprize viligance, slight avocations will seduce attention, and casual eclipses of the mind will darken learning; and that the writer shall often in vain trace his memory at the moment of need, for that which yesterday he knew with intuitive readiness, and which will come uncalled into his thoughts tomorrow.
(Samuel Johnson, ‘Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language’)