In golden days, I used to read a little blue book of Matthew Arnold essays that my mom used in college. I sadly no longer have that little pocket book and should probably re-read its contents, but the essay titled Culture and Anarchy is what I’m thinking of as I type today. I haven’t thought about it in years.
Its most celebrated idea, “Sweetness and light” is a phrase that’s lost its cultural power. But for Arnold, the phrase as a powerful antidote to contemporary over-utilitarian, staid practices and thinking. For him, “sweetness is beauty, and light is intelligence” and is part and parcel of his counsel to pursue and implement “the best that has been thought and said.” A kind of thing we might call a “canon” of knowledge to be consulted in time of need or just as a part of wholesome daily life.
Arnold uses the past tense, “the best that has been thought and said,” but I don’t see his advice as stodgy or antiquarian: he had his eye on reform and truth. Besides, once something is thought AND communicated, it’s done and technically in the past, even if it’s a brand new utterance. I held this ideal as I read my way through my 20s and 30s, confident in my reading choices, and confident that the past held many answers for today. The sheer weight of all that’s gone before us surely has generated just about everything we need to consider as we move forward, so I thought and still mostly do—we were and remain humans. And with solutions to problems and ideas being generated all the time, there’s always a fresh “recent past” to comb through.
For society in general, though, is such a canon a blind tyranny, a crude “survival of the fittest”? There’s something to be said for a society being held closer-knit through a common fund of knowledge, though it would need to quite varied to keep all perspectives and experiences in view. But there’s little need to worry, we never did have a common canon and never will. And the world seemingly only grows more multifarious, with more people, more cultures, and more avenues of communication to reckon with. On the other hand, we are also becoming more homogenized by all of this global communication and product-buying; we don’t want to become trapped in those limits. Still, ideas do eventually come to fruition and the best problem-solvers seek far and wide, and dig deep within, for the best of them.
Do I still believe in a personal canon, a group of best and brightest? (A more “Herodotean/Whiteheadean” attitude might say that “the best” is ever-changing even for an individual person, proceeding with time and place and context and company and more figuring into it.) I thought about compiling my canon of sound wisdom and beautiful strains of poetry and prose into a book, but it would be a never-ending compilation, for certain.
I’m still confident in my reading choices, although I have a nagging feeling I’m often putting off the better things to read while sweeping up bits and pieces and leftovers, just so I have them settled before moving forward. That’s something I need to fix.
And there’s my ephemerality on this planet to consider. Is there ever a time to sit back and be refreshed by the best you’ve encountered, to abandon the spirit of outward exploration? I could endlessly revisit my favorite authors or times in history or places on this planet; I could endlessly mine the various Impressionists, for example, finding variations on the theme the more I explore, but still remain inward in that era. Or I could branch into something else that’s always caught my eye, just not as strongly—Hindu or Sumerian art, for example.
Some say highest wisdom is in focusing on a particular—a Napoleonic history enthusiast once said he focused on the era and all its goings-on to feel like he really understood it. Others might see a broad mind always exploring and digging and dancing around as the wiser. The answer for me, a fundamentally non-specialist person, remains a little of both—I will continue to spread out where my mind or necessity beckons, and also sometimes revisit old favorites, either to recapture an old, wonderful experience or in hopes of finding something even better than I did before. I haven’t felt the urge to read Matthew Arnold in decades, but maybe I’ll give him a look soon, acknowledging how his ideas are part of me, and maybe to find something new to grow on.
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