M. Allen Cunningham's Blog, page 25

Prime Passage: Posthumous Keats by Stanley Plumly

"If poetry -- Keats is saying -- is finally about the flesh vanishing, disappearing, turning cold -- the absorbing night, the setting sun, the broken stone -- it is also, in its afterlife, about the word as spirit, aspirant on the air, invisible, articulate, available. Keats's letters are the mind and heart out of which the poems -- the least as well as the best -- are realized. Lyric poetry, after Wordsworth and Coleridge, becomes a crucial drama of the serious, even conflicted, self. After ...

Prime Passage: The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft by George Gissing (1903)

From late in the section entitled "Autumn":

"Is there, at this moment, any boy of twenty, fairly educated, but without means, without help, with nothing but the glow in his brain and steadfast courage in his heart, who sits in a London garret, and writes for dear life? There must be, I suppose; yet all I have read and heard of late years about young writers, shows them in a very different aspect. No garretteers, these novelists and journalists awaiting their promotion. They eat -- and entertai...

Why It's Desirable to Be Eccentric

Back in 1859 the great English thinker John Stuart Mill published, in Chapter Three of his treatise On Liberty, one of history's most cogent apologias on the subject "Of Individuality as One of the Elements of Well-Being."

To Mill's view, mass opinion (what we might call "mass culture" these days), is an undeniable blight to individuality, and therefore directly threatens freedoms civic and intellectual, cultural, and democratic.

While explicitly political, Mill's argument reaches down...

Prime Passage: The Stones of Venice by John Ruskin (1853)

From Volume 2 of Ruskin's great work.

"[...:] No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of the misunderstanding of the ends of art. This is for two reasons, both based on everlasting laws. The first, that no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure: that is to say, his mind is always far in advance of his powers of execution, and the latter will now and then give way in trying to follow it; besides that, he will always giv...

Prime Passage: How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen

From the essay, "My Father's Brain" (2001)...

"The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies. I wonder if our current cultural susceptibility to the charms of materialism -- our increasing willingness to see psychology as chemical, identity as genetic, and behavior as the product of bygone exigencies of human evolution -- isn't intimately related to the postmodern resurgence of the oral and the ecl...

In Defense of Solitude

— "The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to ourselves." - Michel de Montaigne —

In his 1848 work Principles of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill observed:

It is not good for a man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his s pecies. A world from which solitude is extirpated is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character: and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is...

Prime Passage: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman (1985)

A quarter-century after its publication, Postman's classic litany of questions remains salutary as we confront an age of Social Media and the e-book.

"What is information? Or more precisely, what are information? What are its various forms? What conceptions of intelligence, wisdom, and learning does each form insist upon? What conceptions does each form neglect or mock? What are the main psychic effects of each form? What is the relation between information and reason? What is the...

Prime Passage: George Washington's Farewell Address (1796)

Seems to me that Washington's words are well worth weighing amid the current party-line fracas concerning Health Care reform.

"There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This within certain limits is probably true; and in governments of a monarchical cast, patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favor, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular...

Prime Passage: The Ghost Road by Pat Barker

(From a journal entry by the young Billy Prior, just before going into a hopeless battle in 1918 France ... )

"I realize there's another group of words that still mean something. Little words that trip through sentences unregarded: us, them, we, they, here, there. These are the words of power, and long after we're gone, they'll lie about in the language, like the unexploded grenades in these fields, and any one of them'll take your hand off."

Prime Passage: Libra by Don DeLillo

(Here "He" = Lee Harvey Oswald)

"He walked through empty downtown Dallas, empty Sunday in the heat and light. He felt the loneliness he always hated to admit to, a vaster isolation than Russia, stranger dreams, a dead white glare burning down. He wanted to carry himself with a clear sense of role, make a move one time that was not disappointed. He walked in the shadows of insurance towers and bank buildings. He thought the only end to isolation was to reach the point where he was no longer sep...