Soul-work: reading as a transformative pursuit.

EDITOR'S NOTE: In this poignant memoir, written in a meditative mode, Professor Richard K. Cross (b. 1940) evokes the humane spirit that defined and shaped his vocation as a university teacher of English language and literature. In particular he recalls how brilliant and inspiring teachers introduced him to books and ideas, how novelists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and poets like T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats, spoke to his mind and to his soul, and made him consonantly aware of the redeeming power of love, passion for truth, magnanimity, wisdom. "Endowing inferior ends with a spurious ultimacy," he warns, "has the effect of alienating us from our core selves, until we eventually reach the point where we deny the very existence of those selves." Cross reminds us that the learning process is a metaphysical quest that transcends the imperial self and the flux of the material world--and that art "asks us to live the questions it raises." His words help re-confirm Modern Age's commitment to educational standards and to the study of imaginative literature as an ethical experience that needs to be saved from modern masters of theory and ideology.

"EVERYONE HERE keeps using the word discourse," observed the young man from Johannesburg. "Back home we're chary about reducing literature to abstractions. We talk about books as though our lives depended on them." The setting was the 1985 MLA meeting in Chicago; I was interviewing the young man for a position in what had only recently come to be called postcolonial literature.

Engagement with books had not involved the same stakes for me that it did for the scholar from apartheid South Africa. But it had been a no less passionate affair, and I was as troubled as he was by the sense that Theory, with a capital "T," was leading academics in this country to punish works of literature under codes foreign to their essential character. In my seedtime, twenty-five years earlier, students of literature assumed that the function of criticism was to assist readers in understanding and enjoying poems and novels more fully than they might have on their own. True, we had our theorists, notably Rene Wellek and Northrop Frye, but we construed what they were doing as a clarification of critical practice rather than an end in itself. The discipline as a whole was frankly ancillary. In contrast, the newer critics seemed intent on making texts over in their own image or that of some ideological deity; the effect was to increase the distance between the works and ourselves, to make them less, rather than more, real to us.

I had been drawn to the study of literature by a string of intimate encounters--in several instances mediated by brilliant teachers--with works by writers who had reached artistic maturity in the first half of the twentieth century. These artists were, in Yeats's phrase, the "singing-masters of my soul" who sustained me in the course of my own intellectual coming of age. (Only years afterwards did it occur to me that they had been spiritual surrogates for my parents and grandparents, who were of the same generations.) I recall identifying with the aspiring poet Franz Kappus, recipient of a series of celebrated letters from Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke's injunction "to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves" seemed to have been addressed to me personally.

In his poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo," to which I was introduced in a college German course, Rilke transfigures the remnant of an antique statue he knew from visits to the Louvre, Torso of a Youth from Miletus, into Apollo--patron of prophets, healers, and artists. The absence of the god's head poses no hindrance, since the surviving portion of the statue contains the design of the whole enfolded in it. Apollo's eyes, which had once glistened like ripening apples, we can conjure up from the torso that

  still glows like a candelabra
  in which his gaze, merely dimmed,

  endures and shines.

Rilke compares the splendor emanating from that torso to a starburst, and indeed the work of art--his sonnet no less than the sculpture that inspired it--partakes of an ideal realm that irradiates everyone who comes within its orbit,

  for there is no place,
  that does not see you. You
  must change your life. (1)

At age nineteen I could not account for the apparent disjunction between the scene Rilke evokes--the spectator-reader's being transfixed by the gaze of a missing head--and that daunting summons that ends the poem: you must change your life; du musst dein Leben andern. Our instructor had offered us the poem as an example of just how moving and beautiful the German language could be in the hands of a great artist; he was not, however, prepared to spend much time glossing it. I felt at once exhilarated and perplexed, wondering how on earth to resolve this piece of unfinished business Rilke had laid upon me.

