“This year Has been one painful Dream — I have done nothing!”

— An entry in the notebook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 19 October 1803.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those fortunate enough to have read Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris, and those who dwell in dark places. It is a book of the author’s responses to books and authors. But it is not simply another book about books. Literature is not an adjunctive commentary on life for Fadiman, but the genetic imprint of this curious condition of being human. When asked if she would help found Civilization (the Library of Congress journal) she agreed, amused and intrigued by the challenging title.

Ex Libris: Confessions
of a Common Reader
BY Anne Fadiman
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000)

At Large and At Small followed, relating writing to life also, but in a different way. Ex Libris had books in mind. This later volume is concerned with the complex relations between writers, their lives when writing, and when not writing. The stumbling block for Fadiman (and for most of us) is that “great literature can be written by bad people.”

She cites Ezra Pound’s fascism, and Byron’s incest. It may be argued that Pound’s nature disqualified him from political activity in an age of extreme conflict. An intemperate man of fixed opinions, he was a great, if bullying, editor of Eliot and Yeats. Pound could yeild his red pen without thought of the hurt a writer may feel about the discarded words. Human beings are not words on the page. As for Lord Byron, he wrote of dark, romantic deeds, then he lived them. It is well to remember the Prince of Darkness was a gentleman. Incestuous and licentious, Byron was rash even when he was heroic. It was brave to take up the cause of Greek independence from Turkish — and to die for it — but it was not kindly.

If reading and writing do not make us good, we may ask what do they do? It makes us human. The cave painters of Lascaux were not sentient animals. They were conscious of who they were. They inscribed that consciousness in a pictorial language we can read because we are conscious, too. Anyone who objects that images are not language should consider the look of letters. Picasso as a child had difficulty learning to read because he concentrated on the visual quality of letters. His enthusiasm admonishes for supposing written language is no more than a mechanism. To repeat: writing makes us human in the intuitive, sensory, conscious understanding we have of being human.

We like to think that every living thing is as conscious as we are. Consider all those children’s stories which have animals behaving as humans. (Children will learn that humans behave like animals, but that is not the purpose of Beatrix Potter. She, and others, are perhaps trying to understand the natural world in human terms. Or they are gaining distance by the use of metaphor.)

Fadiman writes of Androsthenes, a scribe in the service of Alexander the Great. Androsthenes, so we may assume, observed many things on the travels he undertook (as far, it seems, as any European had ever been). That was the reason for his employ — to note what he saw. We think of conquerors as rapacious (as many are). Some show a sensitivity to the cultures they seek to possess. They are in quest of knowledge as well as gold. Androsthenes is remembered for his observations of the tamarind flower in India. It was closed at night, and open by day. This, for us in our world of scientific reason, is an observation of the motion of a biological clock, something natural. It was natural, in a different sense of the word, for an ancient scribe to believe the tamarind flower behaved as it did in accord with a sentient impulse: it worshipped the Sun. It could feel as we feel, think as we think. There is poetry in that presumption: the tamarind becomes not only a flower, but a metaphor.

How do we explain a metaphor except by the metaphor itself, or by another of its kind? Consider this: “Were I to dream of paradise, and in that dream someone handed me a flower, and on waking that flower were in my hand, what then?” It is a quotation of unusual and haunting lyricism, attributed to Coleridge. Yet in every attribution I have found there is no precise reference, nor is there a definitive version. Attributed but unlocated, it passes through the lore of English Romanticism so insistently that if Coleridge’s pen never wrote those words, nor did his mind ever think them, they are nonetheless his words. It may be that he did utter them in conversation, only to forget them. There is a letter of Keats which recounts a summary of Coleridge’s casual and brilliant talk. On that evening he had an amanuensis — as he had at other times — but in many conversations the brilliance evaporated, proving frailer than the flower of paradise in the poet’s waking hand.

The fragility of the creative process in Coleridge’s experience is too familiar to need emphasis. Everyone knows how the inspiration of Kubla Khan vanished forever when someone called unexpectedly. For Coleridge dreams were as valid as waking life, and were possibly a higher reality. Poetry was the imprint, the imperfect copy of experience within the Imagination. Experience of the material world depended on what he termed “the science of mere understanding.” Poetry, the art of metaphor, transcends the limitations of reasoned enquiry. Like its enemies, it may call unexpectedly.

I may hold in my hand a tamarind flower. I live close to Byron’s Pool in Cambridge, and I frequently pass by Ezra Pound’s house (I look away) in Kensington. I have lived in Coleridge country. But how do I explain a metaphor? What was known in antiquity should not diminish with time. This is the more evident when we consider that time itself is a metaphor, that it stretches and retracts and turns. It is a measureless cavern where many musics play. A writer even today may see the poets and thinkers of previous ages pass by. And as they pass they speak.

Poetry, the art of metaphor, transcends the limitations of reasoned inquiry. Like its enemies, it may call unexpectedly.

For “almost” you may read “very likely.” Coleridge observed how the mind makes of nature what it likes. But nature “mocks the mind with its own metaphors.” The tamarind and the flower in paradise are equally real, and imagined. We know of them because they were inscribed on memory, on consciousness, by way of words acting on our imagination.

Picture the poet, born into an age of oil lamps and mail-coaches. He makes frequent appearances in Fadiman’s essays, for his is, as she writes, a restless mind. The brilliance is in the vagaries, digressions and spontaneous insights. When Dr. Johnson suggested that Boswell might visit China, Boswell objected that he could not neglect his children. Johnson retorted that any neglect they would feel should be submerged in the status gained by being the children of a father who had seen China. A romantic would have take up Johnson’s challenge. The journey was to be arduous. Restless minds may lack the necessary tenacity. A man who misses the last mail-coach walks for many miles.

So the voyage to China was undertaken. Coleridge said it had been a dream. His cottage in Somerset is remote even today, the more remote then. From the Quantock Hills the Bristol Channel and, beyond it, Wales are easily in view. But we have in mind the bamboo palace of Xangdu beyond the distance of a continent in one kingdom. That the Chinese saw China as the center of the world should be neither unfathomable nor ridiculous to us. This fabulous Elsewhere, whose history is hearsay, is rich in imaginative trajectories. We read its possibilities credulously.

Let us consider not any supposed center, but the world as a whole. One thing we can see of our planet is that it is round, though not a perfect sphere. That very lack of perfection may appeal to our human sensibility. One way of describing our species (“Well, he’s only human”) is its incompleteness, frailty and failure. We speak of truth in plain sight, even when the horizon is limited by the Earth’s curvature. We cannot see to China. And therefore we must use our imagination.

Another much-favoured person in Fadiman’s canon is Alfred Russell Wallace, the barely-remembered Victorian biologist who told a horrified Charles Darwin of his idea of evolution. Wallace is the Engels of Evolutionary Science. He deserves to be remembered. A memorable, though essentially trivial, contribution to science was Wallace’s experiments to demonstrate once and for all — not the biological ancestry of homo sapiens — but the roundness of the world, for this also was a matter of contention in his time. Wallace, who had travelled in fact as well as mind to the ends of the Earth, found that each practical experiment to falsify theories of a flat Earth ended in failure. (An English judge in all seriousness ruled that it was not a matter about which one could have a definite opinion. This continues to stand in English Common Law.)

Although the Earth — seen as a whole — is round, we experience it tangentially as a flat surface on which we can move freely without fear of falling off, or being spun into giddiness. On the ground or in space, we experience the Earth itself as metaphor. How we see the world signifies how we are and who we are. The journey to Xanadu was not undertaken in vain.