Tag Archives: Proust

OF WONDERS WILD AND NEW

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(From poem at the beginning of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.)

I must have been in need of a role model when first I heard of Eve and her transgressions in the garden of Eden, because from the beginning I disagreed with the interpretation promulgated both by my Methodist school and my Jewish background. Feed off the tree of knowledge and suffer for all eternity? It made no sense. Without curiosity and its rewards, childhood, with its trials and expections, would be unbearable. God’s Eve might have been bad and disobedient, but my Eve was rebellious and dismissive of parental authority. She’d had no say in the Adam’s rib business, but her response to the snake revealed her to be curious and confident and courageous. Thereafter, she flaunted her independence and showed Adam who ought to be boss. 

‘And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened…’ (Genesis 3:6-7. King James Authorized Version).

Later, when I read Milton’s Paradise Lost, my admiration for Eve only increased. Milton is no 17th century feminist. His Satan locates authority, intelligence and valour in man, and ‘coy submission’, beauty and grace in woman. But how is this demonstrated? Eve acts, while Adam only responds. Eve defies authority, and does so with determination. Milton proves my case, not his – nor God’s for that matter.

As for curiosity, it is the greatest of the human passions – not that I was aware of this as a child. I embraced curiosity because it worked for me. The family is a crowded place; I shared a bedroom with my sister and the living room was communal space, but curiosity was private. It was fed and satisfied by books and thoughts, and it opened up endless possibilities located far away from suburban Melbourne. And that was the wonder of it: one question led to other questions, and you’d find yourself in imagined terrain that was fabulously interesting and sparking with risk. And given you didn’t need to leave home, you didn’t even need to leave your chair or the nook at the end of the garden, you were entirely safe – an important consideration for a child so anxious that even sleeping was a threat. Crucially, curiosity removed me from the daily terrors of being a child, and at the same time, it made solitude a most desirable state. I was rarely bored during the interminable years of childhood, nor was I decades later during the seemingly endless covid lockdowns. With curiosity powering the imagination and stirring the currents of memory, no one need ever be bored.

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There’s an epidemic of loneliness and boredom in societies like ours, yet it seems we’ve never been busier. Frenzied digital connection from unlimited Wordles to compulsive checking of social media to fevered on-line shopping and mesmerising doom scrolling distract from the boredom and loneliness while, at the same time, being a symptom of these, and probably further feeding them.

So much activity with so little to show for it, accompanied by a pervasive dissatisfaction that seems unappeasable. As for the smart-phone: sometimes it feels like the phone controls you and not the other way around, a bit like the oppressive partner you know you should leave but you can’t bring yourself to do it. The solution is not constant, mind-numbing activity, but active, ceaseless curiosity. This is not a quick google search for the name of a film, a song, a place, a date, that’s not curiosity, that’s just a quick-fix for frustration over a forgotten fact. Curiosity is the determined search for new understandings, a hunger for new experiences, new people and places; it’s invigorating and productive, it starts at one point and shoots off vectors in all directions. With curiosity in full flight, boredom and loneliness don’t get a look-in.             

An active curiosity is like the ardent traveller: implicit to both is the notion of search, of a journey into the unknown. You spend a day wandering in x direction, the next day you change course. You gather knowledge and understanding from both the forward movement and the wrong turns, and when you arrive back at the starting point, you are filled with new understandings and, as T.S. Eliot famously wrote, you return to where you began and know it for the first time. 

Most significantly, given the prominence accorded to the self in the digital age; curiosity turns you away from yourself towards the world, towards new places and other eras, and into the lives of people very different from you. Curiosity could make humanitarians of us all. 

Surrounded as we are in constant noise and an avalanche of information, this greatest of the passions, this resource for living has been left to moulder away in a dark corner of mind. It is hard to think of another resource that costs nothing and is available to all human beings. You can activate it while cooking, or changing the bed-sheets, or watching your child play footy; you can slip into it while travelling to work, delivering noodles, ploughing a field, while walking the dog. The major requirements of curiosity are time and privacy and solitude. Turn off the music, resist your favourite podcasts, don’t call your sister/mother/son/best friend. Put your phone in a drawer or put it on silent and go mental wandering – curiosity by another name.

Which leads me to Trump, as most musings do these days. Even though we know his power is hinged to having our attention, his being plastered across the news and social media, filling podcasts in umpteen different languages makes it is so difficult to ignore him, to turn him off. And besides, for many of us, there is a macabre fascination with this man who has colonised the hearts and minds of millions, who has turned the Republican Congress into a forelock-tugging bunch of lackeys, a man who, either deliberately or simply shuttered within his massive ego, is upending the world order. This man, so loved by his MAGA followers, is seen as a dangerous narcissist by his detractors, a man who disregards anything that does not enhance himself and his power. This is a man so satisfied with himself, not only does not demonstrate curiosity, he has no need for it. 

I don’t believe I’ve ever known Trump to ask a question – and not surprising in a man convinced of his own perfection, his own greatness, his rightness. He does not seek advice from his advisors (given the lack of appropriate skills and experience of most of them, this could be seen as an unexpected benefit), he seeks confirmation only for what he already thinks/wants/believes/needs, which is to say, himself, Donald J. Trump and the web of his selfhood. 

