The Heart of the Humanities by Mark Edmundson

Author:Mark Edmundson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury

To Stay Sane

Everyone knows the line about how great wits are near to madness aligned. One might add that at times moderate and minor wits are, too. Hitchcock’s Norman Bates mutters once that everybody goes a little mad sometimes, and in this, if nothing else, Norman is probably not far from the truth.

Writing is not likely to cure a haunting depression or a truly torturing case of anxiety and as for the more serious psychological maladies—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and the like—writing will do no more for the suffering soul than persistent whistling would. But I think for many of us who want to retain sanity—keep our balance, stay in the game—writing is not a half-bad form of therapy. I’m not talking about writing at length about one’s sorrows and sufferings. I’m not thinking about writing as a mode of defining one’s inner maladies. But I do think the habit of writing can help many people in the quest to be reasonably balanced on an emotional or—why not say it?—a spiritual level. And sanity—what greater pleasure is there than that, especially when one contemplates the alternatives, or has experienced them.

Harold Bloom says that the major trope used by American writers is the trope of surprise. They did not specialize in irony or metaphor, but in the surprising of others and themselves with what came forth on the page. It’s not hard to imagine Walt Whitman waking in the morning after an evening’s bout with the poem that would become Song of Myself (in its first manifestation it had no title). Reading over his efforts from the night and day before, Whitman couldn’t but sigh and laugh a Broadway laugh and say something like: “I did that. I Walt Whitman wrote those words!”

For Whitman’s arrival as a poet was to say the least surprising. He had no formal education; he knew no literary people; he had failed in almost everything he’d tried to do. (He’d flunked as a schoolmaster purportedly because he failed to beat the boys.) At the ages of thirty-one and thirty-two he had a heroically bad temperance novel to his credit (it was called Franklin Evans), a stint as editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, and some skill as a printer. He was working as a carpenter. No one expected much of anything—though on some level he surely did himself. When he began to write the entries in his notebook that would eventually become Leaves of Grass, he was framing two-room houses in Brooklyn.

What he wrote in that journal could only have surprised him. It still surprises most anyone who reads it now. In one entry that (probably for the better) doesn’t make its way directly into the poem, Whitman imagined himself sauntering down the streets of heaven. Whitman never rushed, never trotted. He was always taking it slow, looking at what was around him, a saunterer extraordinaire. On the streets of heaven, Whitman sees Jahweh, Lord God of Hosts, deity of Abraham and Moses coming his way. Whitman is suddenly struck with a major perplexity.

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