~ Sainte-Beuve, "What is a Classic?"
Or there comes a time in life when, having reached so-called maturity, we feel anything but mature or stable; rather, we feel depleted, hungry yet listless, suffering from a desire that we are too weak and dislillusioned to pursue. I believe that in this state, literature and all its glories manifest a more sublime force than it does for comfortable old persons relaxed and easy, and for whom literature -- and art in general -- is merely a hobby. No one, I say, in relaxed circumstances can appreciate the anguish expressed, for example, by Sylvia Plath in her finest poems in the Ariel volume, nor for that matter Byron's Manfred. Despite statements by T.S. Eliot regarding the emotion produced by a work of art, and how that emotion must not merely be eisegetical but must arise naturally from a careful appreciation of the work [see the relevant essays in The Sacred Wood], it is my belief that it is part of the authentic human experience to seek out those works that best suit the mood of not only the moment, but of our time of life.
At forty I am too old to read Rimbaud, but not too old to read Coleridge, or Pound. For the latter men suffered, especially Pound, to an extent that I cannot imagine, though I approach some aspects of their experience: specifically a short jail term and an addiction to alcohol (not dissimilar to Coleridge's laudanum addiction; as for jail ... well, it came nowhere near Pound's experience). Indeed, I am writing this in a hospital bed, where I recently underwent a medical detoxification. It should be no surprise, then, that my reading has consisted of Plath and Pound, in what admittedly amounts to a somewhat fanciful, though not entirely un-existential, identification. I am not sitting here, intravenous tube in my arm, experiencing the "full joys of maturity." No. Instead, I am dreading the future while reminiscing wistfully about the past, which, for me, was glorious. Indeed, I can think of no better rebuttal to Sainte-Beuve (whose remarks, to me, seem quite modern -- or at least American -- in their naive optimism) than these famous opening lines of Wordsworth's Immortality Ode, especially: "But yet I know, where'er I go, / That there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth" (17-18).
When one draws close to art in the vilest and most desperate times of one's life, one will, I believe, be encouraged to identify with those artists -- especially the literary -- whose works cry out with the hoarse and desperate voice of anguish: a depletion of the soul, a kenosis that permits one to either be filled up again with something new and glorious, a palingenesis (to extend the biblical metaphor) or else to end life as a dessicated rind, something to be swept away and forgotten ...
