Guide, Philosopher and Friend

Some years ago, a friend in graduate school was studying Alexander Pope. At my insistence, my friend sent me the manuscript of his dissertation. I meant well. My curiosity was genuine. But, had he been working on the Reimann Hypothesis, I could not have been any less prepared to intelligently read the manuscript my friend sent me. I had read little enough about Pope to be incapable of any but a stuttering kind of light conversation on the poet's biography. On the subject of his poetry, let alone his politics, my acquaintance with Pope's work was hardly sufficient to front further than the introduction of my friend's paper. I'd never read the poem with which the paper was primarily concerned, Pope's Essay on Man. I therefore hunted up a copy and tardily picked the poet up as much to avoid embarrassment as to try to understand what my friend was writing.

How many good books have I read to just such a purpose? I've known many friends whose interests and educations have incidentally broadened my own, if in a small way, as I've scrambled to keep up without making a complete ass of myself. I've found it to be no bad thing, chagrin, in the ongoing effort to ameliorate my own sorry education and dilettantish reading. In the process, I have also learned something of the limit of what can be accomplished in this way. Like many an autodidact, I've been unwilling to expose the full extent of my ignorance, convinced as I still am that everyone else has read and understood everything I haven't. (This hasn't actually proven to be true, by the way, but it still feels true in the company of certain of my friends, through no fault of their own, let me hasten to add. Like the fit man who remembers too well the obese child he once was (or so I've read,) I can not help feeling the least well-read person in any room with a degree on the wall.) Without at least an attempt at the books that prompted the enthusiasm of my friends, I feel I will have disappointed their best expectations of me. If, as a result, I can hardly be said to have ever mastered any subject of study among my wider intellectual acquaintance, I have at least shown, I think, a certain stupid, if admirable loyalty. I've been very fortunate in my friends, and have always felt, and feel, the least I might do for them is not to greet their professional interests with an absolutely blank stare. But then, most of my friends, if they've pursued higher education, have been considerate enough to not go into accounting. One friend who went on to become a psychologist, surprised me, come her graduate studies, by studying Heidegger. That friend unknowingly taught me a lesson in true humility. For the most part though, even if I ultimately had nothing valuable to contribute to their studies but my own blind enthusiasm and support, or even to the conversation with my friends but a dogged willingness to be led, if only among the English majors, I think the effort made me a more appreciative listener. I do so like the company of people smarter than myself, but they will read difficult and boring books, won't they?

Don't misunderstand me, I am only too happy to voice my own ill-considered opinions on a range of subjects of which I am utterly unqualified to have any opinion at all, I am after all still male and American, but while I am likely to make a face when someone references Marx, meaning Karl not Groucho, it is not for not having read a bit of both, though admittedly more of the latter, and with considerably greater edification. If I dislike Joyce, it isn't for want of having opened a book. If there hasn't been a bit of critical theory to come out of France in the past few decades that I couldn't have done just as well without, at least I gave Derrida, Lacan, et al., a go. So, if I may indeed not be the best read individual in any room, if I am even something of a Philistine by any objective standard, if, in short, I am still a bit of a prat, it isn't because I haven't sought out the company of better minds than my own. Serves them right, consorting with such an obviously ill-bred stray, if they find I snap now and then and piss on things mistakenly left at my level. For the most part, I'm surprisingly well behaved. Not docile, but friendly.

In the course of my cramming to read my friend's paper on Pope, I was amazed to read that, after, as I recall, Shakespeare and the authors of The King James Bible, there has been no other in our language more widely quoted, no poet since more picked from and plundered for what we've come to accept as commonplaces. I couldn't credit the idea. To me at the time, Pope was the funny little monkey in the turban, the author of a few days of agonizingly dull study of The Rape of the Lock in high school. Imagine my astonishment, on finally reading his Essay on Man, to find therein, not only the titles of so many English mystery novels, but great good sense, delightful writing, surprising optimism, and line after line of familiar and glorious poetry. If Pope is indeed among the most quoted poets, it is deservedly so. Reading him at last and at length was a revelation of the full, variable force of great poet.

I went on from the Essay to other poems, back eventually even to The Rape of the Lock, which I found much the better for being read alone, but for the aid of a biographer and and a copy of The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope. I even read his wonderful translation of Homer, never otherwise a favorite of mine.

So then, what of my friend's paper? I have it still, and a copy of the book he came eventually to write. I don't know that I will ever be able to make much of either. I am no better qualified to read such things, let alone to evaluate them critically, than I was before I took up Pope. But then, as my friend was too polite to point out at the time, I was never his intended reader. But had I not at least tried, I would never have read so much of Pope as I did. If my friend gained nothing else from sending his work to me, he at least has my gratitude for that. My apologies for the otherwise wasted effort. He is still my friend, he might have known. "Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed." He will understand. "A man should never be ashamed to own he has been wrong, which is but saying, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday." He gave me Pope, and that's been an education. "Form'd by thy converse, happily steer From grave to gay, from lively to severe." Pope understood hubris.

"A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again."

That's from An Essay on Criticism. I read that too, eventually.