Foreword

I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all

aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary

of preparation, and connection, and illustration,

and all those arts by which a big book is made.

SAMUEL JOHNSON

(in Boswell’s The journal of a Tour of the Hebrides)

My title, which sounds like Heraclitus or Darwin, is from Mother Ann Lee (1736–1784), founder of the Shakers. In its practical sense, this axiom was the rule by which Shaker architects and designers found perfect forms. The American broom is a Shaker invention: a flat brush of sedge stems, sturdily bound, and with a long handle. Previously the broom, such as Parisian street-cleaners still use, was a fascicle of twigs, which one stoops to use. The Shaker broom sweeps. One’s upright stance in using it has dignity. It is a broom that means business. We are told that Mother Ann, overseeing the high art of sweeping Shaker rooms (the first uncluttered, clear interior domestic space in a century of china-shop impediments) would shout, “There is no dirt in heaven!”

As an ideal, that form is the best response to the forces calling it into being has been the genius of good design in our time, as witness Gropius, Le Corbusier, Rietveldt, Mondriaan, Sheeler, Fuller. A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible. These studies, most of which were written for editors, are all, one way or another, considerations of ideas and their realization, instigations, innovations, renovations; that is, of force and form.

“The Champollion of Table Manners,” “Imaginary Americas,” “Making It Uglier to the Airport,” and “In That Awful Civil War” were first published in The Hudson Review; “Balthus” and “What Are Those Monkeys Doing?” (under the title “Rousseau”), in Antaeus; “Transcendental Satyr” (under the title “Satyr and Transcendentalist”), in Parnassus; “The Smith of Smiths,” “More Genteel than God,” and “The Peales and Their Museum,” in Inquiry. “Montaigne” is reprinted from Montaigne’s Travel Journal, translated by Donald M. Frame (North Point Press, 1983), “Herondas” from The Mimes of Herondas, my translation (Grey Fox Press, 1981), and “Nabokov’s Don Quixote” from The New York Times Book Review and Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Don Quixote, edited by Fredson Bowers (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983). “Late Beckett” appeared in the Washington Post Book World, “Pergolesi’s Dog” in the New York Times. “The Artist as Critic,” “The Scholar as Critic,” and “The Critic as Artist” (a filched title) were read at Washington and Lee University as the Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Lectures for 1985 and published in Shenandoah. “Ariadne’s Dancing Floor” was written for a collection of essays on Joyce that failed to materialize. “Every Force Evolves a Form” is an unabashedly experimental inclusion: it is simply a lecture, reconstructed from notes on a scrap of paper, for English 684 at the University of Kentucky. It was, like all my classroom lectures, invented on my half an hour’s daily walk to work. As all my ideas, such as they are, come from these walks, and from the classrooms at the end of them, it will perhaps interest a reader or two to see the raw matter of a class.