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• The eye, the steeple, and the (smart)phone

  06/11/26

  A few months ago, I remarked on Wordsworth’s despotic eye, and since then it has left a literal dent in my lens: I now see it everywhere. This is, I suppose, what happens when your lens has a dent in it… Most recently, it turned up in my reading group, where we are attempting the mighty Swann’s Way. The group’s rule is to stay inside the text, with little to no outside reference, a rule I have respected by posting my half-baked thoughts here instead.

  A quick recap: Wordsworth confesses in The Prelude to a stretch of life when “the eye was master of the heart,” when sight held his mind “in absolute dominion.” My last reading group decided this translated to the habit of the picturesque. The trained eye that ranks landscapes, compares scene with scene, turns them into content. The eye as tourist. It goes everywhere, sees everything, and comes home with nothing, like a person who has photographed every painting in a museum and experienced none of them (the natural enemy of the timed museum ticket, and of my summer holiday, I digress¹).

  Now Proust, page 67 of the Davis translation. The narrator has just spent a paragraph as a connoisseur of steeples. A pink spire near Balbec is appraised like a seashell. The dome of Saint-Augustin held up against Piranesi. The whole apparatus of taste is in motion. The group and I buckled up and spent an hour and a half on the following:

  I will never forget, in a curious town in Normandy near Balbec, two charming eighteenth-century houses that are in many respects dear to me and venerable and between which, when you look at it from the lovely garden that descends from the front steps to the river, the Gothic spire of a church hidden behind them soars up, appearing to complete, to surmount their facades, but in a material so different, so precious, so annulated, so pink, so polished, that you see clearly it no more belongs to them than does the crimson crenellated spire of some seashell, tapering to a turret and glazed with enamel, to the two handsome, smooth pebbles between which it is caught on the beach.

  Then he pulls the rug out!

  But since into none of these little engravings, with whatever taste my memory may have executed them, was it able to put what I had lost a long time ago, the feeling that makes us not consider a thing a spectacle, but believe in it as in a creature without equivalent, none of them holds in subjection an entire profound part of my life, as does the memory of those views of the Combray steeple from the streets behind the church.

  The feeling that makes a thing not a spectacle but like a creature! Wordsworth wrote thirteen books of blank verse trying to find his way back to such a vision, where the world is not merely seen but received. Proust seems to know this feeling too, though I have six volumes ahead of me before I can pretend to understand his version of it.

  But for now, the pink spire is exquisite and dead. The Combray steeple is ordinary and alive, because the child never knew it merely as an object. He lived under it, around it, through it. The steeple gave “all the occupations, all the hours, all the viewpoints of the town their shape, their crown, their consecration.” It was there when he went to the post office for letters, when he asked after Mme. Sazerat, when he came home in the evening already dreading the moment he would have to say goodnight to his mother and not see her again that day. The steeple got into him anyway, folded into errands and streets, twisting the hours, steeped in the dread of nightfall.

  The cures, though, go in opposite directions. Wordsworth’s is regime change. Two pages after the despotism passage, he describes the spots of time, memories deep enough to flip the whole arrangement. Memory storms the palace, the mind ends up “lord and master,” and the eye is sent back to the fields to do honest servant’s work. Proust looks at the same tyranny and decides the problem was never about being ruled. The steeple holds an entire profound part of his life in subjection, and he is plainly delighted about it! He does not want liberation. Just the right tyrant.

  My dear phone attempts this on me regularly. Every so often it exhumes old photos, sets them to music, and presents me with a spectacle of my own life². It has never once, however, produced a creature.

  Footnotes

  1. I do respect the dedication of these visitors. ↩

  2. Apple calls the resurfaced ones “Memories,” which might be the most Proustian thing a trillion-dollar company has ever done. ↩

• Spots Of Time

  04/12/26

  There is a sickness Wordsworth had, and I think I have it, and I suspect you might too. The only difference is that he wrote it down in verse so lovely it makes an illness of the senses sound more like music.

