The Meaning of Recognition Read Free

the synthesis that Goethe was so keen on. That kind of scope needs an inexhaustible knack for putting things in an arresting manner to go with the comprehensive intensity of perception,
and Hodgins had that compound gift.
    Looking at it from the other direction, his circumstances would have made him emblematic whatever his talent. Put the two things together, however – the talent and the tragedy – and
you’ve got something with a force of gravity strong enough to feel on your face. It’s important to go on saying that, because his books look so slight. But they only look it. They weigh
as if the language in them had been refined from pitchblende. Barely there between the finger and the thumb, when opened they put you into the world of physics whose heavy metals produced the rays
that bombarded him in his illness. In his last book, sardonically called
Things Happen
, one of his last poems quotes Goethe in its title. The dying Goethe is said to have called for
‘
Mehr Licht, Mehr Licht
.’ Hodgins’ title is a translation: ‘More Light, More Light’. Let me quote the first stanza. Usually when a lecturer says ‘let
me’ he means he’s going to do it anyway, but for some of what Hodgins wrote as he grappled, whether early or late, with the looming fact of his awful finale, I do feel I need your
permission. I’m going to assume it, and use it as a blank cheque. When this is over, you can decide whether I’ve abused your trust. But enough of the pleasantries. There’s no
avoiding that first stanza any further. Here it comes.
    Sickly sunlight through the closed curtains
    that are white but much thicker than a sheet.
    Sunlight with all the life taken out of it,
    diminished but still there, an afterglow,
    like the presence of a friend who has died.
    You’re lying still and yet you’re moving fast.
    Notice that by using the impersonal ‘you’ he shuts out the ‘you’ that you would use for yourself. You yourself are just reading, not even visiting. You are well. You
might have seen a friend die, but you have a life you’ll be going back to. Back out there in your life, the sunlight won’t have all the life taken out of it. It will be ordinary,
everyday sunlight. You’ll be in it again. You won’t be in here. But then, with the opening of the second stanza, it turns out that you might be staying. By now he has made that standard
device, the impersonal ‘you’ that should mean only him, into a personal identification that includes the person he addresses. You are not excused after all.
    A nurse comes in to give the drip a shot.
    He opens the curtains in a moment of revelation.
    The sunlight is revitalized into an opportunist
    and instantly takes over the room like a brilliant virus,
    filling out even the places you had never thought to look.
    Your life is changed. The room is shown to you as it is,
    not as it dimly appeared to you all that time ago.
    You’re moving fast and yet you’re going nowhere.
    And that’s the whole poem. Critics shouldn’t quote poems whole, I think. When they do, they turn themselves into anthologists. But we need to see this poem whole because otherwise we
might miss the shift from the lifeless light that floods the first stanza to the brilliant, viral light that scorches the second, the light that turns out to be even more lifeless, the death light,
like the white light Ivan Ilyich sees in Tolstoy’s valedictory story, the dreadful story that tries to pretend Natasha Rostova never danced and Anna Karenina never loved. Seeing that shift of
intensity, we can see the grim relationship between the poem and its title. When Goethe called for ‘More light’, he’d already had his share, and more than his share. He’d
had enough of everything to get sick of it, which is not at all the same thing as being sick in advance. He’d had enough of fame and celebrity, for instance; enough to arrive at the accurate
judgement that they don’t add up to much. But it’s