Gallery of Clouds

by Rachel Eisendrath

A personal and critical work that celebrates the pleasure of books and reading.Largely unknown to readers today, Sir Philip Sidney’s sixteenth-century pastoral romance Arcadia was long considered one of the finest works of prose fiction in the English language. Shakespeare borrowed an episode from it for King Lear; Virginia Woolf saw it as “some luminous globe” wherein “all the seeds of English fiction lie latent.” In Gallery of Clouds, the Renaissance scholar Rachel Eisendrath has written an extraordinary homage to Arcadia in the form of a book-length essay divided into passing “The clouds in my Arcadia, the one I found and the one I made, hold light and color. They take on the forms of other a cat, the sea, my grandmother, the gesture of a teacher I loved, a friend, a girlfriend, a ship at sail, my mother. These clouds stay still only as long as I look at them, and then they change.”Gallery of Clouds opens in New York City with a dream, or a vision, of meeting Virginia Woolf in the afterlife. Eisendrath holds out her manuscript—an infinite moment passes—and Woolf takes it and begins to read. From here, in this act of magical reading, the book scrolls out in a series of reflective pieces linked through metaphors and ideas. Golden threadlines tie each part to the a rupture of time in a Pisanello painting; Montaigne’s practice of revision in his essays; a segue through Vivian Gordon Harsh, the first African American head librarian in the Chicago public library system; a brief history of prose style; a meditation on the active versus the contemplative life; the story of Sarapion, a fifth-century monk; the persistence of the pastoral; image-making and thought; reading Willa Cather to her grandmother in her Chicago apartment; the deviations of Walter Benjamin’s “scholarly romance,” The Arcades Project. Eisendrath’s wondrously woven hybrid work extols the materiality of reading, its pleasures and delights, with wild leaps and abounding grace.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Art, Memoir, Books About Books, Criticism

136 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 11, 2021

Reviews

[Tony]

This started out with much promise. The author dies - I DIED AND THEN FOUND MYSELF walking across a large green field - and finds herself standing in front of Virginia Woolf - Oh. - Thank God. - There are gay women in heaven. - who is reading the author's manuscript, maybe this one, and begins to nod.

But then it petered out for me. Little wisps of memoir (which I liked well enough) mixed with thoughts on Philip Sidney's pastoral romance - Arcadia - (which I have never read and now have no urge to).

Maybe it was the timing, opening this in quarantine, as a breakthrough case, with small children about, and new-age threats of "time-out" in the air.

It is extremely unlikely that I would give this another go. But don't go by me.

[andrew]

"With all its parenthetical additions, this romance is a kind of magical box with many interior drawers."

Rachel Eisendrath's Gallery of Clouds is a meditation on and an homage to Philip Sidney's 16th century pastoral Arcadia. And though it is that, this work does not exist as something to visit after you have read Sidney's work. It is not a requirement that one even be aware of Sidney.

While Eisendrath is a scholar, this gallery that she has built is not an academic work of analysis or critical commentary. What it actually is, I am not entirely certain I have the capacity to label. It's difficult to ignore that impulse, to categorize and put something in a given genre. It is a meditation and an homage, yes. And it is also a personal memoir and it is criticism and the work taken as a whole feels akin to the essay.

As Brian Dillon describes the essay - "a species of drift or dissolve, at the levels of logic and language, that time and again requires the reader to page back in wonder - how did we get from there to here?"

It is an essay, certainly, but more than anything, I think of it as a romance.

And it is a romance that has to do with the contemplative life. Eisendrath gives us a portrait of a young Sidney (he was never old), dealing with those 16th century terms of the contemplative life and the active life. His mentor, Hubert Languet, warns him of the perils of the contemplative life: "be careful not to let your thirst for learning and acquiring information lead you into danger." Thank goodness Sidney did not heed this advice. Rather, he wrote a defense of poetry, in addition to poetry. He did indeed live the contemplative life. And those nagging, persistent questions of To what end? To what purpose? What is it for? have never left us.

Eisendrath considers the prose style of Sidney's Arcadia, a style that has gone out of fashion - a disregard for what has been called teleology, there is not a desire to have a beginning, a middle, an end, but rather to create moments, moods, to create prose that is in a certain way sensuous. And those cloud like moments, forever drifting, dissolving, pass overhead as we encounter another. That style reflects the contemplative life that Sidney sought. If there is no beginning, what purpose is an end? It's worth noting that his Arcadia was never completed before his death. But how could it have been? Eisendrath shows that he was "...constantly inserting, digressing, wandering, qualifying, and in a thousand ways forestalling the end."

