Exercises

1. Re-punctuate (and re-paragraph if you think it useful) Francis Bacon’s “Of Suspicion” (handout). Type up the essay, with your changes, and be prepared to discuss your revisions in conference.

2. Write “Of _____________” Your essay should be about the same length as the Bacon essay. For its subject, choose one of the following:

Departures
Ice
Facades
Red (or Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, or Violet)
Interruptions
Bicycles
Hats
Secrets
Noise
Beginnings

3. Discuss what you wrote yesterday as if it had been written by some author unknown to you; treat of its strategies in circumscribing the subject, in the ways it opens and concludes, and in what it leaves out.

4. Write either:

(a) Your own discussion “Of Suspicion”
or         (b) “Of__________,” treating of anything you wish, but trying to imitate as closely as possible Bacon’s style. Don’t use archaisms unless you know them thoroughly, but try to get at his syntax, his overall rhythms, his elegant concentration.

5. Write “Of Mondays”

Examples:

1.
‘Of Suspicion’

Suspicions amongst thoughts are like bats amongst birds, they ever fly by twilight. Certainly, they are to be repressed, or at the least, well guarded: For they cloud the mind; they leese friends, and they check with business, whereby business cannot go on, currently, and constantly. They dispose kings to tyranny, husbands to jealousy, wise men to irresolution and melancholy. They are defects, not in the heart, but in the brain; For they take place in the stoutest natures: As in the example of Henry the Seventh of England: there was not a more suspicious man, nor a more stout. And in such a composition, they do small hurt. For commonly they are not admitted, but with examination, whether they be likely or no? But in fearful natures they gain ground too fast. There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little: And therefore Men should remedy suspicion, by procuring to know more, and not to keep their suspicions in smother. What would men have? Do they think, those they employ and deal with, are saints? Do they not think, they will have their own ends, and be truer to themselves, than to them? Therefore, there is no better way to moderate suspicions, than to account upon such suspicions as true, and yet to bridle them, as false. For so far, a man ought to make use of suspicions, as to provide, as if that should be true, that he suspects, yet it may do him no hurt. Suspicions, that the mind, of itself, gathers, are but buzzes; But suspicions, that are artificially nourished, and put into men’s heads, by the tales, and whisperings of others, have stings. Certainly, the best mean, to clear the way, in this same wood of suspicions, is frankly to communicate them, with the party, that he suspects: For thereby, he shall be sure, to know more of the truth of them, than he did before; Arid withall, shall make that party, more circumspect, not to give further cause of suspicion. But this would not be done to men of base natures: For they, if they find themselves once suspected, will never be true. The Italian says: Sospetto licentia fede: As if suspicion did give a passport to faith: But it ought rather to kindle it, to discharge itself.

leese: lose                   check: interfere           currently: smoothly
account upon: consider           mean: means               would: should

2.
Masks are arrested expressions and admirable echoes of feeling, at once faithful, discreet, and superlative. Living things in contact with the air must acquire a cuticle, and it is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts; yet some philosophers seem to be angry with images for not being things, and with words for not being feelings. Words and images are like shells, not less integral parts of nature than are the substances they cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation. I would not say that substance exists for the sake of appearance, or faces for the sake of masks, or the passions for the sake of poetry and virtue. Nothing arises in nature for the sake of anything else; all these phases and products are involved equally in the round of existence, and it would be sheer willfulness to praise the germinal phase on the ground that it is dead and sterile. We might as justly despise the seed for being merely instrumental, and glorify the full-blown flower, or the conventions of art, as the highest achievement and fruition. of life. Substance is fluid, and, since it cannot exist without some form, is always ready to exchange some form for another; but sometimes. it falls into a settled rhythm or recognizable vortex, which we call a nature, and which sustains an interesting form for a season. these sustained forms are enshrined in memory and worshipped in moral philosophy, which often assigns to them a power to create and to reassert themselves which their precarious status is very far from justifying. But they are all in all to the mind: art and happiness lie in pouring and repouring the molten metal of existence through some such tenable mould.
Masks are accordingly glorious things; we are instinctively as proud designing and wearing them as we are of inventing and using words…

(George Santayana, “The Tragic Mask”)

3.
SOME BACONIAN OPENINGS

OF TRUTH: What is Truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer. Certainly there be that delight in giddiness, and count it a bondage to fix a belief, affecting free-will in thinking, as well as in acting…

OF PARENTS AND CHILDREN: The joys of parents are secret; and so are their griefs and fears. They cannot utter the one, nor they will not utter the other. Children sweeten labours, but they make misfortunes more bitter

OF MARRIAGE AND THE SINGLE LIFE: He that hath wife and children have given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.

