Lying down with Asses and Lambs: an Opinion

This post serves one and one purpose only: to rile the donkey. So, ahem:

"That the author of Religio Medici, mounted upon the airy stilts of abstraction, conversant about notional and conjectural essences; in whose categories of Being the possible took the upper hand of the actual; should have overlooked the impertinent individualities of such poor creatures as mankind, is not much to be admired."

What makes this passage so brilliant, aside from its cool use of litotes, is the lapidary wit with which Lamb executed it. If you'll notice, while deriding Thomas Browne for being a pedant and a dreamer, the author, seduced by the gorgeous periodic movement of Browne's prose, starts to mimic the elder's style. By the end of that very hypotactic no-no, Lamb's persona has celebrated the very thing he planned to defame. And for good reason: he too is a whimsical, vacillating dork, caught up so fervently in each new sting of sensation or novel imagining that he follows, and does not dictate, his desire. And he also enjoys mocking himself, and his heroes, for both entertaining the foolishness of caprice and applauding, and enjoying, the vigor and constancy of earthy business.

Lamb was no fool. In that essay he goes on to catalogue and explore with some amusement his own tastes and prejudices--including loving but not liking or even wanting to be around Quakers, distrusting Jews, thinking "Negroes" are cute and noble but not really worth one's company, and, my personal favorite, despising the truth-worship of, who else, the Scots (?!?). His description of his own bigoted, complacent self is hysterical and, while somehow teasing and tickling against the heavy hand of memoir, with its unhappy Scottish insistence that things cohere, both totally ironic and admirably, even defiantly, literal. Even when he's joking, he's not kidding, and that willingness not only to admit but to extol--and to discuss indifferently, with no moral significance beyond curiosity or frank weirdness--his paradoxical attraction to and displeasure in the distinctions of mankind, so wonderfully and pyrotechnically performed in the opening sentence on Browne, earns a special kind of moral merit: it proves the worth of such things as telling the truth, not telling the truth, and lying about telling the truth. The essay ends with a spectacular anticlimax, an anecdote about three Quakers, him, and an unpaid dinner bill.

From what I gather, his point is this: people are fickle, and part of being human, and of being one of those humans in particular who recognizes and appreciates the differences and distinctions of this world, is the irrational, unjustifiable, and very natural practice of not liking certain things. What makes those human beings sympathetic persons--and good critics--is an ability not to mistake distaste for lack of quality but to assert one's own preference on the basis of no real value, and at the expense of others' preferences. As Lamb implies, criticism--and living well--is no neoclassical surmise; it isn't an evaluation. There are no inherent standards and there are no guarantees. Value is created, not given; and those who think that worth involves any measurement in or against tradition confuse appreciation--which is the task of criticism and of life--with evaluation, which is pedantry. Value grows with conviction, becoming social and therefore apparently permanent, or as lasting as created things can be, only when some personality impresses their vitality and dignity upon his audience. Values are rhetorical entities; they are not facts to be confirmed or boxes to be checked.

Lamb most likely would argue that hamsters are not inherently worth anything; neither are human beings. We decide that one isn't or that the other is; we construct that distinction, and we can also deconstruct it. Time inevitably will. Whether the value is sentimental or honest has everything to do with context. Because you inhabit an age of mirrors, not lamps, you believe in a world where things are. Because I inhabit an altogether different context in which lamps illuminate but do not reflect, I believe in a world where things become. In the moments of coming into being and passing away, our worlds meet and conflict, and complement each other. Other than that, they are incongruous, and because our truths evolve from incompatible origins, we argue. In my world, rabbits matter, and it is better for their importance. Lamb would agree. Erasmus, I'm sure, would not.

All moral and aesthetic matters come from and end in subjects, in thinking persons who can and do create value where only objects exist. That is why they are subjective realms. They are not science, which is a method, or mathematics, which is a description of laws, but sloppy systems built to give shape and order to the flux of human experience. Unlike science, they are not a means to some truth, and they therefore cannot furnish lasting and independent knowledge; they do not deal in facts. Unlike mathematics, their object is not independent of its observer, and therefore their laws, whatever they may be, are not objective but rather expressive and therefore natural, and subject to change. Science discovers; mathematics describes; art and morality explain.

Or at least, they do where I live.

Also, in an essay about his own ears, those "indispensable side-intelligencers" (!!!), Lamb claimed that he felt "no disposition to envy the mule for his plenty." The mule, Dr. Bottom.

And just to vex you, a list of everything I call my rabbit, arranged in order of invention:

Shuriken, Riken, That Riken, Damn Riken, Bunder, Bunjerdoo, Bunjer, Bunjerdoodle, Binkasaurus, NB, Giggle Bear, Nibble Bear, Mr. Nibbles, Shafoogle, Riki Banana, Bananagin, Bananagins, Smiling Assassin, Danger Bear, Mr. Sparkle, and of course, The Glorious Charles Lamb, or Lambriken.