It is this way of thinking, expressing, feeling that perhaps best reflects existence. As Gass said, "our experience consists of immense aggregates, which occupy even the most self-effacing and slimmest moments." These moments, these glimpses, these clouds that drift and change, they are what account for us. We are all gifted with an imagination - we can't help it, really, it's the nature of being alive - and it's our imagination that builds and constructs our own galleries.

"Flotsam and jetsam wash up on the shores of the mind."

We could stand to make room for these fragments. We could stand to do things that don't have a point, to make things that have no purpose, to engage with things that have no end. We could stand to lie down in tall grass and simply watch the clouds. To learn nothing. To learn something.

"Clouds stay still for us only as long as we look at them, but then, as soon as our mind wanders, they take on a new shape and become a different color."

Virginia Woolf is a bookend of sorts in Gallery of Clouds. It opens with a luminescent moment in which the author dreams of having died and found herself in a field of green grass. She approaches a small group of people that are sitting, talking, and Eisendrath notices that one of them stands out more than the others. It is Virginia Woolf. Eisendrath hands Woolf her manuscript.

In her essay on the essay, titled "The Modern Essay," Woolf says, "You have not finished with it because you have read it, any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up and alters and adds." She could be referring to so many things, but it is here that she is specifically referring to Max Beerbohm's essay, "A Cloud of Pinafores."

"Thought experiment: In a given period, what is the inherent connection between the dominant technology of artistic representation and the dominant worldview?"

In his essay "Attention: A (Short) History", Joshua Cohen points out that data storage is now immortal. We have "the nimbi and cirri of storage...", the infinite cloud that can preserve everything. I can save digitized family photos, tax documents, a recipe for sourdough muffins, an essay that was started but never completed and they can remain up in the cloud perhaps beyond the terminus of human existence. But it's worth considering, "just because information is stored, safe and secure, doesn't mean it exists or has value."

How does someone that uses the written word as their form of artistic expression create something that has value or even simply exists amidst this overwhelming miasma of word/text communication that has saturated seemingly everything? I learn how a family member is doing by reading a text, I hear from my employer by reading messages in an app, I read an email from an old teacher, and my phone alerts me with a message about the storm that is moving into the area and instructs me to be prepared for rain. I should be able to tell if a storm is coming by the gathering clouds I can see out my window, but our clouds are now no longer visible.

Gallery of Clouds makes me think of many things, but has begun to feel, as I look back on it, as a romance that has to do with our connection to books. Some of us live among them with an intimacy that is difficult to really articulate. Our memories of them, with them, shape our feelings towards them and color our experiences with their contents.

"Perhaps, after you're done reading it, you keep the book near you for a while, on your bedside table or on the dining room table or on the pile of books near your favorite chair."

It's this moment that I felt Eisendrath knew me personally. After I finished her book, it sat on my nightstand for a while. It then went on the bookshelf. But only for a while. I removed it and thumbed through it again. It went back on the nightstand, just to remain near me. There is a comfort to be found just from a proximity to books. She of course doesn't know me personally but it did feel like she could, and that is because she knows so well that the lives of our books are complex and that our lives with them will continue to be complex. There are moments when I realize that I can remember the physical feeling, the texture, the heft of a book, I can recall the exact color of the jacket vividly, and maybe I can even summon the scent of the pages just from conjuring its cover; but, I cannot remember, except for a couple of hazy details, what the book was about. I try to, to test myself and determine if I can remember what it was I read. But it has drifted too far.

Gallery of Clouds was and remains deeply personal, deeply learned, deeply moving. Its effects, myriad. And when I return to think of it after an hour or a day, I find it has taken a new shape, a different color.

[Kidlitter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part memoir, part literary criticism, part philosophy and history, pure genius. A slim volume to be carried about and dipped into and ponder over every sentence, with moments of identification and humour and illumination that stay with the reader. Eisendrath has produced one for the ages - it made me want to go and read Sidney's Arcadia again, which I vowed never to revisit after grappling with it in my English Renaissance uni class. Perhaps if I'd had Eisendrath for a teacher, I could remember something about it, but at least I can use her shining light to illuminate my dark corners. Great stuff!

