42 The New York Reviewgiven along with the opening itself;
and if we acknowledge...In Little Did I Know, with its time-
shuttling weave of diary entries al-
ternating with deep dives into the
remembered past, Cavell often adopts
this almost mannered voice, borrow-
ing his serpentine rhythms from Henry
James and Marcel Proust.
But Cavell has a countering (or per-
haps contrapuntal) voice, which aspires
to the abruptness of aphorism. A talent
for the witty aside had always been a
resource in his writing, as when he re-
marked in Pursuits of Happiness that
“a willingness for marriage entails a
certain willingness for bickering.” In
his later writing, aphorism becomes
an end in itself. There is a moment
in Little Did I Know, dating from the
summer of 1972, when Cavell, inspired
by the fragmentary writings—and
the Provençal landscape—of the poet
René Char, tries his hand for “ten days
of quite deliberate departure and di-
rection in my writing.” The resulting
aphorisms, reproduced in Little Did I
Know, pointed a way forward. “Advice
on being human,” he wrote. “Do not
stomach what you have no taste for, for
you will develop the taste.” Or: “Five
senses and just one world. The odds
were fair enough.”
A philosophy built entirely of apho-
risms is what Cavell found in his two
major models of philosophical style,
Wittgenstein and Emerson. For both
thinkers, a turn toward the aphoristic
coincided with a rejection of system-
atic aspirations. Cavell asks readers “to
recall Emerson’s and Wittgenstein’s
relation, in their fashionings of discon-
tinuity, to the medium of philosophy
as aphorism, in counterpoise to its me-
dium as system.” In an impressive essay
on collecting titled “The World as
Things,” included in Here and There,
Cavell relates Emerson’s interest in
natural history museums to the magpie
assemblages—cullings from personal
journals, quotations from stray read-
ing, fleeting insights—that formed his
essays.
Cavell offers a fresh interpretation
of Emerson’s visit to the Jardin des
Plantes in Paris in July 1833, when
Emerson (as many biographers have
pointed out) was overwhelmed by the
“bewilder ing series of animated for ms”on display, the “beautiful collection” of
birds in their “fancy-colored vests,” the
scorpions with which he felt “an occult
relation.” Walking through the zoo and
noting the animals “that Adam named
or Noah preserved,” he said to himself,
“I will be a naturalist.” What Emer-
son took from this revelatory visit, in
Cavell’s view, was not some simmering
conflict between scientist and philoso-
pher, but a confirmation of his instincts
as a writer. The “beautiful collection”
of birds matches “the way we are to see
[Emerson’s] sentences hang or perch
together.” According to Cavell’s read-
ing, “Every Emersonian sentence [is]
a self-standing topic sentence of the
essay in which it appears,” while Em-
erson’s paragraphs are “bundles or col-
lections that may be moved.”
Cavell’s observation registers the
oddly percussive and additive qual-
ity of Emerson’s prose in essays like
“Self-Reliance,” as well as the num-
bered entries in Wittgenstein’s Phil-
osophical Investigations. But it also
gestures toward how Cavell wanted
his own late writings to be received. In
“The World as Things,” he describes a
sense of looking at the world, as well as
writing about it, as “aggregation and
juxtaposition.”
One thinks in this regard of the bur-
ied jar filled with “one of each differ-
ent thing or creature.” In Little Did I
Know, Cavell connects that moment
with a radio announcement he heard,
around the same time, that the kidnap-
per of the Lindbergh baby had been
executed. The radio emitted a hum
that Cavell assumed was the sound of
the electric chair. Six decades later, he
found himself “teaching a course on
opera and film [and] describing the
Overture of The Marriage of Figaro as
expressing the hum of the world, spe-
cifically the restlessness of the people
of the world.”
Cavell provides no explicit linkage
among these instances. He offers them
for inspection, like the exotic hum-
mingbirds and parrots on display in the
Jardin des Plantes. What comes across
most powerfully, in this and other pas-
sages of “aggregation and juxtaposi-
tion” in Little Did I Know and Here
and There, is Cavell’s attentive listen-
ing, throughout his long and distin-
guished career, for what one might call
the hum of humanity. Qtnr.com/newsletter
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I learned to listen to what I see
But never quite to see what I hear
And something has always been missing
In the hearing: glamorous truth
No that’s been there no it’s something else:
The origin story of the god
Of stories yes that’s it that headless
Moon not swollen with night but the moon
As it dissolves dawn’s haptic canvas
That self-portrait of the first silence—Rowan Ricardo PhillipsBenfey 40 42 .indd 42 4 / 13 / 22 5 : 20 PM