“When a new thing…is presented us our first criticisms are not our truest, best, most homefelt, or most lasting but what come easiest on the instant.”
That’s from Gerard Manley Hopkins, the…idiosyncratic English poet and Jesuit priest whose letters I’ve been reading of late (after having gone through much of his poetry). Want a taste of his verse? Here’s the last stanza of “Inversnaid”:
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
Anyway, a couple of days ago—and roughly 140 years after Hopkins wrote the line we started this post with—Rob Long tweeted on learning of the death of Tom Wolfe, “One lesson from Tom Wolfe’s genius: to write a great novel, to capture a time, you must first sit quietly and pay attention to the world. As it is. Stop talking, listen, and take notes.”
I guess the message here is that our first impulse is often wrong; that, a truer, better, lasting response to anything, really, comes only after quiet reflection. That’s harder these days, I suppose. But still worth remembering.