OF DEATH: Men fear Death, as children fear to go into the dark; and as the natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other. Certain the contemplation of death, as the wages of sin and passage to another world, is holy and religious, but the fear of it, as tribute due unto nature, is weak. Yet in religious meditations there is sometimes mixture of vanity and superstition… It is as natural to die as to be born, and to a little infant, perhaps the one is as painful as the other.
********

4.

In the proportion that credulity is a more peaceful possession of the mind than curiosity, so far preferable is that wisdom which converses about the surface to that pretended philosophy which enters into the depth of things and then comes gravely back with information and discoveries, that in the inside they are good for nothing. senses to which all objects first address themselves are the sight and the touch; these never examine farther than the colour, the shape, art upon the size, and whatever other qualities dwell or are drawn by the outward of bodies; and then comes reason officiously with tools for cutting, and opening, and mangling, and piercing, offering to demonstrate that they are not of the same consistence quite through.

Now I take all this to be the last degree of perverting nature; one of whose eternal laws it is to put her best furniture forward. And therefore, in order to save the charges of all, such expensive anatomy for the time to come, I do here think fit to inform the reader, that in such conclusions as these, reason is certainly in the right, and that in most corporeal beings which have fallen under under my cognizance the have been outside hath been infinitely preferable to the in; whereof I farther convinced from some late experiments.

Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse. Yesterday I ordered the carcass of a beau to be stripped in my presence, when we were all amazed to find so many unsuspected faults under one suit of clothes. I laid open his brain, his heart, and his spleen; but I plainly perceived at every operation that the farther we proceeded, we found the defects increase upon us in number and bulk; from all which I justly formed this conclusion to myself: that whatever philosopher or projector can find out an art to sodder and patch up the flaws and imperfections of nature will deserve much better of mankind, and teach us a more useful science, than that so much in present esteem of widening and expos them (like him who held anatomy to be the ultimate end of physic). And he whose fortunes and dispositions have placed him in a convenient station to enjoy the fruits of this noble art; he that can, with Epicuru content his ideas with the films and images that fly off upon his senses from the superficies of things; such a man, truly wise, creams off nature, leaving the sour and the dregs for Philosophy and reason to lap up. That is the sublime and refined point of felicity, called the possession of being well deceived; the serene peaceful state of being a foll among knaves.

(from Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub)

5.
For in general mortals have a great power of being astonished at the presence of an effect towards which they have done everything, and at the absence of an effect towards which they have done nothing but desire it. Parents are astonished at the ignorance of their sons, though they have used the most time-honoured and expensive means of securing it; husbands and wives are mutually astonished at the loss of affection which they have taken no pains to keep; and all of us in turn are apt to be astonished that our neighbors do not admire us. In this way it happens that the truth seems highly improbable. The truth is something different from the habitual lazy combinations begotten by our wishes.
(George Eliot, Daniel Deronda)

6.
My first glance around me, as the man opened the door, disclosed a well-furnished breakfast-table, standing in the middle of a long room, with many windows in it. I looked from the table to the window farthest from me, and saw a lady standing at it, with her back turned toward me. The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays. She had not heard my entrance into the room; and I allowed myself the luxury of admiring her for a few moments, before I moved one of the chairs near me, as the least embarrassing means of attracting her attention. She turned toward me immediately. The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window–and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps–and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer–and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!
(Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White)

7.
Innocence so constantly finds itself in a false position that inwardly innocent people learn to be disingenuous. Finding no language in which to speak in their own terms, they resign themselves to being translated imperfectly. They exist alone–through anxiety, through desire to impart and to feel warmth. The system of our affections is too corrupt for them. They are bound to blunder, then to be told they cheat. In love, the sweetness and violence they have to offer involves a thousand betrayals for the less innocent. Incurable strangers to the world, they never cease to exact a heroic happiness. Their singleness, their ruthlessness, their one continuous wish makes them bound to be cruel, and to suffer cruelty. The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet–when they do, their victims lie strewn all round.
(Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart)

8.
One caution, first of all, we should take along with us, and it is this: that all those persons who hold the powers of government without having an identity of interests with the community, and all those persons who share in the profits which are made by the abuse of those powers, and all those persons whom the example and representations of the first two classes influence, will be sure to represent the community, or a part having an identity of interest with the community, as incapable in the highest degree of acting according to their own interest; it being clear that they who have not an identity of interest with the community ought to hold the power of government no longer, if those who have that identity of interest could be expected to act in any tolerable conformity with their interest.
(James Mill, Essay on Government)