[Shane Skelcy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful prose. I really enjoyed this read as the “clouds” of art, history, personal life, and clouds passed in small fragments. Short and sweet, it made me feel something at the end that I don’t quite know.

[kenna bean · Rating 5 out of 5]

the perfect little book, in my opinion.

[eva]

THATS MY PROFESSOR ‼️‼️

[Angela]

This was a delight. Thank you Joseph for recommending this one to me.

[Nikolai Nikiforov · Rating 3 out of 5]

Philip Sidney's Arcadia is a book I've read some fourteen years ago, but that have never reached the end of for rather dramatic reasons, though not as dramatic as those that preven­ted Sidney himself from finishing his revision of the whole (he was killed somewhere in the middle of the process). I don't remember much of the plot, but I remember being engaged by that book in a way that maybe a couple of other books ever kept me engaged. Tastes might differ, of course, T.S. Eliot once called Arcadia “the dullest novel in the language”, but when one finds a book which has Sidney's book as its main subject, one expects some kind of appreciation for his peculiar pleasures to be there. Alas, that's not the case.
Basically, the only Sidney's qualities described here are his ornate style and his rambling stories. Regarding the style, the author presents two opposites: there is difficult and sometimes incomprehen­sible style of someone like Sidney and there is direct and precise style which is more common today. She finds arguments for both of those styles, but even if one accepts the necessary simplification inherent in such comparisons, I must say that the “direct style" of, say, modernism was a reaction not against ornate/baroque writings of the predecessors. The problem with Victorians like Tennyson or Swinburne was not in their meaning being hidden behind overcomplicated verbal constructions: their problem was in the meaning simply not being there, sacrificed for the musical phrases and beautiful rhymes.
Sidney I remember certainly wrote in a peculiar and artificial way, but whatever he wrote, he always had some point, maybe even too much of it. Regarding the subject of the book, Eisendrath says she quite forgot the plot. So did I (it was 14 years ago), but having just read Steven Moore's The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600 retelling of it, I see that despite the pastoral setting, Arcadia deals with many wild and serious topics in wild and serious ways.
Arcadia is not just a series of random fleeting images to be comprehended by some sexless bibliophile prone to melancholic reverie. Sidney's words are not clouds which take some shape and then disappear.
As for the rest of the author's observations (only about a quarter of the book is directly related to Sidney), I don't think they lead anywhere — but that was probably the point, the clouds are not supposed to tell a straightfor­ward story.
The author presents many ideas and images dealing with books and art in general as something that expands mental space around us, something that also gives us vast inferiority which can never be really breached by another person. And these are interesting ideas, I just don't understand why would you make Sidney the centrepiece of a book dealing with these ideas. Sidney was certainly a dreamer in a way, but to reduce him to merely this seems to be a wasted opportunity when writing about such a fasci­nating character.

***** 
«Аркадия» Филипа Сидни — книга, которую читал около четырнадцати лет назад, но так и не дочитал до конца по причинам довольно драматичным, хотя и не столь драматичным, как те, ч��о помешали самому Сидни завершить переработку всей книги (он был убит в середине этого процесса). Мало помню из сюжета, но помню, что книга меня затянула так, как, возможно, в жизни затягивала всего пара других книг. Вкусы, понятно, различаются, Т. С. Элиот в свое время назвал «Аркадию» «самым скучным романом на английском», но когда встречаешь книгу, главным предметом которой является сочинение Сидни, ожидаешь встретить в ней некоторое понимание связанных с ним своеобразных удовольствий. Увы, его тут нет.
В целом, единственные описанные здесь качества Сидни — его витиеватый стиль и его запутанные истории. Что касается стиля, авторка дает противопоставление двух противоположных вариантов: есть сложный и иногда непонятный стиль кого-то вроде Сидни, и есть более распространенный сегодня прямой и точный стиль. Она находит аргументы в пользу обоих этих стилей, но даже если принять во внимание необходимое упрощение, присущее таким сравнениям, должен сказать, что «прямой стиль» того же модернизма не был реакцией на витиеватые/барочные произведения предшественников. Беда с викторианцами вроде Теннисона или Суинберна заключалась не в том, что смысл у них был скрыт за чрезмерно сложными словесными конструкциями: беда была в том, что смысла просто не было, он был принесен в жертву музыкальным фразам и красивым рифмам.
Сидни, которого я помню, действительно писал своеобразно и вычурно, но что бы он ни писал, у него всегда была какая-то мысль, может быть, даже слишком ее много. Если говорить про содержание книги, авторка говорит, что совсем забыла сюжет. Я его тоже не помню (повторюсь, читал 14 лет назад), но, прочитав The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600 пересказ Стивена Мура, вижу, что, несмотря на пасторальные декорации, «Аркадия» затрагивает множество диких и серьезных тем дикими и серьезными способами.
«Аркадия» — это не просто серия случайных мимолетных образов, адресованных бесполому библиофилу, склонному к меланхоличным грезам. Слова Сидни — не облака, которые принимают какую-то форму, а затем исчезают.
Что касается остальных наблюдений авторки (только четверть книги напрямую связана с Сидни), я не думаю, что они ведут куда-либо — но, вероятно, это и не было целью, облака не могут рассказывать четкую историю.
Авторка представляет множество идей и образов, касающихся книг и искусства в целом как чего-то, что расширяет ментальное пространство вокруг нас, чего-то, что также дает нам огромное чувство внутренней полноты, которая никогда не будет доступна другому человеку. Это интересные идеи, но не понимаю, зачем было делать Сидни центральной фигурой книги, касающейся этих идей. Сидни, безусловно, был в некотором роде мечтателем, но сводить такого увлекательного персонажа только к этому кажется упущенной возможностью.