The answer came several years later when I visited the Galleria dell'Accademia, intent, like everyone else in the throng, on viewing Michelangelo's David. The David did not disappoint, but I was even more struck by the pieces from Michelangelo's workshop where the figures appeared to be straining for release from the marble blocks in which they were encased. Finally the sense of Rilke's sonnet dawned on me. What the poet had grasped was the fact that he and his readers were as marred as the Apollo he depicts; he knew this, moreover, because he could recollect a world where the images in which each of us has been fashioned--images of the sort the sculptor had striven to set free from the marble--remained intact. These ideal forms underlying the works of the two masters called us, I felt, to do everything in our power to render them into life, and that could occur only through a drastic alteration in the lives we were presently leading. Then came the questions: how could I know which form was mine and, even if that knowledge were disclosed to me, how far did my power to realize it extend? In their own lives Michelangelo and Rilke had come nowhere near the perfection they achieved, at moments, in their art--and in fact those among their works that affected me most were ones that not only celebrated the quest but acknowledged the difficulty of pursuing it to completion.

During my late teens and early twenties, the period in which the encounters with Rilke and Michelangelo occurred, I was occupied with making decisions about my course of study, career, and life-direction generally. After the intellectual solitariness of my high school years, the riches proffered by the university gave me a sense of having been transported to Elysium without the discomfort of dying. The study of literature appealed to me on grounds that seem as valid now as they did then, namely, the opportunity it affords to enter into the minds of writers and the figures they have created--to plumb their ways of seeing the world and in the process to clarify one's own outlook; the challenge of responding to the questions--aesthetic, moral, metaphysical--that works of literature raise, since, as Rilke reminds us, the reader is as much the one being scrutinized as the one doing the scrutinizing; and the sheer beauty of the verbal textures and formal structures of poems, plays, and novels, monuments not merely to the artists' inventiveness but to tradition, the muse, the genius of the language--to powers, that is, far greater than those of any individual human being, even the most gifted.

I was drawn, at bottom, by the chance to immerse myself in what was as much a wisdom tradition as it was a literary one. The writers with whom I meant to break bread were the masters who confront the perennial problems. What sort of beings are we? In what proportions do we belong to the realm of nature and to that of spirit? Are we sponsored or merely adrift? If the former, what entailments does that place on us? And since we are all of us on this voyage together, how should we conduct ourselves in relation to one another and to the bark in which we are sailing? What I was looking for were imaginative and philosophical matrices that would allow me to explore these issues without having to commit myself to a settled system of beliefs. (I had been impressed by Santayana's dictum: "Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.")

It is not surprising, then, that The Waste Land, which raises the fundamental questions without pretending to resolve them, had an enormous impact on me. I read the poem initially in a survey taught by an exceptionally clear-sighted young scholar and critic, A. Walton Litz, who played the part of Rilke to my Kappus. From Litz I learned to approach modernist texts by homing in on the felt life in them and not losing sight of the forest for the symbols. In the case of The Waste Land, that "felt life" turned out to be a piercing absence. "Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?" demands the hysteric in "A Game of Chess." Her consort avoids making an overt reply to this tirade; her questions are, however, on point. His mind is indeed hollow; the best he can manage is a fragmentary recollection--"Those are pearls that were his eyes"--of a world in which people still believed in the possibility of transformation.

In re-reading the poem (many times), it seemed to me that Eliot did indicate a way out of the self-absorption to which the wastelanders are prone: they must learn to register compassion for their suffering fellow creatures--as does Parsifal, to whose quest the poet alludes--and find an effective way of expressing it. Reduced to its simplest terms, this most complicated of poems calls us to regain sufficient trust in life to enable us to love, although it offers only the merest hints (the salving words have grown as remote as Sanskrit) as to how one might actually become a person capable of love.

If The Waste Land is permanently associated in my mind with Litz's mentoring, then a second work that played a key role in helping to define my outlook, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, is connected with another of my Princeton teachers, Lawrance Thompson. I took his British novel course in the spring of 1960 and quickly came to appreciate his hewn-from-New Hampshire-granite integrity. (It is altogether fitting that he should have been the biographer of Robert Frost.) Thompson, the son of a Methodist circuit rider, spent a lifetime shaking his fist at his father's God. Not that he or any of the other teachers who made a difference in my intellectual formation--the Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann, for example, or E. Harris Harbison, from whom I took a course in Renaissance and Reformation history and who struck me as a latter-day Erasmus--would have considered for a moment employing their authority in the classroom for the purpose of indoctrination. Their job was to get us to do what they had done, to work through the issues for ourselves.

