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Literary relations: Pater, Hopkins, and me
American Poetry Review, The, Sep/Oct 2002 by Weiss, Theodore
I find myself both as man and as myself something most determined and distinctive, at pitch, more distinctive and higher pitched than anything else I see; I find myself with my pleasures and pains, my powers and my experiences, my deserts and guilts, my shame and sense of beauty, my dangers, hopes, fears, and all my fate, more important to myself than anything I see. And when I ask where does all this throng and stack of being, so rich, so distinctive, so important, come from / nothing I can see can answer me. And this whether I speak of human nature or of my individuality, my selfbeing. For human nature, being more highly pitched, selved, and distinctive than anything in the world, can have been developed, evolved, condensed, from the vastness of the world not anyhow or by the working of common powers but only by one of finer or higher pitch and determination than itself and certainly than any that elsewhere we see, for this power had to force forward the start or stubborn elements to the one pitch required. And this much more true when we consider the mind; when I consider my selfbeing, my consciousness.and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnut leaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man (as when I was a child I used to ask myself What must it be to be someone else?). Nothing else in nature comes near this unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctiveness, and selving, this selfbeing of my own. Nothing explains it or resembles it, except so far as this, that other men to themselves have the same feeling. But this only multiples the phenomena to be explained so far as the cases are like and do resemble. But to me there is no resemblance: searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being. The development, refinement, condensation of nothing shows any sign of being able to match this to me or give me another taste of it, a taste even resembling it.
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One may dwell on this further. We say that any two things however unlike are in something like. This is the one exception: when I compare my self, my being-myself. with anything else whatever, all things alike, all in the same degree, rebuff me with blank unlikeness; so that my knowledge of it, which is so intense, is from itself alone, they in no way help me to understand it. And even those things with which I in some sort identify myself, as my country or family, and those things which I own or call mine, as my clothes and so on, all presuppose the stricter sense of self and me and mine and are from that derivative.
One cannot, I believe, fail to be impressed by the irony accumulating in the time that expired between Hopkins's writing of the above self-examination and the later sonnet "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day." His mood has moved all the way from fascinating (and fascinated as well) self-examination to horror at that self. As the sonnet says,
