The call of duty. Unspeakable duty.

Some duties in life we choose. Some watches we take up intentionally, fully aware of the demands they will make on us, the sacrifices they will require.

Other duties, however, are thrust upon us. They seek us out on sneaking feet, and before we realize it we are press-ganged and enlisted, on the ramparts with a weather eye to the horizon, lives in our hands, like it or not.

The former is how I would characterize my interest in and cataloging of instances of fictional characters being compared to beloved movie bigman Sydney Greenstreet. It is but an expression of my Sydney Greenstreet–sized passion for that noble object of comparison.

The latter category? Well, that would include a beat to which I hadn't, until this week, even realized I'd been assigned: reporting on { . . . sidelong glance . . . . whisper . . . } grandmotherfuckers. Ahem.

I did, a few years back, report on D. J. Enright's inclusion of that--thankfully rare--category of person in his list of causes of vampirism:

The sins and misfortunes reckoned to lead to the condition have included some weird items: committing suicide, of course, but also working on Sundays, smoking on holy days, drinking to excess, and having sexual intercourse with one's grandmother; more innocently, those born on Christmas Day are doomed to the same fate in punishment of their mothers' presumptuousness in conceiving on the same day as the Virgin Mary.

That, I thought, 'twould be the end of it. Like many a horror movie protagonist, I was wrong.

Earlier this week, reading Tristram Shandy, I came upon an account of a complicated and nonsensical argument that concluded with a proof that parents are not kin to their children, in part because while their "blood and seed" are mixed in the child, his are not mixed in them. Innocently, I read on:

It is held, said Triptolemus, the better opinion; because the father, the mother, and the child, though they be three persons, yet are they but (una caro) one flesh; and consequently no degree of kindred--or any method of acquiring one in nature--There you push the argument too far, cried Didius--for there is no prohibition in nature, though there is in the levitical law,--but that a man may beget a child upon his grandmother--in which case, supposing the issue a daughter, she would stand in relation both of--But who ever thought, cried Kysarcius, of laying with his grandmother?--The young gentleman, replied Yorick, whom Selden speaks of--who not only thought of it, but justified his intention to his father by the argument drawn from the law of retaliation--"You lay'd, Sir, with my mother, said the lad--why may not I lay with yours?"

And with that, let us leave this topic and hope never to be called to vigilance regarding it again.

Many's the time when, foully abused of a sudden by a cannonade of knife-bitter wind, my only recourse has been to laugh. Maniacally.

Today's dip into the writers' mailbag returns some sentiments suitable for the cold, cold day here in Chicago. It comes from the pen of Saul Bellow, writing to University of Chicago professor Edward Shils on September 15, 1966:

The most agreeable thing about Chicago is that one doesn’t run into many writers, critical razboiniks and gangsters of the pen. But then Chicago is also in a state of extraordinary winter nullity, and we haven’t seen many people. Winter nights are long. I have an electric blanket and read War and Peace.

I'm not having much luck with a quick attempt to learn what razboiniks are: Google tells me it's Romanian, and that, spelled "raboiznics," it might mean "warrior."

Regardless, War and Peace could be a good answer to our bleak midwinter--but I've read it too recently, and, frankly, it's too dour for my mood today. (Anna Karenina, on the other hand. . . . Oh, the sudden appearance of the train at the end sours things, but by that point you've had hundreds of pages in which to enjoy Stepan Arkadyevich and his feckless nonsense!)

Instead, it's Tristram Shandy for me, re-read the first time in eighteen years. What better choice to alleviate winter's gloom? "I am now fabricating for the laughing part of the world," wrote Laurence Sterne in a letter in 1762, "--for the melancholy part of it, I have nothing but my prayers--so God help them." Amen.

The Life and Opinions of Barbara Pym, Gentlewoman

It's no secret that I'm a fan of Barbara Pym. I think she's a wonderfully perceptive and comic writer, displaying an amazing economy in her sentences, characterizations, plots, and choice of settings and subjects. So this passage, from her diary (I'm stretching January's theme of letters to include it) entry of April 11, 1943, has brought me much amusement--as the book she's referring to is Tristram Shandy:

It seems a nice inconsequential sort of book--the sort of book one would like to have written--or might even one day write.

The mind boggles? What on earth would Tristram Shandy be like written by Barbara Pym? A hell of a lot shorter, that's for sure.

"The beginning is not a beginning at all," or, Maybe it's time to read Tristram Shandy again?

I pulled Adam Thirlwell's The Delighted States: A Book of Novels, Romances, and Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, and Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations, and a Variety of Helpful Indexes (2007), a book as precious yet as satisfying as its title, off my shelf over the weekend because I remembered that Thirlwell wrote well on the topic of Tristram Shandy. And I wasn't disappointed. Here, for example, is as good a distillation of Shandy as I could imagine being crammed into five sentences:

The essence of Sterne's novel is the way, deadpan, he makes Tristram a character who is stricken by a mania for comprehensiveness. To describe this type of mania, Sterne came up with the word hobbyhorse. Sterne's style is predicated on the hobbyhorse. All his destabilising of beginnings and endings (and everything in between) are part of his way of describing character: a construction helplessly at its own mercy, in thrall of compulsions of its own making. And Tristram's mania for comprehensiveness creates havoc with the book.

Writing a novel, you can try to get it all in; you can leave it all out; you can strike a middle ground and pretend that you've covered it all. Brutally: David Foster Wallace; Chekhov; Trollope. Sterne decided to make a game of pretending to care most about trying to get it all in; we've been playing in his playground ever since.

