Tag: willa cather

Everything, Always at Our Fingertips

You know by now that I am somewhat of a Luddite and often rail against the effect that technology has had on our lives and our minds.  But, of course, there are many ways that technology has enriched our lives.  I was thinking recently about Willa Cather and Benjamin Franklin in this regard.

Willa Cather loved music.  In her fiction and in her letters, she recalls a time when music was hard to come by.  Surely there were local musical groups and piano players, but without the technology of records or tapes, symphony music was not available on the prairie, and when a touring symphony orchestra deigned to play in a place like Lincoln, Nebraska – well, people went and wept.  In 1917, Cather wrote this in a letter to a friend:

I never heard any music at all until I was sixteen, that means really none, and when I was seventeen I heard an orchestra and a symphony for the first time; —Theodore Thomas and the New World Symphony in Lincoln, Nebraska. He happens to mention that day and that performance in his published letters to his wife. It was a great day for me. (Letter to Katherine Foote Raffy, 1/17/1917)

There is a similar scene in Song of the Lark, and this touching scene in a story about a woman coming to the big city from the prairie and being taken by her nephew to hear a Wagner concert for the first time:

My aunt wept quietly, but almost continuously, as a shallow vessel overflows in a rainstorm…. The deluge of sound poured on and on; I never knew what she found in the shining current of it; I never knew how far it bore her, or past what happy islands. (“A Wagner Matinée”)

I think also of more recent times – as in 1957 when Glenn Gould played his first Bach concert in Russia.  The hall was sparse for the first half, and then after intermission – and many hurried phone calls by the listeners – the hall was overflowing.  No Gould recordings were available in Moscow, and every subsequent performance was SRO.  And now, anytime and anywhere, I can put in my earbuds and listen to any music as interpreted by any musician.  I can flood my home with the noise of a symphony or hear Glenn Gould muse over Bach while I read my e-mails.  I take this for granted – we all do.  And, unfortunately, it also makes the music less exciting.  It shouldn’t.

Part of the reason Ben Franklin became a printer was because it gave him proximity to books.  Even as a child, he grabbed whatever books came his way in the days before free libraries or cheap editions:

From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books…. My father’s little library consisted chiefly of books in polemic divinity, most of which I read, and have since often regretted that, at a time when I had such a thirst for knowledge, more proper books had not fallen in my way since it was now resolved I should not be a clergyman. (Autobiography)

Later, he became part of a club in Philadelphia that shared their books, and Franklin soon expanded that into what is often credited as this country’s first lending library:

Those who loved reading were obliged to send for their books from England; the members of the Junto had each a few. We had left the ale-house, where we first met, and hired a room to hold our club in. I proposed that we should all of us bring our books to that room, where they would not only be ready to consult in our conferences, but become a common benefit, each of us being at liberty to borrow such as he wished to read at home. This was accordingly done, and for some time contented us.  Finding the advantage of this little collection, I proposed to render the benefit from books more common by commencing a public subscription library. (Autobiography)

Books were rare and precious commodities in earlier times.  Now we have immediate access to millions of books, and many of the classics of fiction and philosophy are available for free.  There are free libraries in most towns and those libraries often have inter-library loan privileges within the state – they also often have sites where digital books can be downloaded.  There may be a waitlist for current bestsellers, but for the really good stuff, there is no wait. (This truism could stand in almost all circumstances, I think!)  We are indeed fortunate.

On top of all this, we can hear the best of lectures and podcasts any time – and look at art from almost any of the world’s collections. But do we appreciate it?  Does the ubiquity of music and art and culture demean its worth?  If so, it is our own fault.  That wonderful book is not less wonderful because you can pull it up on your Kindle within seconds, and Bach and Gould should not be diminished because I can listen to them while doing the dishes.

In a way, this is a metaphor for all of life.  Miracles surround us every day, but we are used to them.  Nature creates far more splendid miracles than technology, but we are also jaded to that.  We are like spoiled children, who have too much to appreciate anything.  But we can change.  We can listen to the music, read the book carefully, be appreciative for the good things that technology makes available to us – and perhaps that will help us discard the parts of the digital world that compromise that appreciation.  If we old people – who remember what life was like before downloadable music, books, and movies – can’t appreciate the treasures that are there for us, surely there is no hope in this regard for the younger generations.