There’s nothing special about Trump’s narcissism; like any narcissism it is incompatible with curiosity about people and events and places beyond his personal domain. Indeed, if Trump’s minions fail to stroke his ego, they find themselves unemployed, and, in many cases, unemployable. This man, entrusted with the lives and fate of not just Americans, but much of the rest of the world, lacks the fundamental passion of what makes us human; this saviour of the working American, this nasty narcissist does not give a damn about his adoring followers, nor all those drooling republican congressman, and he certainly does not give a damn about the conflicts in the wider world (unless, of course, he can insert himself as the fixer-saviour). This narcissist, inoculated as he is against curiosity, is, simply, not interested.

The Slaughter of Language

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There are books/authors that mark a time of life. Of these, I would include Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandrian Quartet; D.H. Lawrence and Scott Fitzgerald; Tilly Olsen, Grace Paley, May Sinclair and a swag of other women writers who were published through The Women’s Press and Virago. The defining characteristic of books that exert a significant power at a particular time is that most of them cannot survive later readings. It is best – kinder – to leave them in their times.

Other books/authors traverse an entire lifetime. For me, these would include the novels of Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf (also Woolf’s letters and diaries), Proust, E.M. Forster, Maugham, Coleridge, Rilke. Life companions such as these are relevant no matter where you are on your life’s journeying. You read them over and over again. Each rereading is a new reading.

I first read George Steiner’s Language and Silencein 1971. It was a remarkable event. I was astonished and captivated by the ideas, dazzled by Steiner’s erudition, delighted and surprised by the richness of his language. And there was a sense of privilege too, that I, a twenty-year-old in Melbourne, Australia had access to something so extraordinary.

I have returned to Steiner many times through the years. I have read each book of his as it was published (Steiner is over 90 and is still working) and I have returned to several of them, but none so often as Language and Silence. Steiner is definitely one of my life’s companions, most especially through his Language and Silence.

I am a more critical reader these days than I was as a twenty-year-old, but still I find Language and Silence a compelling book; still I come away with the delight and appreciation and new understandings that have accompanied all my readings. This morning I reread the second essay in the collection, ‘The Retreat from the Word’. In this essay, from 1961, Steiner considers the dilution and shrinkage of language usage. He writes about modes of understanding other than linguistic, e.g. mathematical and musical, as well as the use of jargon. He is highly critical of the often quasi-scientific jargon in the humanities and social sciences. This jargon does not illuminate, rather it obscures. (Steiner’s essay was written before critical theory strangled the life out of the language, replacing it instead with deadly neologisms.)

Since the time of Shakespeare, common language usage has consistently shrunk. These days, all you need is a few hundred words to navigate the press, social media and everyday conversation. A few hundred more and you could probably get a PhD. We are like Moloch, killing off all that is most humanly precious.

In killing off the language, we also snuff out theorising and understanding and debate. The process has been accelerated with the doorstop interview and the 24-hour news cycle. It is impossible to get across a policy or a complex argument in 10 or 20 seconds; similarly, it is difficult to persuade people to shift from long-held attitudes and beliefs. Under present conditions, considered explanation and reasoned argument are jettisoned, and instead, our politicians and policy makers are resorting to emotional wrenching and obfuscation in the guise of euphemisms.*

Remember THE PACIFIC SOLUTION (nothing peaceful about it), and PEOPLE SMUGGLERS (at one stage mentioned ad nauseum, in contrast to desperate people seeking asylum who were hardly mentioned at all), and QUEUE JUMPERS and the MALAYSIAN SOLUTION. Now we have the absurd and almost incredible NEGATIVE GLOBALISATION (straight out of the Breitbart handbook), the tritely rhetorical HOW GOOD IS….?, and the just plain trite IF YOU HAVE A GO, YOU GET A GO. While the current Prime Minister on his recent suck-up trip to the US was an embarrassment, his use of language is simply shameful. It’s as if he, and others like him, actually want the population – us – to be ignorant and stupid. Yes, our leaders are dumbing us down.

Back in 2012, and posted on this website, I wrote an article titled THE LANGUAGE OF LYING, about the way in which language was being defiled and squeezed of life. It is only 7 years ago, but with the dominance of social media and the prominence of Twitter as a means of spreading news at the expense of the traditional news; with a man in the White House who talks in tweets, who lies without compunction, and who never defends himself against criticism but rather attacks instead, and with several similar types in other parts of the world mimicking the supreme commander, language is truly in terminal decline.

In Australia, anyone under twenty and most people under thirty have never known life outside the digital age. It is hard to suffer the loss of something you’ve never known or experienced. Privacy, contemplation, personal responsibility, mental arithmetic and memory (to mention just a few human qualities and skills) are fast going the way of telephone boxes and fish and chips wrapped in newspaper. And so too a language usage that is lithe, argumentative, subtle, persuasive, that feeds and expresses an active, hard-working intelligence.

How can we navigate our way through this complex, fast-paced world if we don’t have the language to perceive, to analyse, to understand what is going on? How can we change what needs to be changed if we cannot define it in the first place? How can we head into an uncertain future if our power to reason and understand, both vitally reliant on language, is crippled?

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*During the most recent election, Bill Shorten dropped his pre-fab zingers and decided instead to treat the electorate as capable and thoughtful. In the post-election analysis, however, it was decided that Shorten’s message was too complex, too over-whelming for the average Australian. (Is it like climate change? Have we passed the point of no return with our language usage and ability to consume ideas?)

I would argue against this analysis. Politicians need to work out other ways than the ten-second grab,\ to get ideas and policies across to the electorate. We need vision in our politicians, and we need skill. We need politicians who make us better citizens, and our country a better country, politicians who address the best in us, not our worst.