  He called it the despotism of the eye. In Book XI of The Prelude, the book he titled “Imagination,” Wordsworth confesses to a stretch of life when “the eye was master of the heart,” when the eye, “the most despotic of our senses,” held his mind in “absolute dominion.” Read by itself, it sounds like penance for some sort of Romantic crime. Too much hill-walking, perhaps? An overindulgence in the picturesque? The eternal hazard of the nature poet.

  The state to which i now allude was one
  In which the eye was master of the heart,
  When that which is in every stage of life
  The most despotic of our senses gained
  Such strength in me as often held my mind
  In absolute dominion

  But no, he means something worse. This is the eye that cannot stop seeking. A new surface and then another. More, more, more! Wordsworth is describing, in 1805, the exact feeling of picking up your phone for no reason and setting it down an hour later feeling robbed. Where did the time go? More to the point, where did the mind go?

  The phone comparison tempts me, but it lets me off too easily. It also flattens the force of his words. He is describing a mind made helpless by stimulus, the slightly sick feeling of having looked at too much and taken in too little.

  Then, two pages later, he does the maddeningly Wordsworthian thing. He makes the problem stranger just as I was getting comfortable with my little phone analogy. The answer to the restless eye is not less looking, exactly. It is a few images that have gone so far inward they have become part of him. A memory deep enough to stand against the present.

  Induced, effect, in whatsoever degree,
  Of custom that prepares such wantonness
  As makes the greatest things give way to least,
  Or any other cause which has been named,
  Or, lastly, aggravated by the times
  Which with their passionate sounds might often make
  The milder minstrelsies of rural scenes
  Inaudible — was transient. Had felt
  Too forcibly, too early in my life,
  Visitings of imaginative power
  For this to last: I shook the habit off
  Entirely and for ever, and again
  In Nature’s presence stood, as I stand now,
  A sensitive, and a creative soul.

  There are in our existence spots of time
  Which with distinct pre-eminence retain
  A vivifying virtue, whence, depressed
  By false opinion and contentious thought,
  Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight
  In trivial occupations and the round
  Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
  Are nourished and invisibly repaired —
  A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
  That penetrates, enables us to mount
  When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.
  This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks
  Among those passages of life in which
  We have had deepest feeling that the mind
  Is lord and master, and that outward sense
  Is but the obedient servant of her will.
  Such moments, worthy of all gratitude,
  Are scattered everywhere, taking their date
  From our first childhood — in our childhood even
  Perhaps are most conspicuous. Life with me,
  As far as memory can look back, is full
  Of this beneficent influence.

  The same words come back, but the order has changed. The passage has inverted. First the eye rules the heart. Then the mind rules the eye.

  The cure for the tyranny of the eye is memory. Wordsworth calls them “spots of time,” charged moments, many from childhood, that keep a “vivifying virtue” and return years later to repair the mind once ordinary life has worn it smooth. The man enslaved to the new is saved by the old. What rescues him is a handful of deep memories he has been carrying the whole time, unspent.

• On Noticing

  10/14/25

  Many authors relay the art of noticing to living a good life.

  Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. Mary Oliver

  …and probably a whole lot more from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing that I have been meaning to read for years… more to come!

• How To Read A Novel

  02/28/25

  This frame should apply to all advice-seekers and givers, of every domain:

  The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions…you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess.

  …few people ask from books what books can give us.

  Woolf published around 300 reviews, essays, and notes in her career! The more reviews I read, the more I wonder: do authors bring a different empathy to their critiques?

  Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticise at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read…open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this, and soon you will find that your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something far more definite.

  Attempting to write on your own makes you appreciate the work of others with a deeper understanding.

  Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read, but to write – to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words.

  How do craft such a sharp essay?

  I’m in awe of Woolf’s dedication, four revisions, each more precise than the last. What began as a school talk in 1926 was published in The Yale Review that same year, then refined and republished in The Second Common Reader in 1932. Link to a pdf version of this essay.