9.
Generally speaking, the word culture is used in a sense which approaches the honorific. When we look at a people in the degree of abstraction which the idea of culture which applies, we cannot but be touched and impressed by what we see, we cannot help being awed by something mysterious at work, some creative power which seems to transcend any particular act or habit or quality that may be observed. To make a coherent life, to confront the terrors of the outer and inner world, to establish the ritual and art, the pieties and duties which make possible the life of the group and the individual–these are culture, and to contemplate these various enterprises which constitute a culture is invariably moving. And, indeed, without this sympathy and admiration a culture is a closed book for the student, for the scientific attitude requisite for the study of cultures is based on a very lively subjectivity. It is not merely that the student of culture must make a willing suspension of disbelief in the assumptions of cultures other than his own; he must go further and feel that the culture he has under examination is somehow justified, that it is as it should be.
(Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture)

10.
That it [Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Languagel wi11 immediately become popular I have not promised to myself: a few wild blunders, and risible absurdities, from which no work of such multiplicity was ever free, may for a time furnish folly with laughter, and harden ignorance in contempt; but useful diligence will at last prevail, and there never can be wanting some who distinguish desert: who will consider that no dictionary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some falling away; that a whole life cannot be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be sufficient; that he, whose design includes whatever language can express, must often speak of what he does not understand; that a writer will sometimes be hurried by eagerness to the end, and sometimes faint with weariness under a task, which Scaliger compares to the labours of the anvil and the mine; that what is obvious is not always known, and what is known is not always present; that sudden fits of inadvertency will surprize viligance, slight avocations will seduce attention, and casual eclipses of the mind will darken learning; and that the writer shall often in vain trace his memory at the moment of need, for that which yesterday he knew with intuitive readiness, and which will come uncalled into his thoughts tomorrow.
(Samuel Johnson, “Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language”)

11.

Of Studies
L.

Studies serue for Delight, for Ornament, and for Ability. Their Chiefe Vse for Delight, is in Priuatenesse and Retiring; For Ornament, is in Discourse; And for Ability, is in the Iudgement and Disposition of Businesse. For Expert Men can Execute, and perhaps Iudge for particulars, one by one; But the generall Counsels, and the Plots, and Marshalling of Affaires, come best from those that are Learned. To spend too much Time in Studies, is Sloth; To vse them too much for Ornament, is Affectation; To make Iudgement wholly by their Rules is the Humour of a Scholler. They perfect Nature, and are perfected by Experience: For Naturall Abilities, are like Naturall Plants, that need Proyning by Study: And Studies themselves, doe giue forth Directions too much at Large, except they be bounded in by experience. Crafty Men Contemne Studies; simple Men Admire them; And Wise Men Vse them: For they teach not their owne Vse; But that is a Wisdome without them, and aboue them, won by Obseruation. Reade not to Contradict, and Confute; Nor to Beleeue and Take for granted; Nor to Finde Talke and Discourse; But to weigh and Consider. Some Bookes are to be Tasted, Others to be Swallowed, and Some Few to be Chewed and Digested: That is, some Bookes are to be read onely in Parts; Others to be read but not Curiously; And some Few to be read wholly, and with Diligence and Attention. Some Bookes also may be read by Deputy, and Extracts made of them by Others: But that would be, onely in the lesse important Arguments, and the Meaner Sort of Bookes: else distilled Bookes, are like Common distilled Waters, Flashy Things. Reading maketh a Full Man; Conference a Ready Man; And Writing an Exact Man. And therefore, If a Man Write little, he had need haue a Great memory; If he Conferre little, he had need haue a Present Wit; And if he Reade litle, he had need haue much Cunning, to seeme to know that, he doth not. Histories make Men Wise; Poets Witty; The Mathematicks Subtill; Naturall Philosophy deepe; Morall Graue; Logick and Rhetorick Able to Contend. Abeunt studia in Mores. Nay there is no Stond or Impediment in the Wit, but may be wrought out by Fit Studies: Like as Diseases of the Body, may haue Appropriate Exercises. Bowling is good for the Stone and Reines; Shooting for the Lungs and Breast; Gentle Walking for the Stomacke; Riding for the Head; And the like. if a Mans Wit be Wandring, let him Study the Mathematicks; For in Demonstrations, if his Wit be called away neuer so little, he must begin again: If his Wit be not Apt to distinguish or find differences, let him Study the Schoole-men; For they are Cymini sectores. If he be not Apt to beat ouer Matters, and to call vp one Thing, to Proue and Illustrate another, let him Study the Lawyers Cases: So euery Defect of the Minde, may haue a Speciall Receit.