Mason Cooley (1927-2002) was an American
academic known for his aphorisms. He was
a professor emeritus of French, Speech and World Literature at the College of Staten Island, as well as an
assistant professor of English at Columbia
University from 1959 to 1967, and adjunct professor from 1980 to 1988.
He wrote
the first-ever book-length analysis of novelist Barbra Pym, and penned the introduction to the Barnes & Noble
edition of Middlemarch. His critical analysis of David Lodge also did much to bring that comic writer to the
attention of academia.
And he also
wrote aphorisms. Hundreds of them, bound
in privately printed little booklets that brought infinite delight to his friends.
I’m happy
to say that I was a very close friend of Mason’s during the last 12 years of
his life. He was, in many ways, a
remarkable man. Fewer people had a
greater gift for friendship, and he was able to walk into a room crowded with
strangers and walk out with dozens of new (and lifelong!) friends. He was funny – witty, acerbic, and a master
of the short form of the well-crafted irony.
Some of
Mason’s aphorisms include: My accomplishments may have been modest,
but, then, so were my efforts. Or Rising from incompetence to mediocrity
takes tenacity and work. Two other
favorites include: New York is now the
leading world city in every way, including the doubling of the rat population
every five years, and the wonderful,
Never strike a family member. Your house
will be flooded with social workers, policemen, and lawyers.
On June 1st,
1995, Mason delivered a Commencement Speech to a class of graduating English
majors. It shows his commitment to wit,
to brevity, and his deep and abiding love of literature. There is nothing here that we at the Jade
Sphinx do not endorse whole-heartedly, and we thought it an excellent way to
start the New Year:
Right off I want to show that I am
your friend by telling you that my speech is going to be a minute or so under
my allotted 10 minutes rather than over. The most delightful thing about almost
any speech is its coming to an end in a timely manner, and if it ends earlier
than expected, rejoicing spreads through the audience. I plan to achieve at
least that form of success.
Everyone here today is either an
English major, or a friend or relative of an English major, that term
denominating someone who decided to devote at least a couple of years of study
to reading and writing about literature. I decided to be an English major over
a half a century ago, and liked it so well that I went on to take an MA and Ph.D.
in English and teach it for 45 years.
My choice of occupation is one that
I have never regretted. I have always known that the life of reading and
writing and thinking about literature, and, of course, teaching, was the life
for me. Sometimes I minded not having
more money. Sometimes I was bored and sterile, indifferent and inattentive, but
the subject was still full of life and power when I got myself together enough
to return to it.
Why this lifelong taste for what we
call “English?”--meaning literature written in English or translated into it,
and the language itself as we read it and write it.
First, who could resist the
opportunity to read one wonderful book after another, first for college credit
and later for an academic salary? The books are always there, not digests or
textbooks or archival material, but real, honest-go-God books written to be
read by people. These books are the primary subject matter of the English
major, with, of course, writing about them a close second. They are always
there waiting to be read. The student of English is less dependent than almost
all other students on the quality of his teachers. A good teacher of Literature
brings enlightenment and excitement to the subject, but is by no means
absolutely necessary. Even with a poor teacher, or no teacher at all, the books
are still there to be read, and that is the center of literary study. Just get
hold of the books, and you can give yourself a literary education anytime,
anyplace.
English is not just another major,
for it branches out into everything else--history, philosophy, art, religion,
even science. If you want to learn something about Christian theology, you can
learn it in connection with studying Milton. If you want to study the rise of
industrialism in England, you can read Dickens, especially HARD TIMES. If you
want to find out something about psychoanalysis, you can take a course in
psychoanalysis and literature. The core of an English major is literature, but
literature involves almost everything else once you begin to study it in any
depth.
We read for all sorts of reasons,
practical and impractical, for information and for moral instruction, but most
of all we English majors read in order to be reading, for the delight of it.
Virginia Woolf has written a memorable fancy of Judgment Day in which readers
figure.
"Yet who reads to bring about
an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practice because
they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? I have
sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great
conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards--their
crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable
marble,--The Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain
envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these
need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading."
But in addition to reading, English
majors, and their professors, have to talk and write about literature. The
writing is what causes procrastination (almost universally), lip-biting,
headaches, and insomnia. Writing, as someone has said, is the hardest work
there is that does not involve heavy lifting. Writing about literature is in
particular fiendishly difficult. Why?
The basis for a literary piece is an
intense emotional and imaginative involvement with a text--Dickens,
Shakespeare, Yeats, whatever. Without that involvement one has not experienced
the work and therefore is in a very poor position to write about it. But after
the involvement, in order to write, must come detachment and analysis. Literary
criticism combines imagination and analytic reason, fancy and fact, detachment
and involvement, irony and passion, the conscious and the unconscious. There is
in good literary criticism a constant shuttling back and forth between these
poles in the course of creating an apparently seamless essay. Writing literary
criticism forces one to develop emotional and intellectual agility and
resourcefulness.
That agility and resourcefulness,
that ability to think from a variety of perspectives without losing coherence,
are invaluable in the world beyond the university. It is not true that the only
thing English majors can do is teach--though many of us do that for a lifetime
and are glad of it. With a broad humanistic education such as English offers,
when you go out into the world, you do not find a clearly labelled slot waiting
for you, and your first job may be the hardest one you will ever have to find
to find. But once you have made contact, you will find that the ability to read
and write, and to do the thinking behind reading and writing, are far from
common abilities, though they are always much in demand. Particularly, people
who write well, have analytical skills, and possess enough emotional
flexibility to adapt to changing situations often find themselves going up the
professional ladder at a gratifyingly brisk clip.
Goodbye and good luck. Don't forget
that as a result of your literary studies, your mind works a little differently
from most people’s, perhaps with a little more irony and playfulness, a little
more flexibility, a little more agility. Hang on to that difference when you
find yourself hedged in by a mighty chorus of things trying to pass themselves
off as social and personal facts that must be submitted to without question.
Lots of supposed facts and so-called necessities dissolve into prejudice or
myth if you walk all the way around them. With and independent and skeptical
mind, you might just spot the exit to freedom and invent a life for yourself.
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