Sydney M. Williams
“Wind Sprints” by Joseph Epstein
September 2, 2019
“I myself fall into the last category – those writers who feel a desolating sense of uselessness
if a few days go by without their writing anything, and writing it for publication.”
Joseph Epstein (1937-)
Introduction
Wind Sprints 2016
We read for many reasons. We read fiction because we want to be entertained, as in humor and mysteries, or to understand something of character, as in the classics, or to learn the author’s take on a specific era. We read nonfiction to better explain science, psychology, technology, or to become familiar with historical events. We read biography to better know those who came before us, and autobiographies to see how the author perceives him or herself. And we read essays to get the view of the writer on events great and small. But in all literature, it is the quality of the writing that distinguishes great books from the simply good: the ease of the writing, the words used, the sentence structure, the flow from paragraph to paragraph. “Something there is,” Professor Epstein wrote in “Literary Tippling,” “about an elegantly turned sentence or a well-made paragraph that calms me…” They do me as well, and these also put a smile on my face.
One should never measure a book by its weight. For three years this tome sat by my bedside. When I went to bed at night and rose in the morning, it looked beseechingly at me, but I withstood its forbidding 581 pages. When I finally succumbed, I discovered some of the most beautiful writing I have encountered. Within those pages lie 143 essays, “wind sprints,” as Joseph Epstein calls them. It was not a marathon as I had feared. The title is auspicious. These are short essays, generally 800 to 1000 words, perfect for reading in what Mr. Epstein calls the “smallest room” in one’s house. In one essay titled “The Greatest Story Never Read,” the Jewish Professor Epstein writes of his decision to read all 1130 pages of the King James version of the Bible. He tells us: “I generally read three chapters a day with my breakfast” – a useful formula for reading Wind Sprints. As an amateur writer of essays, I have a prejudice toward the form, but as a reader of all types of literature I have some idea of how words and sentences, when properly used, give joy in their resonance. Like most writers, Mr. Epstein is a perfectionist. In an essay titled “A Happy Problem,” he writes about the publication of his 21st book: “Some of the sentences give genuine pleasure; others one would like to have the chance to rework, ever so slightly but crucially.”
In the foreword to his 1977 collection Essays of E.B. White, Mr. White began: “The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.” There is truth in that statement, but it is not the incident(s), but the way in which it or they are described. In “All the News Unfit to Read,” he catches my own feelings: “Someone once said that each day one picks up one’s newspaper in eager anticipation and puts it down in disappointment.” In “Sound Off,” where he watches the evening news with the mute button engaged, his words resonate: “One has only to glimpse the self-satisfaction playing upon their faces to realize what they know we have no need to know.” In “The Divine Miss H. Revisited,” he amiably, but with razor-sharp wit, makes a political point using his house-bound cat as the fulcrum: “In short, she has been offered a gentler, if more extreme version of our welfare state…”
No matter ones’ political biases, his sentences are learned, sophisticated and fun. In “Don’t Ask, Multitask,” Epstein references two of my favorite authors, P.G. Wodehouse and Edith Wharton. In “Go Google Yourself,” he quotes Stendhal that having a book published is to risk being shot in public and then writes: “I used to compare having a book out in the world to walking down a deserted street, when suddenly a window opens and from behind a curtain someone yells, ‘Fool.’” A sentence in “Audio-Dismal Aids” reminded me of Henry Kaufman when he was head of research at Salomon Brothers. Mr. Kaufman often said he preferred to see analysts sitting back, hands behind their head in contemplation, rather than hunched over a computer: “The sight of a man or woman of high intelligence in the act of thinking – there can be no more compelling audiovisual aid.”
In Death Comes to the Archbishop, Willa Cather wrote: “Miracles…seem to rest not so much upon…healing power coming suddenly near us from afar but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that, for a moment, our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there around us always.” Joseph Epstein’s genius is that he miraculously makes the ordinary extraordinary. He will make you smile and cause you to remember favorite books and movies. For example, in “That’s a Nickel” he references the late 19th Century French psychologist Émile Coué who said, “Every day in every way I am getting better and better” – a line best remembered (at least by me) as being uttered by Herbert Lom, playing Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus, in “The Revenge of the Pink Panther.” Epstein’s essays cover myriad topics: books, reading, the Draft, music, orchids, his cat, neckties, language, politics, shopping, technology, hot dogs and the Bible. The shortest, “Toting a Dumb Phone,” concludes “No app exists to organize the wandering mind, thank goodness.” The longest, “Funny, But I do Look Jewish:” “The complication of being Jewish…I believe, is the feeling of never quite feeling altogether at home anywhere.” That may be, but Joseph Epstein is perfectly comfortable in the milieu he has chosen as a profession – a teacher of English and a writer of essays, and we readers are his beneficiaries.
The essays span twenty years, 1996-2015. All had been previously published, all but five in the Weekly Standard. Each essay consumes but a few minutes and are ideal for those free moments we all have. You won’t be disappointed.
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