I remember squirreling myself away in a carrel in Firestone Library and devouring To the Lighthouse in a single sitting. The scene in which Mrs. Ramsay withdraws from all her social roles, enters into the "wedge-shaped core of darkness" at the center of her being, and finds herself intoning "We are in the hands of the Lord" astonished me then, as it does still. Indeed she surprises herself, since she is no more a Christian than is her author. Mrs. Ramsay's words seemed not so much a confession of creatureliness as a poignant recognition of her status as a contingent being, with a keen sense of the voids into which human life can fall. Although Woolf and her protagonist are not in the usual sense believers, they do possess something for which the wastelanders can only yearn: an implicit faith in the possibility of discovering meaning in life that allows them to commit themselves to their hopes and affections. Almost every character in the book comes to Mrs. Ramsey looking for sympathy and a renewal of courage--and finds it. Her final triumph lies in her communicating to her husband the fact that she loves him without ever having to say the word.

Was the humanism of Woolf's novel potent enough to dispel the chill of Eliot's poem? Much as I wanted it to be so, I had not, at twenty, attained sufficient ripeness to make that call. I resembled the prickly Stephen Dedalus of Ulysses--not truly ready to love or be loved. Ulysses, which I also read first in Thompson's course, was still more crucial to my development than To the Lighthouse. I found myself, Litz student that I had been, drawn to Joyce's exhaustive rendering of what it feels like to be alive--to the qualities that make Ulysses a novel rather than an instance of some other genre. Thompson, on the other hand, saw the book as an Eliotic satire on contemporary history; in his reading, Molly Bloom's "yes" became a "no." The senior thesis I wrote a year later, under Litz's supervision, was a study of the modes of irony in Ulysses that sought a balance between these two lines of interpretation, although I wound up placing the accent on Joyce's affirmation of the common life. I was intrigued by the recurrent phrase "word known to all men," which looked as though it might hold the key to the novel. Hans Walter Gabler, in the edition of Ulysses he brought out in 1986, prints one occurrence of the motif in the following form: "Love, yes. Word known to all men. Amor vero aliquid alicui bonum vult...." This "love passage," which Gabler discovered in a draft of the Scylla and Charybdis episode, had been, whether deliberately or inadvertently, omitted from all previous editions. It quickly became apparent that most Joyceans preferred to let readers surmise the word in question, as they had been doing for sixty-four years.

Had I surmised that the word was "love" while I was writing my thesis? Actually I had been coy about identifying the word, although I did recognize that Ulysses was an extraordinarily penetrating inquiry into all that is entailed in loving, whether the love is between husband and wife, parent and child, friends, or members of a community. Libido, eros, philia: the novel seeks to do justice to them all. It took me another five years, in the course of which I researched and wrote my Stanford dissertation on Flaubert and Joyce, to realize that the love that mattered most to the Irish novelist was agape, a love grounded in the sense of each person's ideal possibilities that actively desires his flourishing. I came to see Bloom's solicitude for Stephen, undertaken in the full awareness that the paternal-filial bond he longs for is unlikely to develop, and his equally clear-eyed attachment to Molly, rooted in his recollection of their original passion, as being examples of agape. Love of human beings for the sake of their ideal fulfillment, their actual imperfections notwithstanding, is perhaps the nearest approach any of us can make to caring for others, or for ourselves, in the way that God presumably does. But another fifteen years of dialectical wrestling had to go by before I could affirm that.

"Word known to all men": the truth is that we know and do not know it. There is nothing any of us craves more than to receive agape, which confirms our worthiness to exist and which is in turn the most sublime bounty we can confer on others. Why, then, do we have such difficulty acting in accordance with a need so central to our being? This is a huge question that admits of no single answer. One explanation is that, since many of us lack the sense of a master narrative that enables us to see life whole, we drift into the pursuit of lesser goods--material well-being, sensual pleasure, social or professional status--as though they were ends in themselves. Endowing inferior ends with a spurious ultimacy has the effect of alienating us from our core selves, until we eventually reach the point where we deny the very existence of those selves.

