For the last few mornings I'd been breakfasting and lunching with Francis Bacon so this was a change, some might say welcome but I quite enjoyed Bacon's essays. His brother Anthony intends to pay me a visit soon in the company of Daphne du Maurier. Yes, a most unusual pairing, but I've been told they are worth entertaining. Before them, however, comes Woolf, her singular person i.e. without Leonard, on a repeat visit, bringing her essay voice and not the fictional. I imagine she'll be amusing but rather teacherly i.e. at times stern. (I like, if you haven't already guessed, the i.e.)
But for the next week, at least, I'll be dining with, and out, on Horace, for I speak on what I'm reading to other bookish persons whether they are of like mind or not. I write, too, on what I'm struck by, for the people I speak to usually aren't. I see a significance perhaps where there isn't any or perhaps where they can't. Learning is not infectious, only the spirit of it is i.e. my immersion does not make people race out to read what I'm extolling about, but it might encourage them to read (if they don't already) the printed word.
I can be so awash with someone else's voice and style I begin to imitate them, not unknowingly but unwillingly and yet this compulsion to do so cannot be fought, it must be allowed to play itself out, just as the sun plays.
Bacon grabbed my pen (and Woolf always does), but Horace as of yet shows no signs of the same. He hasn't arrested me, not entirely, but I think the problem is my reading of him and not him i.e. it's me. How should a Roman poet like Horace be read? Perhaps not in one go as I've been doing, as if his works contained in two volumes were novels, but, you see, I've never been a dipper-in or a reader of more than one book at a time. I turn page after page in order i.e. as the page numbering dictates I should; whereas with Horace and his like i.e. the writers of satires, epistles, odes and epodes, and even short stories and essays, the better approach is, I think, to dip or to read one piece a day and no more. But the compulsion to read on always wins out, which perhaps means I grasp only the essence and not the substance i.e. I read and fast forget.
No; for those of us with a systematic mind the reading habits of a lifetime cannot be so easily dismissed, and nor can one's relationship with time, for I'm forever slipping backwards then only moving forwards by slow degrees. I'm not sure I will ever again reach the contemporary literary scene i.e. a novel set in present day. I seem to prefer writers that speak to me from the grave, who may not have in their own time been praised, or perhaps were and are still reaping criticism and approval in equal and unequal measure. (Horace argued with me on this very point one misty morning. And he's not the only dead but unforgotten satirist that took the opposite view i.e. readers should look to the new.)
I cannot help it; I have no interest in the recent, only in what has gone before. Where Horace on occasion catches the glitter of a lovely word, I see whole pages filled with them, in a tongue that is not alien (though occasionally translated) but aged. Why should modern writers, because they are new, have all the glory? 'Why should the old?' Horace replied, forgetful that he was now in that very position i.e. still consulted and enjoyed far beyond his closed box.
However I take his point: there is indeed room for both, the old and the new; neither should be resented or revered. People should be able to read what they like, each to their taste i.e. without judgement or recrimination.
As for myself, I crave a different wit and a different wisdom, and a different take on the complexities of life altogether, which only certain poets and writers – the made-modern, the revised, the re-printed, the translated and the antiquated - can administer to i.e. if they are unable to the failing is mine and not theirs.
Picture credit: Horace, the Roman Poet (Source: The Guardian).
Written September 2020.