[Tiffany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unexpected delights lie within. One could open the book anywhere at any time and read something interesting, read something interesting into the words on the page, read something into the self in the words on the page. It’s wonderful!

[oliver · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Here is one experience of refraction through layers. Think of the hour before the sun goes down and the light glows with unaccountable beauty, so golden and warm. Suddenly, everyone on the city street is for a moment transfigured, resurrected as an angel version of herself; even the indifferent office buildings appear as though newly arisen in the heavenly city, their mute concrete blocks suddenly rendered as soft and effulgent as the shingled feathers of Gabriel's wing, and every passerby with her shopping bags glows like Mary when, eyes cast down, she receives the news that God will condescend to an earthly form through her mortal body- all because the sun, as it slips down toward the horizon, is shining through the zillions and zillions of zooming atoms that constitute the layers of earthly atmosphere and pollution.”

[Jason Prokowiew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Full disclosure, I gave up at the 1/4 way point. This was not for me. I liked the idea that these moments could form a complete picture when put one after another, the way thoughts in our mind often work. But, for me, the book was hard to find the author in. We get so much of the academic voice, I lost the spark to care about the central character, which is why I came to this book which was sold to me as a memoir.

[Riley Peek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sweet and ekphrastic, Gallery of Clouds attests to art's utopic qualities, its abilities to escape us from pain and hardship and take us somewhere more beautiful. I enjoyed Eisendrath's researched intimations of literary history, her journey into the subconscious, her retrieval of childhood memories. I'd like to reread this soon.

[Conner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really fantastic embrace of essay on Arcadia, to then unfold into narrative and musings, drifting through in simulation of the topic at hand. I would’ve stayed for as long as Eisendrath would’ve led me.

[Ljubi · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me a minute to figure out what this book was about, and it turns out to be about nothing and everything all at once. Eisendrath is incredible in the way she weaves the English language and even moreso how she weaves her writing with others'. A surprising and extraordinary work.

[Ashley]

This book is a little bit of everything on a wide range of topics - simultaneously memoir, meditation, homage. The thought behind the fragmented pieces is clearly insightful and flows exactly like a dream, or as the author intends - passing clouds in the sky.

[Oscar Ivins]

fantastic. this book gave me a girlfriend.

[Madeline Jarvis-Cross · Rating 5 out of 5]

stunningly unique; an instant fave :)

[Evelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed a lot of this, it's well written and has such interesting things to say! - even if at times I feel like she wandered too far it wasn't for long or often.

[Alex Aguilar · Rating 3 out of 5]

i usually love this style of writing but either this one didn't jive with me or i didn't get it

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

A memoir of a Renaissance scholar & Philip Sydney's Arcadia. I wii be sure to read this story again after reading the Sydney poem.

[Janet · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to leave this book on my bedside table so it can become “part of the flotsam and jetsam that float in and out with the tide of household clutter.” Beautifully written.