On the day you were born, dear reader, you were sensible to only a select few things. You emerged squint-eyed from the womb, a small and crying little thing. The world outside was too bright and too loud, there was too much a sense of movement as they picked you up and placed you in your mother’s arms. From the offing, the world was full of sounds: your mother crying, you crying, whisperings, murmurings, light cooings, baby talk. There were also occasional jarring sounds: the sounds of cars on a busy street, of something heavy crashing to the floor. These sights and sounds acted upon your as-yet unformed brain, stimulating and making impressions on it. As you grew first into a toddling little boy or girl, and then into a “whining school”-boy or girl, you came into contact with innumerable others–other adults and children, perhaps, siblings, if you had any, but especially your parents or caregivers–those who spoke to you nearly constantly. You would hear–if only dimly–what they said (starting, in the ideal, with “mama” and “dada”) and began slowly to speak as they would speak, and overall began to be shaped quite thoroughly by the influence of your environment. As you grew older, teachers formed some minor part of how you thought and spoke, though probably much less than your siblings and friends.

How, precisely, did this influence take place? In the first place, as sensory human being, you found certain sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and haptic sensations to be naturally pleasant or unpleasant–if it was the sugar rush of candy, quite so; if the shock of placing one’s finger obliviously on a hot stove, quite the opposite–but this particular set of reactions you had came primarily from the interaction between the things themselves and the general physiological features that the great mass of humanity shares in (and which allows you, presumably, to identify with most of the sensations I’ve described; if you, for some reason, had a faulty nervous system, then the examples I’m offering might not apply to you; which illustrates, on a certain level, the futility of trying to make arguments like the one’s I’m making, rooted in supposedly common experience.) Regardless of what exceptions may apply to these phenomena, the larger point stands: that there is a class of likes and dislikes that stem purely from physiology, rather than some invented human ideology. Burning your fingers on the stove will almost always be unpleasant, unless you are able by some means to train or trick yourself into taking pleasure in what most people consider pain. This pain is not the product of an ideology, unless we are prepared to call every toddler an ideologue. These natural sensations are the reductio ad absurdum of postmodern arguments which claim that there is no discernable difference between one or the other experience, between one or the other piece of art. Where the postmodernist may still have a good argument, however, is when we turn to discussing the social effects of natural sensations.

This social mediation happens almost as soon as you’ve left the womb. The adults in your life, if you came from a wealthy and privileged environment, likely sought to surround you with bright colors and joyful memories. (To furnish such memories they will have felt dutybound by societal norms.) As you grew older, they likely tried to fill you with happy thoughts about the world, and tried to soften the blow of inevitable bad thoughts when, as the case may be, your pet or your grandmother “passes on.” (Itself a euphemism meant to soften the reality of death, the natural destruction of body and mind, the soul being a made-up concept which is used as a means of tacitly denying said destruction.) However, if you come from a not-so-privileged environment, the likelihood is that the adults around you were less assiduous–or at least, less capable–of surrounding you in an envelope of pure pleasantness. At times the fact of your poverty will become apparent to you despite whatever efforts your parents make to distract you from it. (See this classic piece by John Scalzi.)

Much of what you liked and disliked was shaped by your interactions with your peers. Your friends would converse with you according to their own behavioral preferences (mediated often by those of their own parents.) Because you likely wished to sustain such human relationships as you had (if you were like most people) you were eager to please these friends, as they were you (albeit the desire to please might have been mediated by either person’s assessment of its necessity; which is to say, even when you were a kid you and your friends were making tacit judgments about the relative social power and influence of various people.) When your friend expressed an opinion, even one you found very disagreeable, you would tend to frame your response in terms that you felt your friend would respond to favorably. He or she liked something, so you at least gave it a chance. He or she hated something, so you at least countenanced the reasons for said hatred.

This influence goes further, however, than merely attitudes. For in addition to thoughts and attitudes, what you also likely share with your close acquaintances are certain utterances, certain typical ways of expressing yourself and putting your thoughts and feelings into words. That’s so gay! said innumerable boys at the middle school and high school I attended. This was at a cultural moment, the early 2000s, when there was a majoritarian backlash against gay people, an instinctive recoiling against the idea of gay marriage as something alien and threatening. At this time, That’s so gay! was current American teenager slang for, It’s dumb; It’s stupid; I don’t like it. When I was only eight years old or so, I got in trouble for saying to one of the neighboring kids, “You’re gay.” I didn’t know what that meant. The idea of homosexuality did not even cross my mind. I just knew I had heard things referred to as gay, and the word gay was a means of denigrating whatever it was you were talking about. My sister told on me to my father, who summoned me to him and gave me a slap for saying such a vulgar thing about another boy. Little did I know how I would feel about gay people a mere decade and a half later. What I absorbed from the environment was a phrase: gay as an insult, and had not my own attitudes and the attitudes of many Americans changed in the intervening time, it might have become a permanent part of my vocabulary. Every word I speak, every utterance emitted from my brain, is a resource taken from some influence in my environment. These are speech acts, as the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin termed them, and they govern what language and what rhetorical moves I have available to me when I speak and write. My writing is not merely an expression of one individual voice, but rather is the reuse of resources furnished by my impressions of many voices which I have encountered in various places throughout my life.

