American author Gore Vidal described Logan Pearsall Smith as "a lover of language" devoted to "getting his own sentences right." Born in New Jersey, Smith was educated at Harvard and Oxford, and in 1913 he became a British citizen. Smith "retells legends," Vidal said, "and composes entire novels and biographies in a page while producing eternal wisdom as well as life-enhancing malice in a series of phrases."

"Weltanschauung" (the German word literally means "world view") is one of the longest pieces in More Trivia (1921), Smith's second collection of brief, aphoristic essays. The book opens with this memorable "greeting" . . . to us:

What funny clothes you wear, dear Readers! And your hats! The thought of your hats does make me laugh. And I think your sex-theories quite horrid.

Thus across the void of Time I send, with a wave of my hand, a greeting to that quaint, remote, outlandish, unborn people whom we call Posterity, and whom I, like other very great writers, claim as my readers--urging them to hurry up and get born, that they may have the pleasure of reading "More Trivia."

To learn more about Smith and his thoughts on the art of writing, see "Fine Writing," by Logan Pearsall Smith.
 

Weltanschauung

by Logan Pearsall Smith

When, now and then, on a calm night I look up at the Stars¹, I reflect on the wonders of Creation, the unimportance of this Planet, and the possible existence of other worlds like ours.

Sometimes it is the self-poised and passionless shining of those serene orbs which I think of; sometimes Kant's phrase² comes into my mind about the majesty of the Starry Heavens and the Moral Law; or I remember Xenophanes³ gazing at the broad firmament, and crying, "All is One!" and thus, in that sublime exclamation, enunciating for the first time the great doctrine of the Unity of Being⁴.

But these Thoughts are not my thoughts; they eddy through my mind like scraps of old paper, or withered leaves in the wind. What I really feel is the survival of a much more primitive mood--a view of the world which dates indeed from before the invention of language. It has never been put into literature; no poet has sung of it, no historian of human thought has so much as alluded to it; astronomers in their glazed observatories, with their eyes glued to the ends of telescopes, seem to have had no notion of it.

But sometimes, far off at night, I have heard a dog howling it at the Moon.
 
¹ In his youth, Smith was a friend and admirer of American poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892). Compare Smith's essay with these lines from Whitman's Leaves of Grass:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

² From the conclusion of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1788): "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." The sentence (in the original German) is inscribed on Kant's tomb in what is now Kaliningrad, Russia.

³ Xenophanes (c.570-c.475 BC) was a Greek poet, historian, and philosopher. Aristotle said that Xenophanes believed the "world simply to be equal to god."

⁴ "Heidegger famously claimed that it was Brentano's dissertation, On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle, that first awakened philosophical stirrings within him. Indeed, he writes that 'The quest for the unity in the multiplicity of being, then only obscurely, unsteadily and helplessly stirring within me, remained, through many upsets, wanderings, and perplexities, the ceaseless impetus for the treatise Being and Time which appeared two decades later.' . . .

"According to Heidegger, being is already understood, in Aristotle and for the Greeks in general, in terms of the present intelligibility of things, and it is this that determines the way in which the unity of being is then articulated. Nevertheless, this should not blind us to the fact that, for Aristotle, the question concerning the ground of beings cannot be divorced from the problem of understanding being in the complex unity of its multiple senses."
(Jeff Malpas, Heidegger and the Thinking of Place: Explorations in the Topology of Being. The MIT Press, 2012)