something

Well, friends, it’s time for another installment of “I read something so good I have to tell you all about it.” Previous installments: the moth one, and the one about the eclipse. Today I’m here to talk to you about Something Defeasible, by Max Beerbohm. It’s a short essay, you can read it in the nicely formatted version I prepared, or over at Project Gutenberg from where I snagged the text. I’ll wait, or if you think you won’t read it just know that there are spoilers below that I’d rather Max get the credit for.

I wasn’t reading this one for a self-assigned homework. I didn’t have any things to look out for, not counting similes or counting how many direct renderings there were vs allusions or abstract ideas. This one was just for, I don’t know, reading. Or for absorbing good examples of what good writing looks like. It’s in The Norton Book of Personal Essays.¹ So I was just, you know, reading Max’s. On my lunch break. For relaxation. I wasn’t expecting him to hit me in the face.

I must admit that Max put me on the back foot from the get go and I didn’t even realize that it was part of the setup. I thought we were in the English countryside, admiring a some real old houses. He continued, and well, I caught up. We’re on the beach, and some kids are making sandcastles, and doing other kid things. And the tide is coming in, which is something that it’s always doing, always going in or out. So what. One kid is making a nice sand cottage, quite artfully, it’s really cool. I guess Max has had enough of the kids and their sandcastles so he goes off to read his newspaper. Something about the Labour party. What year is this? 1919. Ok, so this essay is contemporaneous with Downton Abbey, the war he is referring to is World War I. So obviously the tide is time and the sand houses are England, and it’s a complicated time with a lot of changes happening. The tide is still coming in.

The Labour party of 1919 might be about to make a real mess of things, and there would be trouble. Max isn’t really into the trouble, but sometimes, sometimes things have to break down. He doesn’t really like it, but it sure can be exciting. I don’t think Max particularly wanted to admit this little secret, but the boy with the house made of sand forced his hand. The tide was really in now, and that boy was leaping and cheering the sea’s razing of his so carefully built and decorated Jacobean cottage. Max sees it and wishes he hadn’t, and I think that’s why he has to write this essay.

Two things here really get me. One: I saw all of this stuff happening in real time and yet I still didn’t expect the turn at the end. The call is coming from inside the house, and it’s us. Boy, we’re screwed. Two: and I think this is necessary for it to have hit as hard as it did despite being over a hundred years old. Our moment, it’s a mess, it’s a lot like that moment. Some nightmare surgeon is just cutting away at everything and no one is able to stop it. It’s only getting hotter. New tech is coming. I mean new tech can be cool, but I’ve been through it a couple of times, so my cheers these days are pretty green and wan. At least my part of the country isn’t lying in a blanket of smoke. Doesn’t mean others aren’t in it now or we won’t be next. Et cetera et cetera. Ugh. How did Max know?

And more importantly, how did Max do it? It seems a rather obvious set of rhymes, no? And yet my nose is bleeding and my face hurts. As near as I can figure, the move is to find two things that can sit next to each other and have something to say. It’s the back and forth that makes the literal into a metaphor. The order matters. The reader makes the analogies go by investing their reasoning in the pattern. The reader is me. The trap is set and I step right into it. The logic is inescapable because it is my logic.

jg

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