I’m as capable as the next old person of looking back fondly at the good old days, but I am also a person who suffered through the measles and mumps before vaccines.  One of my New Year’s resolutions is to foster an appreciation of what is good in these troublesome times, to nurture the sense of awe that Nebraskans felt when they heard their first symphony concert, but also to choose more mindfully from the digital cornucopia.

I have posted often about resolutions and the New Year – New Year’s Resolutions in Old Age, Baby New Year and Old Father Time, and New Year’s Re-Solutions.   On the subject of appreciating the world we’re living in, I would also recommend an article by Charles Mann, “We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It.”

Last Novels – Hesse’s Glass Bead Game

I will go back to last poems at some point, but let’s talk about a few “last” novels over the next few weeks.  There is even a list out there of “best” last novels.  Many of the novels I will talk about here are on the list, but there are also some omissions (Mann’s Dr. Faustus for one).

First, let’s admit that a writer’s last work is not always their best.  One might think of Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl, which is surely not up to her standard.  But great authors who have lived to old age have had a long time to hone their craft and to think about what they want to say.  And that can make for very interesting reading.

I have been re-reading Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game,  and – as many times as I have read it – it always and inspires.  Glass Bead Game was Hesse’s last book and probably his best.  It earned him a Nobel Prize and the acclaim of his peers.   Last novels have various forms, but many are “lives” of fictional characters which allow the older writer to survey the whole of life.  Hesse follows the life of his main character, Joseph Knecht, through childhood to his ascendency to Master of the Glass Bead Game and on to the end of his life. 

Hesse was writing in Switzerland in the late thirties and early forties; he seems barely aware of radio and other media.  The novel takes place in the 23rd century, in a world that collapsed in the twenty-first century after an era of continuous warfare and cultural breakdown.  Even though Hesse did not envision anything like computers and the internet, he blames the collapse on a shallow culture of distraction and a culture of “untrammeled individualism.”  More freedom “than they could stand” led to the Age of Feuilleton – the latter word meaning the section of a European newspaper devoted to light entertainment – stories about celebrities, “a major source of mental pabulum for the reader.” Sound familiar?  The newspapers also provided games for distraction.  “These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems….”   Freedom was the watchword, but loss of religion led to a   “passionate search for a means to confer legitimacy on this freedom.”   We want to do what we want, but we want to be sure we are doing the right and approved thing.  A paradox to be sure.  Civilization was saved by an elite group of scholars who formed a sort of monastic/academic order from which they rescued the educational system and reworked the culture to give it a sense of discipline and purpose.  Hesse’s main character rises in this fascinating structure, but, in the end, realizes its limitations.

One of the things that is intriguing about the education of the elite in Castalia, Hesse’s world of learned renunciates, is students and teachers are encouraged to write a certain kind of life review periodically – however, they are encouraged to set the review of their life in another historical period.  Hesse has appended three of these life reviews – purported to have been written by his protagonist – at the end of The Glass Bead Game,  and any or all of them are worth your time if you do not want to tackle the whole novel.  I haven’t exactly tried this kind of life review yet, but it would make for an interesting exercise for those of us who think things out through the written word.

And on the topic of writing, there is this description of the kind of writing that the older Joseph Knecht tells a younger character he is going to undertake once he escapes from Castalia and his duties as Master of the Glass Bead Game.  He describes such work as a “booklet, a little thing for friends and those who share my views”:

…the subject would not matter.  It would only be a pretext for me to seclude myself and enjoy the happiness of having a great deal of leisure.  The tone would be what mattered to me, a proper mean between the solemn and the intimate, earnestness and jest, a tone not of instruction, but of friendly communication and discourse on various things I think I have learned… I imagine, I might very well experience the joys of authorship, of the sort I foresee: an easygoing, but careful examination of things not just for my solitary pleasure, but always with a few good friends and readers in mind.  

This description from a fictional retiree (of sorts) aligns pretty well with the reasons I write this blog.  My blog is always offered as a kind of “friendly communication and discourse.”  And it is also a “pretext for seclusion” – not that we need any pretexts these days!

I will look at some other last novels over the next few weeks.  Please feel free to let me know what your favorites are.  If you are interested in Hermann Hesse (who had much to say about old age), you might refer to my earlier blog posts: Becoming and De-Becoming and Yes and Hesse and Old Age.