The best books on meaning and mutability

In his hundreds of poems, Frost wrote about a lot of things, but almost always about the fluid nature of the world and our efforts to give it shape and meaning. The very form of a poem, he believed, embodies those efforts. The question always remains: What form do we find, what form do we impose, and what self do we construct in doing so?

Start with “For Once, Then, Something,” in which he adapts the meter of classical poetry to the cadences of the English language and the ambiguity of modern life. Take a long look at the long poem “Home Burial,” in which a grieving couple clash over incompatible ways of understanding nature’s apparent indifference to human desire. Re-read “Mending Wall,” in which two people disagree about the meaning of the form they cooperate in imposing on the landscape.

And don’t neglect the letters in which Frost acknowledges his dept to William James, the psychologist who explored how we make meaning of what he called the “blooming, buzzing confusion” around us – and find something like ourselves in the process.

A young man pretends to be something he isn’t, and (perhaps) discovers that he is what he pretends to be – and isn’t.  Nothing remains fixed. The slippery language is essential: Trying to make his experience mean something coherent and actionable challenges his enormous skill with language. After all, words are one of the ways we try to fence off the flux, but it won’t be contained. The language is confusing in the truest sense, mixed up. The first words of the play are “Who’s there?” and Hamlet’s first words are a slippery attempt at an answer: “A little more than kin, and less than kind.” Our words are approximate at best, downright wrong at worst. Through the following five acts the play explores what that question and answer mean, and especially how the struggle to put the answer into words is itself part of the answer.

Work! It’s one of the most neglected topics in literature, and yet it’s what most of us spend our lives doing, trying to create something where there was nothing. How can we make it meaningful? Pirsig shows us that by investing ourselves in the most ordinary activities we shape the shapeless world, and ourselves, into something transcendent, if only briefly. His keyword is “quality,” by which he means the essential whatness of things: What they are is what we make of them, and in doing so, we make ourselves, in work that is never finished.

In these accounts of strange neurological misfires, Sacks shows how unreliable we can be as narrators of our own lives. The examples are extreme, sure, but they question the foundations of our certainty about the world and ourselves. Ordinarily, our senses make sense of the flux, label it and archive it for future reference; when the wires get crossed, we see hints of the essential changeableness of things and of the fictional self that tries to tame them. The book is a guided tour of what Sacks call our cerebral habitat: “Forcing or finding order in an imagined chaos.”

It’s the oldest book I know of that tries to explain the mutable material world in strictly material terms. Appropriately, or maybe paradoxically, Lucretius puts his treatise into the form of poetry, following strict rules of prosody, as if the conventions of verse could create order out of chaos. Two thousand years later, the master poet A.E. Stallings translates it into formal English poetry. Nothing remains fixed, especially not language, and yet we never quit trying.