Aesthetic Nano-Manifesto

Lady Macbeth wasn’t sure her husband had it in him, to kill a king:

      Yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full of the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way.

“Milk of human kindness” is burned in our brains, because it’s such a delightful surprise: a wild way to think about kindness that’s also just right. A sentence may have many virtues, and too few have any, but this kind of surprise may be the one I prize most. Even better, is the next thought in Lady Macbeth’s speech:

	Thou wouldst be great,
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it.

“The illness”: she means ruthlessness, which is a vice, and so indeed an “illness” of the soul or spirit, but how is it that Lady Macbeth, with open eyes, recognizes it as such, while also urging that it “should” attend ambition (not itself a vice), and lamenting that, in her husband, it does not?

The density of great but sideways thoughts is extraordinary in Bob Dylan’s writing. About being washed-up in the 1980’s, he wrote:

The mirror had swung around and I could see the future—an old actor fumbling in garbage cans outside the theater of past triumphs.

And he said this in a 1966 interview:

All I did was write and sing, paint little pictures on paper, dissolve myself into situations where I was invisible.

In my day job, and for my night work too, I often have to read prose that avoids surprise like a disease. How wonderful, and rejuvenating, then, to be reminded that some writers lives for such moments. Michael Chabon must cultivate a writing environment where they may fruit and bud. His novel The Final Solution is both a warm-hearted and coldly serious book, about the last days of Sherlock Holmes, and also, obliquely, about the Holocaust; but many moments are there just to make you smile. One woman suffered from “gephyrophobia,” the “morbid fear of crossing bridges”:

When a car, bus, or train in which she was riding hung suspended over some river, she would sink deeply into her seat, eyes closed, breath coming through her nostrils in short whistling gusts, moaning softly, holding herself perfectly still with the brimming cup of her fear clutched between her palms as if she dared not spill a drip.

When two characters visit London in July 1944—a month after D-Day—Chabon jolts us by comparing the taking up of arms against evil, with the natural expression of American ebullience:

To Mr. Panicker the thing that chiefly struck him, and had done over the year leading up to 6 June, was the startling Americanness of London: American airmen and sailors, officers, and food soldiers, American military vehicles in the streets, American films in the cinemas, and an atmosphere of loud, raffish swagger, a smell of hair tonic, a cacophony of sprung vowels that might, as Mr. Panicker was prepared to concede, be entirely the product of his own imagination but which nevertheless animated the city for him in a way that he found at once appalling and irresistible, an air of riotous, brutal good humor, as if the invasion of Europe itself, now proceeding in bloody stages across northern France, were only the inevitable exploding forth of a buildup of jazzy slang and the uncontainable urge to buck and wing.

There are moments of surprising beauty:

At the stilling of the centrifuge the porch, the farmstead, this vale in the lee of a hillside, the immense bowl of tedious green country around them seemed to fill with a thick and gummy mass of silence.

But the most powerful and insane parts of the book are Chabon’s attempt to capture the mind and spirit of a man, who gloried above all else in intellect and knowledge...

Some old men finished their lives as little more than the sum total of their memories, others as nothing but a pair of grasping pincers, or a set of bitter axioms proven. It would please him well enough to amount to no more in the end than a single great organ of detection, reaching into blankness for a clue.

...but is losing both, where a mind reduced to uninterpreted experience might be thought worse than death:

He felt—with all his body, as one felt the force of gravity of inertia—the inevitability of his failure. The conquest of his mind by age was not a mere blunting or slowing down but an erasure, as of a desert capital by a drifting millennium of sand. Time had bleached away the ornate pattern of his intellect, leaving a blank white scrap.

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