Garry Wills, Philip Larkin

The other day I spent $5 on a one-week subscription to the NYRB so I could get access to a few recent articles.  One was a review of, among other things, two of Garry Wills's books, Font of Life, and Augustine's Confessions:

For [Augustine], baptism no longer stood out in high relief. The baptized Christian could not expect to be buoyed up by the sense of having been transformed by a single, dramatic rite. Human nature did not change so fast. Each believer remained like a leaky ship on the high seas, kept afloat by the constant creak of the bilge pump. The salt water of small, insidious sins dripped through its timbers. If not pumped out by constant acts of penance, prayer, and almsgiving, these small trickles of sin could sink the ship. In this, Augustine preached a doctrine for the long haul, suited to a gray world where almost everyone was a Christian and very few of them were good Christians.

Another was a review of The complete poems of Philip Larkin.  Here's Larkin on modernism:

I dislike such things not because they are new, but because they are irresponsible exploitations of technique in contradiction of human life as we know it. This is my essential criticism of modernism, whether perpetrated by Parker, Pound, or Picasso [or, Einekleineblog might add, Miró or Klee or Warhol]: it helps us neither to enjoy nor endure. It will divert us as long as we are prepared to be mystified or outraged, but maintains its hold only by being more mystifying and more outrageous: it has no lasting power. 

And on aging:

“Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines—”

And on death:

Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

On James Joyce:

“a textbook case of declension from talent to absurdity.”

Anyone looking to buy me a Father's Day present could do a lot worse than Wills's Augustine's Confessions and Larkin's The complete poems.