Reading Pullman in New York

Exile and creativity? The books on Ramsey’s shelf—Henry giving every movie considered great five stars. The Uruguayans in New York, the neighborhoods around Washington Sq. Languages—how many kinds of Chinese? Saying something in class, even as the teacher, in another language, there’s such anxiety and shame. But the allure of knowing, and the comfort and curiosity of not yet understanding—the men Sally Lockhart admires, and Harriet stilled by the bearded Katz, and the underlying conviction and passions of the author showing through. Some combination of impotence and compelling through the words on a page. Reading the mysteries as a commentary on the energies of art—where the handscrawled note begins things, and the penny dreadfuls, plays, letters move them forward, and the cold or inhuman sorts of greed or pomposity try to slow them down—the interplay of historical and scientific accuracy and invention, self-conscious dramatics and seeking states in which thinking and truth can emerge clear—the wizard’s visions, the spiritualist’s trance, the opium smoke—the villains’ say, even quoting the poet Blake, as the wizard indicates Keats. What is left unsaid, not shown, in the climactic points, the fire in the courtyard the night they made love in the bedroom, and disposing of those villains, or what might have created them. Keeping the books short and fast, sparing the fullest conceits, nor endorsing the novelist’s prerogative to digress, philosophize, or decorate too much—restraint, in the service of the better, livelier delights of storytelling. We can do the reflecting ourselves, later, and try to say it, or not do it, or leave it unsaid—still the essential thing, the story, is there. The creative work we couldn’t do convincingly without all the inspirations behind it, the knowledge and personality and efforts of the real author—and in exchange or which, perhaps, he can never enjoy the result quite the way we enjoy it, coming to it from somewhere else, and with different biases and knowledge of our own going to work on it again. Not the same excitement of a story, but a kind of mystery in it, still, when it is well done. Something more, an arch wherethrough gleams…But having to admit, as Patrick goes back to, the impossibility of generalizing the appreciation of these kinds of things, holding onto all the while that deeper more natural intelligence and character given by more active experience—but this, the reading, is what can be taught. The other you can’t do much about, short of Rousseau’s manner of getting at it. And the reading is finally just a way of bringing to bear some reflection upon it. Maybe some people don’t need it—that’s fine, it’s no good forcing it on them—but society as a whole, for the sake of keeping together and not abandoning its culture, surely does need some people who are concerned with asking questions. So that slavery does not persist, and the grosser inequalities, in the societies where this questioning has gone furthest, in the west. Though at what cost to the people we considered other? That seems to stem from that old blindness James catches sight of.