Except perhaps for Eliot, no one has depicted the degree of self-estrangement that this denial engenders more acutely than Elizabeth Bishop, whose poetry I chanced upon in the early 1960s. In her poem "The Man-Moth" generic urban man no longer experiences either himself or his world with any sense of immediacy: "He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties, / feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold." As a result of this rupture, man's spirit has atrophied to the point where he casts a shadow "only as big as his hat. / It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on." The remedy for an existence so diminished lies, Bishop suggests, in rediscovering our archaic roots, personified by the Man-Moth. The Man-Moth has been driven into a nether world, the subways of New York, but he retains an atavistic yearning to transcend the dim life available to him there; venturing to the surface, he displays a tropism to the light, scaling skyscrapers in an attempt to storm the moon--that same orb faint-hearted man knows only through its effects. Whereas the city-dweller's range of feeling has been reduced to, say, two-and-a-half octaves, the Man-Moth can still call upon six or more. Man, if he is to become whole again, has to recover this split-off dimension of his being; he must seek to apprehend the Man-Moth, from whose eyelids

  one tear, his only possession, like the bee's sting, slips.
  Slyly he palms it, and if you're not paying attention
  he'll swallow it. However, if you watch, he'll hand it over,
  cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.

It was clear to me that novels like To the Lighthouse and Ulysses and poems like The Waste Land and "The Man-Moth" could help us to know ourselves and our fellow human beings better--and also, I was ready to wager, enable us to love with a greater understanding of our common needs and desires. Where else, after all, was it possible to enter not just into another human being's consciousness but into the depths of his soul? "What we need are books that affect us like ... the death of one whom we loved more than ourselves," declares Kafka, in an aphorism I committed to memory; "a book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us." Like all great artists, Woolf and Joyce, Eliot and Bishop know how to break through our self-encapsulation; they offer us visions that rend the heart and, in so doing, point the way toward healing. Such works summon us, as surely as does Rilke's "Archaic Torso," to transform our lives.

Given the allure of literature and the extent to which I had identified with my mentors, it seemed the most natural thing in the world for me to go into college teaching. I meant to try to do for others what Litz and Thompson had done for me. By the time I became an assistant professor at UCLA, half a dozen years later, the broadly humanistic approach to reading I had absorbed from these men had been supplanted in many quarters by an insistence that texts be politically relevant. That demand presented no great problem when it came to a work like Lowell's "For the Union Dead," with its impassioned plea for racial justice. I asked myself, though, whether a political reading of the poem could encompass so transcendental an idea as Colonel Shaw's rejoicing in "man's lovely, / peculiar power to choose life and die." My students, even those with religious backgrounds, had considerable difficulty grasping the notion of losing one's life in order to find it. Nothing I had ever done remotely compared with Shaw's sacrifice, but I had experienced, in books and apart from them, what it meant to slough off an outworn self and enter into a more abundant mode of being. The challenge lay in breaking through the students' self-protectiveness and getting them to take what Lowell was saying to heart.

When the Cambodian incursion and the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State occurred in May 1970, the UCLA campus erupted in protest. Many students wanted to suspend classes and engage in antiwar activities; others were simply too upset to study. All of this happened while I was teaching William Butler Yeats in a course on modern poetry. I could sympathize with my students' wish to translate their worry and anger into political deeds, but I failed to see how not reading or talking about Yeats would serve their purpose. Of all the great twentieth-century poets, he was probably the one best able to illumine the situation in which we found ourselves. Living through a time of empires collapsing, with revolution raging in Eastern Europe and civil strife on his own doorstep, Yeats had managed to compose such masterful poems as "Meditations in Time of Civil War," "The Second Coming," and "A Prayer for My Daughter."