But Thirwell's next paragraph is even better, because it can so easily be turned on us, readers racing through our piles of unread books:

Tristram takes his life so seriously that his Life becomes impossible. For Tristram discovers that no beginning is ever a beginning. Every description of a beginning requires another description of the beginning's beginning, and so on. Therefore, although Tristram's Life, in its final state, take up around 600 pages, he has still not managed to get past the first few months of his life.

We read, in part, to illuminate and understand our experience, but what is the balance? When, instead, should we put down the book and go out?

All of this reminded me of a line from an early review of the novel in the Royal Female Magazine of February 1760, collected in the Norton Critical Edition of Tristram Shandy, which makes up for its ugliness as a book with this section of contemporary reviews:

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy . . . affects (and not unsuccessfully) to please, by a contempt of all the rules observed in other writings, and therefore cannot justly have its merit measured by them.

The reviewer does, however, go on to complain of the "wantonness of the author's wit" and to wish that a note of delicacy could have been introduced. The very idea of a delicate, inoffensive Sterne boggles the mind (a topic that came up a couple of years ago in connection with Thirlwell and one of those oh-so-eighteenth-century volumes, The Beauties of Sterne).

Then there's the first review of the novel, by William Kentrick in the December 1759 issue of the Monthly Review, which notes what is still a valid objection, and its, if not refutation, then at least its leavening factor:

There prevails, indeed, a certain quaintness, and something like an affectation of being immoderately witty, throughout the whole work. But this is perhaps the Author's manner. Be that, however, as it will, it is generally attended with spirit and humour enough to render it entertaining.

Which, if my memory of sixteen years ago is true, remains the case these 250 years later. There is, in Tristram Shandy, some flop sweat, but it's more than made up for by the true humor, inventiveness, surprise, and even genius on offer elsewhere in the book. Yet sixteen years is a long time to be away from a book one professes to love: perhaps it's time to revisit Tristram and Uncle Toby and the rest? Any thoughts, readers?

Sometimes the cogs mesh, other times the gears just spin

Tonight I attended a talk on Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey (1768). I left with my brain full of so many coincidences and confluences among things I've been reading and thinking about that I decided to map them out. I make no bold (or even timid) claims for the connections, which I openly admit are tenuous, but I think the web of them starts to give a sense of why I find constant pleasure--and a perpetual supply of new thoughts and ways of thinking--in a reading life.

Laurence Sterne had been on my mind since just after Christmas, when my friend gave me a DVD of A Cock and Bull Story, the 2005 movie of Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759). The movie, which I heartily recommend, stays impressively true to the digressive, hilarious, muddled spirit of the book; the sheer fun of it had me thinking that maybe I should read the novel itself again this winter. So a few weeks ago, as Stacey and I leaned against a wall waiting to be admitted to a different lecture (on bird song), having Sterne on the brain no doubt helped me pick out the poster for tonight's lecture from the usually indistinct mess of fliers and announcements papering the hallway.

Between work and the lecture, read a bit of Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), for which Maggie and Christmas are also, in a sense, responsible. When Maggie was in town in December, she was reading Robinson Crusoe (1719), our discussion of which made me think I should try A Journal of the Plague Year. However, it's unlikely that I'd have gotten around to it by now except that for Christmas Stacey got me Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map (2006), a history of London's 1854 cholera epidemic, and my brother got me Max Brooks's World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006). Clearly, if there was ever going to be a time to read A Journal of the Plague Year, it was now.

In the pages I read just before I left the bar feature Defoe's narrator, H. F., decides to flee London in the early days of the plague, only to discover that there are no horses available. Following that disappointment, he turns to bibliomancy to decide whether he will stay or set out on foot; he opens the Bible to Psalm 91, which exhorts him to

Say of the Lord, He is my refuge, and my foretress, my God, in him will I trust. Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler and from the noisome pestilence.

Thus reassured, H. F. decides to place his hopes (and his soul) in God's hands and stay in London.

Arriving at the talk, I learned that it was to focus largely on the role played in Sterne and subsequent sentimental literature (down to Frank Capra!) by the ideas of the vehicle and motion. It was fairly heady stuff, exploring the real and metaphorical roles of actual vehicles and motion, as well as more abstruse spiritual concepts of vehicles for the workings (and movement) of the soul, the emotions, and sentimental communication. But it did immediately call to mind H. F.'s worries about transportation and his entrusting his soul to God for delivery, if not physically out of London, then at least safely into the afterlife. The soldiers and zombies of World War Z came to mind, too: the soldiers, forced by society's collapse to eschew the vehicles they had come to depend on, are brought face-to-face with the zombies, the ultimate expression of Descartes's concept of a body without a soul They're empty vessels, still animate but to no good purpose--and with whom there is no communication. No matter how earnest and heartfelt an entreaty one makes, there is no hope that they will be moved.

Finally, a mention late in the talk of J. M. Coetzee's most recent novel brought me, in a sense, full circle, as Coetzee's 1988 novel, Foe, is a reworking of the Crusoe story. Though it's not nearly as good as Coetzee's best, if you're a Crusoe fan it's worth at least looking at; I had just today reminded myself to send Maggie a note asking if she knew about it.

So what does all of this mean? As I said at the top, almost certainly nothing of substance. But I know that it--and the talk itself--got the wheels of my brain spinning, and they're still going. And I know that if I were to ever imagine coming to believe in a soul, its vehicle-of communication, transit to immortality, whatever--would most certainly be some form of that whirring activity.