Becoming Cultured

A guest post from Matthew Morgan

Exploring Life through the Written Word

Dear Friends,

Matthew Morgan

was born in England, grew up in the mountains of British Columbia, and moved back to the UK with his family while in his teens. He makes his home there with his wife, a woman he says is “the kindest person I’ve ever met, and who tolerates my failings and encourages my success.” That sounds like a good reason to put down roots.

As a young man, he dropped out of college and worked as a carpenter, a kitchen assistant, a cleaner, and a handyman. The whole time, he read as many books as he could — everything from The Divine Comedy to The Human Stain, from Austen to Zola. As a less-young man, he studied for a degree in English Literature while working as a bookseller. The job meant that he read even more, and his studies meant he became a better writer. Now, as he approaches the event horizon of middle age, he has found a sense of deep purpose in writing about the role of books in our lives and the place of literature in our culture.

Enjoy this guest essay from Matthew.

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Years ago, I read Anatole Broyard’s memoir, Kafka Was the Rage (1993), in which he writes of a friend whose “manners were a history of civilisation”. I knew – or felt – immediately what he meant by this and decided that, if I had any say in what goes on my gravestone, I wanted Broyard’s sentence as my epitaph. Of course, I didn’t want to appropriate this description without earning it. I intended to become someone who was cultured.

My idea of a cultured person was broad and yet, at the same time, exacting: someone who’d read the seminal texts from antiquity, and passably read or spoke multiple languages, and could follow a conversation on physics or philosophy. At the very minimum, they are people who are – in Susan Sontag’s definition of a writer – “interested in everything”.

Today’s pop culture offers few examples of such people. What we get instead is a superficial and unsatisfying churn of short-term celebs and trends. The space vacated by challenging novels, experimental cinema, and difficult conversations has been filled with the cacophony of cultural ephemera, the “hot takes” of a culture that can’t sit still.

So, I turned to the culture of previous decades, when TV hosted debates and books were discussed seriously in the press. I looked to people like Susan Sontag, Christopher Hitchens, and Alberto Manguel, and in following the references they made to earlier thinkers, I made my way down a well-trod path through history. I discovered, for instance, that my proclivity for short sentences and simple syntax (since abandoned) had been done before and better by this Hemingway chap. More recently, I’ve come to think that ancient liturgies make more sense than the informalities of the modern church.

“The past is a foreign country,” L. P. Hartley tells us, “they do things differently there.” For the same reasons we travel geographically – to discover how things are done differently and take the lessons back to our own lands – we should travel temporally through the foreign countries of Aristotle’s Athens, Picasso’s Guernica, and other historical islands in the sea of time. In Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), one of his characters elaborates on this concept, calling it “temporal bandwidth”:

“‘Temporal bandwidth’ is the width of your present, your now ... The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.”

This reminds me of the way T. S. Eliot describes one’s shadow “striding behind you” at morning and “rising to meet you” in the evening. My shadow is cast backwards across centuries and forwards as potential in the future, and the longer it is, the more solid I feel against the light of history shining on the present moment. The present is built out of all that came before, like a cake made out of pre-existing ingredients; failing to appreciate the past is like eating the cake and having no ability to taste the sugar, butter, and chocolate that made it. You’re eating something, sure, but it doesn’t have much flavour.

Acknowledging the shoulders on which we stand, Eliot insisted that the contemporary world can only be fully understood with reference to its history. To comprehend the present moment, one must look back at the path that led to this place:

“The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe ... [and] of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”

(“Tradition and the Individual Talent”, 1920)

Through this “historical sense”, dead poets – and the traditions they represent – come alive again in the now and “assert their immortality”. Immortality, perhaps, but of a kind that must be granted. If we remember them, engage and argue with them, and modify their achievements to fit new purposes, those figures of the past will remain alive today. If we forget them, they die again. This is what the poet Clive James calls “cultural amnesia”.

Why, then, have the twentieth and twenty-first centuries seemed so hell-bent on jettisoning all historical “baggage”? Our conviction that the new is inherently better (which C. S. Lewis termed “chronological snobbery”) goes back at least as far as Ezra Pound’s modernist command to “make it new”. Though its legacy frequently obscures its origin, Pound’s use of this expression illustrates the point: he borrowed the phrase from Confucius. The most seemingly novel creations, however tailored to modernity, all owe a debt to traditions that came before. There’s nothing new under the sun.

So how does Eliot give the dead poets life, widen our temporal bandwidth, and cure us of cultural amnesia? He writes The Waste Land (1922), a poem that confronts modernity with constant reference to the past, from Arthurian Legend to Biblical scripture. The Waste Land is a dense and difficult poem, and often the best access a new reader has to understanding it is through knowledge of its historical references. The past is a passport to the present.

The Waste Land opens with perhaps the most memorable first lines in twentieth-century poetry:

“April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.”

This modernist triumph performs two subversions simultaneously. The first is to tip on its head our usual assumptions about spring being a joyous season, freeing us from the darkness of winter, and the second is to do this by referencing the opening lines of the 14^th century (hardly modern) narrative by Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales:

“When April the sweet showers fall

And pierce the drought of March to the root, and all

The veins are bathed in liquor of such power

As brings about the engendering of the flower ...”

Perhaps Eliot’s April is modernism, the arrival of a new season/movement that thaws our collective numbness to the world around. Certainly, the modernists were excited by contemporary life and saw it as a shock to the system; Eliot, however, was not so naively optimistic. Modernity could bring cruelty, even if it was necessary or, like the turning of a season, inevitable. Throughout The Waste Land, Eliot places the present in the context of the past, widening his poem’s temporal bandwidth and reminding us of what we ought not forget.

Discovering this, an important shift occurred in my thinking about becoming a “cultured person”. I stopped concerning myself with being impressive, with having a witty jeu d’esprit or sharp quotation in my pocket, so that others would think me “cultured”. Instead, I just focused on those voices speaking out of deep time, echoing from the past into the present. It’s only when we stop talking that we can begin to truly hear. “Speak, Memory”: Homer opens The Odyssey with this petition to Mnemosyne, goddess of memory. Speak she will, so long as we listen.

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Until next time,