In the last of these, written shortly after the birth of Anne Butler Yeats in February 1919, the poet ruminates on the spiritual equipment his child will need to withstand the onslaught. Yeats sees the forces that disrupt our psyches and our civilization as intrinsic to human nature. But deep as this strain of "murderous innocence" runs, it is not the most fundamental constituent of our being; if it were, the race would long since have gone the way of Tyrannosaurus rex. The aggressive instinct may be only too manifest, but happily there exists alongside it, in the shadows, a countervailing, life-affirming power that we can, with effort, recover and which the poet terms "radical innocence." Yeats employs "radical," stemming from Latin radix, root, to refer to those attributes of character that enable us, like songbirds in a laurel tree, to sway through the tempest rather than being wrenched from the bough. Virtues like kindness, tact, and modesty are not, in the poet's eyes, mere social constructions; they are features of our natural endowment that flow from "the mouth of Plenty's horn." Although the seeds of such qualities inhere in us, they demand cultivation if they are to grow and blossom.

Custom and ceremony, which transmit and give sanction to the patterns of conduct that make civilized life possible, are the soil in which radical innocence flourishes. The soul's capacity to establish a rooted existence depends as well upon its turning inward and discovering there

  that it is self-delighting,
  self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
  And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will.

Aligning oneself along this axis is equivalent to the tat tvam asi in Hindu thought, a recognition that the individual self is joined at its base with the universal Self; it is to have gained the spiritual leverage that comes with locating the fulcrum of one's existence. Yeats, who was intimately acquainted with Indic philosophy and who subsequently translated The Ten Principal Upanishads with Shree Purohit Swami, knew exactly what he was praying for, both for his daughter and for himself. With "A Prayer for My Daughter," we find ourselves spurred to delve into the matrix of our being and to ground our lives in a wisdom grander than anything we as creatures of a given time and place could conceive, a wisdom that is in fact perennial.

"The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry," observes Simone Weil. "The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry." For more than two decades now I have taught at the University of Maryland, where many students are among the first in their families to attend college. Often enough they are the children of families that have come to this country seeking economic opportunity and are concerned that the education they are struggling to pay for will lead to tangible rewards. (As the son of parents who considered themselves fortunate, in the depth of the Depression, to finish high school, I have no trouble understanding their concern.) One particularly effective means of helping these students acknowledge their metaphysical hunger is to introduce them to a writer like Saul Bellow, himself the son of immigrants, who started out in circumstances as hard as many of them have known.

Bellow remarked to his friend Keith Botsford that a person should form his artistic and moral sensibility by taking "certain masterpieces into [him]self as if they were communion wafers.... When you've done that, you've been shaped from within by these books." In The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow's protagonist declares his faith in what he refers to as "the axial lines of life, with respect to which you must be straight or else your existence is merely clownery." These are in fact fundamental laws of human existence, "older than the Euphrates, older than the Ganges," comprising such first principles as love, balance, passion for truth, and magnanimity. It is worth noting that the lines are multiple; in order to find the axis proper, one has to triangulate among them--a strenuous undertaking, as Bellow's errant hero demonstrates. Crucial is the recognition that the axial lines are not "imaginary stuff" but the genuine article: "I bring my entire life," Augie assures us, "to the test."

In his Nobel lecture, Bellow argues that the principal justification of art lies in its power to peel back layers of appearance and lay bare a world that sends forth--in a phrase he borrows from Proust--"true impressions," persistent intimations of more abundant life that move us "to believe that the good we hang on to so tenaciously ... is no illusion." The writer's job is to descry these intimations and render them in a way that will make them accessible to readers. The reader's job, I do my best to convince students, is to absorb what the artist has disclosed and bring all we can of it to bear on the never-ending work of transforming ourselves. In the tension between our Platonic selves and the refractory stuff of actual existence, identity takes shape. I shudder to think how much poorer our identities, the students' or my own, would be if we lacked the vision of an ideal fulfillment. Art asks us to live the questions it raises, as Rilke urges in his Letters to a Young Poet, until such time as we are prepared to live our way into the answers.

1. In the original these lines, which I have translated literally, read: "[Sein Torso] gluht noch wie ein Kandelaber, / in dem sein Schauen, nur zuruckgeschraubt, // sich halt und glanzt .... denn da is keine Stelle, / die dich nicht sieht. Du musst dein Leben andern."

RICHARD K. CROSS is Professor of English at the University of Maryland.