Another example: In the past week, I have been listening to a Librivox recording of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (read in a faux-British accent by Elizabeth Klett, a finely enunciating reader as always, though I’m probably ill-suited to judge the authenticity of the accent.) A number of ideas of things to write about have struck me while listening, and I hope to give a fuller discussion of the novel in the near future; a blog cannot long endure, after all, if one never writes for it.)

Cannot long endure, let me state by an awkward-albeit-fortuitous segue back to the subject I am writing about, is a phrase that–a quick Google search shows–was written by one Edward Abbey, a writer I am not at all familiar with. This inverted, archaic-sounding phrase–the adverb long comes before rather than after the infinitive endure, thus creating one of those Star Trek-style split infinitives which some grammarians at one time a hundred years ago were so horrified by–is next found used in a speech by Ronald Reagan. So we have a writer I know nothing about and a U.S. president I was not alive to listen to, nor consciously decided to be influenced by, and yet, somehow this phrase comes out of me. Thinking back a day ago, however, I recall that I was reading the third massive volume of a set of Chamber’s Cyclopædia of English Literature which my mom and I just acquired at auction, and I was reading the entry for Abraham Lincoln. The author of the entry stated that Lincoln will be remembered as a literary figure for his two inaugural addresses and “for this speech” at the Gettysburgh cemetery. There followed a full text of the Gettysburgh Address, in which Lincoln alludes to Americans questioning, in the aftermath of the terrible battle, “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” Moreover, in another setting Lincoln quoted scripture in saying, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” It turns out then that as I was casting about for a phrase to use in the rueful last sentence of my previous paragraph, I ended up unwittingly mashing together two separate Abraham Lincoln quotes!

What we see here, in capsule form, is one of the ways the influence of previous authors can be expressed in the work of another author is in the form of literary speech acts, the echoing of phrases and rhetorical gestures which the writer has encountered in daily life and in the works of other writers. I heard one such echo of another writer while I was listening to Jane Eyre, in Chapter 7 as Jane returns to Thornfield Hall after her first encounter on the road with Mr. Rochester. Here is the paragraph, which a reader might think pretty and descriptive (and parallelistic, in Charlotte Brontë’s manner) but otherwise unremarkable:

I lingered at the gates; I lingered on the lawn; I paced backwards and forwards on the pavement; the shutters of the glass door were closed; I could not see into the interior; and both my eyes and spirit seemed drawn from the gloomy house—from the grey-hollow filled with rayless cells, as it appeared to me—to that sky expanded before me,—a blue sea absolved from taint of cloud; the moon ascending it in solemn march; her orb seeming to look up as she left the hill-tops, from behind which she had come, far and farther below her, and aspired to the zenith, midnight dark in its fathomless depth and measureless distance; and for those trembling stars that followed her course; they made my heart tremble, my veins glow when I viewed them.

As soon as I heard, in close succession, the words “rayless” and “zenith,” I smiled a knowing smile. Whatever other resources figured in Brontë’s writing of this paragraph, one unmistakeable one is the opening stanzas of the 18th century poet Edward Young’s The Complaint, or Night Thoughts in which he describes the Night thusly:

I wake, emerging from a sea of dreams
Tumultuous; where my wreck’d desponding thought 10
From wave to wave of fancied misery
At random drove, her helm of reason lost.
Though now restored, ’tis only change of pain,
(A bitter change!) severer for severe:
The day too short for my distress; and night, 15
Even in the zenith of her dark domain,
Is sunshine to the colour of my fate.
Night, sable goddess! from her ebon throne,
In rayless majesty, now stretches forth
Her leaden sceptre o’er a slumbering world.

There it is! Night, “even in the zenith of her dark domain,” Night, “in rayless majesty”! In essence, night is not just the night. Night is all the other associations that we attach to it, whether in our own memories or in the memorable phrase of an Edward Young. I knew these ringing phrases because I not long ago started making a recording of Young’s Night Thoughts; so when I heard the words appear in Jane Eyre, the earlier poem immediately came back to me. Whether consciously or unconsciously, purposefully or otherwise, when Charlotte Brontë sought to call forth from her writer’s resources a vision of the Night, she heard Edward Young’s words speaking to her in her head. What other echoes might I hear in this paragraph or others in Brontë, if only I was familiar with them, if only I could pluck them right out of my brain? This is one of the joys, then, of reading old books: to fill your heads with the stirring voices of others, to hear echoes from the past in the words you hear and read in the present. It is as though the life of literature is like the life of a person, and when we hear the echoes of an old writer we are returning to the point of birth.