Read a book or watch TV -- Vonnegut, Harold Bloom, T.S. Eliot

Each with something to say about it . . .

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. tried meditating in the '60s, he said, in his Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage, [I think. Sorry] using a mantra, a Sanskrit word which he thinks may mean $85, what he paid for it. Later it dawned on him that "in our civilization" we meditate using "a medieval object, a book," putting ourselves in touch with people in ages gone by. This kind of meditation, he says, gives "access to brains better than our own."

Ah the mystery of it all. Some guy 500 years ago had a great thought, and it's ours to ponder, with or without the Internet.

As for the joys of reading, Dr. Ken Cooper, the aerobics specialist, decided at one point that relaxation was as much obtained by quiet reading as by meditation-with-mantra. The maharishi came and went, and we still have reading.

Secret sharing: People say, "My, you do a lot of reading," as if I steal from sleep or eating or prayer. It's time for a little secret: I generally don't watch the tube, that's what. The tube I figure is for mind-vacating. A movie works that way too.

The time-snatcher television relates to schooling too. Kids who go for the tube with every free moment, reading only what's required even in demanding school programs, are culturally deprived. TV, sedative or stimulant, is in any case a drug, I say.

Some fairly complicated stuff: Harold Bloom touches on TV in The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, his unapologetic appreciation and promotion of what the West has given mankind. Discussing "Shakespeare, Center of the Canon,” he says "partisans of Resentment" object that only an elite can read in the way he recommends. Bloom isn’t sure even about that. It's gotten harder to "read deeply” he concedes, adding that "even the elite tend to lose concentration.”

Wondering if his generation represents the last of the close-reading public, he asks whether his not owning a TV set until age 40 might be relevant. He wonders "if a critical preference for context over text does not reflect" impatience with "deep reading."

"Context over text" refers to how critical theorists, his "partisans of Resentment," tear everything apart, eschewing enjoyment in favor of analysis. Bloom also analyzes, but they do it in a peevish pecking-away-at-things to satisfy a craving for upset, he says. Armed with Freud, whom Bloom much respects, and far lesser lights such as the eminence noir Michel Foucault, whom he does not, they take off into a literary sky-blue yonder with anarchistic intent.

And that’s a putdown with hair on its chest . . .

When times weren't a-changing: We take it for granted that times are changing, but Shakespeare didn't. Nor did his contemporaries, whom we call Elizabethans and Jacobeans, after Queen E. and King James, of Bible-translation fame. Therefore Shakespeare et al. could talk of human nature as a timeless universal. They were not tempted to political correctness as we know it, incessant politicizing, or analysis of their society, which they took for granted.

Their times were changing, of course, and we can analyze them. But apart from recording the "rise of [merchant] families and their ambition to ally themselves with needy peerages and to acquire country estates," Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists had no sense of it, T.S. Eliot observes in his Selected Essays, 1913-1922 (London, 1950).

They were "blessed," said Eliot, because it meant they could "concentrate their attention . . . upon the common characteristics of humanity in all ages, rather than upon the differences." The same went for Dante and the ancient Greeks but not for writers "in periods of unsettlement," as Petronius in the 1st century and Lucian in the 2nd.

Elizabethans and Jacobeans "believed in their own age," as "no nineteenth- or twentieth-century writer of the greatest seriousness has been able to believe in his age," said Eliot, whose "Waste Land" was no happy-ending Broadway musical. Eliot sounded wistful as he made this point, as if he would like to be able to believe in his age.

We join the master in his wistfulness? No?