Sydney M. Williams
burrowingintobooks.blogspot.com
Burrowing into Books
“Wind Sprints” by Joseph Epstein
September 2, 2019
“I myself fall into the last category – those
writers who feel a desolating sense of uselessness
if a few days go by without their writing anything,
and writing it for publication.”
Joseph
Epstein (1937-)
Introduction
Wind Sprints 2016
We read for many reasons. We read fiction because we want to be
entertained, as in humor and mysteries, or to understand something of character,
as in the classics, or to learn the author’s take on a specific era. We read
nonfiction to better explain science, psychology, technology, or to become
familiar with historical events. We read biography to better know those who
came before us, and autobiographies to see how the author perceives him or
herself. And we read essays to get the view of the writer on events great and
small. But in all literature, it is the quality of the writing that
distinguishes great books from the simply good: the ease of the writing, the
words used, the sentence structure, the flow from paragraph to paragraph. “Something there is,” Professor Epstein
wrote in “Literary Tippling,” “about an elegantly turned sentence or a
well-made paragraph that calms me…” They do me as well, and these also put a
smile on my face.
One should never measure a book by its weight. For three years this tome
sat by my bedside. When I went to bed at night and rose in the morning, it looked
beseechingly at me, but I withstood its forbidding 581 pages. When I finally
succumbed, I discovered some of the most beautiful writing I have encountered.
Within those pages lie 143 essays, “wind sprints,” as Joseph Epstein calls
them. It was not a marathon as I had feared. The title is auspicious. These are
short essays, generally 800 to 1000 words, perfect for reading in what Mr.
Epstein calls the “smallest room” in one’s house. In one essay titled
“The Greatest Story Never Read,” the Jewish Professor Epstein writes of his
decision to read all 1130 pages of the King James version of the Bible. He
tells us: “I generally read three chapters a day with my breakfast” – a
useful formula for reading Wind Sprints. As an amateur writer of essays,
I have a prejudice toward the form, but as a reader of all types of literature
I have some idea of how words and sentences, when properly used, give joy in
their resonance. Like most writers, Mr. Epstein is a perfectionist. In an essay
titled “A Happy Problem,” he writes about the publication of his 21st
book: “Some of the sentences give genuine pleasure; others one would like to
have the chance to rework, ever so slightly but crucially.”
In the foreword to his 1977 collection Essays of E.B. White, Mr.
White began: “The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the
childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to
him, is of general interest.” There is truth in that statement, but it is not
the incident(s), but the way in which it or they are described. In “All the
News Unfit to Read,” he catches my own feelings: “Someone once said that
each day one picks up one’s newspaper in eager anticipation and puts it down in
disappointment.” In “Sound Off,” where he watches the evening news with the
mute button engaged, his words resonate: “One has only to glimpse the
self-satisfaction playing upon their faces to realize what they know we have no
need to know.” In “The Divine Miss H. Revisited,” he amiably, but with
razor-sharp wit, makes a political point using his house-bound cat as the
fulcrum: “In short, she has been offered a gentler, if more extreme version
of our welfare state…”
No matter ones’ political biases, his sentences are learned, sophisticated
and fun. In “Don’t Ask, Multitask,” Epstein references two of my favorite
authors, P.G. Wodehouse and Edith Wharton. In “Go Google Yourself,” he quotes
Stendhal that having a book published is to risk being shot in public and then
writes: “I used to compare having a book out in the world to walking down a
deserted street, when suddenly a window opens and from behind a curtain someone
yells, ‘Fool.’” A sentence in “Audio-Dismal Aids” reminded me of
Henry Kaufman when he was head of research at Salomon Brothers. Mr. Kaufman often
said he preferred to see analysts sitting back, hands behind their head in
contemplation, rather than hunched over a computer: “The sight of a man or
woman of high intelligence in the act of thinking – there can be no more
compelling audiovisual aid.”
In Death Comes to the Archbishop, Willa Cather wrote: “Miracles…seem
to rest not so much upon…healing power coming suddenly near us from afar but
upon our perceptions being made finer, so that, for a moment, our eyes can see
and our ears can hear what is there around us always.” Joseph Epstein’s
genius is that he miraculously makes the ordinary extraordinary. He will make
you smile and cause you to remember favorite books and movies. For example, in
“That’s a Nickel” he references the late 19th Century French psychologist
Émile Coué who said, “Every day in every way I am getting better and better”
– a line best remembered (at least by me) as being uttered by Herbert Lom,
playing Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus, in “The Revenge of the Pink Panther.” Epstein’s
essays cover myriad topics: books, reading, the Draft, music, orchids, his cat,
neckties, language, politics, shopping, technology, hot dogs and the Bible. The
shortest, “Toting a Dumb Phone,” concludes “No app exists to organize the
wandering mind, thank goodness.” The longest, “Funny, But I do Look Jewish:”
“The complication of being Jewish…I believe, is the feeling of never quite
feeling altogether at home anywhere.” That may be, but Joseph Epstein is
perfectly comfortable in the milieu he has chosen as a profession – a teacher
of English and a writer of essays, and we readers are his beneficiaries.
The essays span twenty years, 1996-2015. All had been previously
published, all but five in the Weekly Standard. Each essay consumes but
a few minutes and are ideal for those free moments we all have. You won’t be disappointed.
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