Is Chris Arthur Making Us Smarter?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been confirming through personal experience nearly all the warnings and admonitions sounded out by gurus of technology and prophets of new media: that ease of access devalues information; that attention span decreases with the possibility of endless, linked distraction; that our brains are rewiring to handle multitasking more efficiently, which makes sustained attention more difficult; that it won’t be long before we lose the ability to read long books; that our ability to concentrate on just one thing is shot, or shortly will be. Heck, even in the course of writing this paragraph, I’ve gone to check my email, Facebook, Chris Arthur’s web page, Amazon, the archived page from his academic work at the University of Wales Lampeter. I’ve read again bits and pieces of each of the three books I’m reviewing; I’ve sent a quick note to the librarian in charge of faculty research rooms, complaining about the excessive heat in my office.

Getting to my point, though: In so many ways, Chris Arthur’s essays are an antidote to the barrage of attention-claimants that beset us in our twenty-first century technological world. In a sideways answer to Nicholas Carr’s intriguing Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” I would suggest that Chris Arthur is making us smart again, and if only more people were aware of the salubrious effects of his essays, we might all regain the peace and insight that come from centered meditation on the wonders of the world.

Like most essayists, Chris Arthur has been toiling away quietly for years, making beautiful experiments in the language arts, thinking through interesting connections, publishing his attempts in a variety of small journals that carry on, fueled by the love their editors and staff have for literature (you can find him at least once a year in Southern Humanities Review, for instance, and slightly less often in Hotel Amerika, Southwest Review, and several others). For this reason, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of him before. His biggest splash on this side of the pond was “(En)trance,” the opening piece in 2009’s Best American Essays. That essay derives from a meditation on a pair of pillars that graced the entrance of Arthur’s mother’s childhood home, and which helped him realize that he would never become the kind of writer he once thought he’d become (“the kind who undertakes complete stories, who engineers a beginning, works things through to an ending, and offers readers an experience of apparent wholeness”). Instead, as he explores circuitously within the piece, he’s become an essayist, a writer who turns his subjects this way and that, who lets his mind travel through tangents of associated meaning, who rejects the very notion of completeness in favor of a calm acceptance of the irreducible complexity of the world. “(En)trance” includes also an extended thought experiment in which Arthur imagines himself as a “temporal kestrel,” viewing from on high the various creations and destructions that change the face of the land at a pace too slow for one human being to appreciate. Reading the essay, as I have done several times now, one gets the feeling of escape from the world’s buzzing in favor of a peaceful ramble through the landscapes of Antrim and of Arthur’s thinking. This is literary escapism, like that afforded by the writers of the sort Arthur is not and will never become, but quite unlike it, too, because the places described are verifiable, yet the path to visit them is made up of bucolic switchbacks along the meanders of mind.

Arthur’s first three books, Irish Nocturnes (1999), Irish Willow (2002), and Irish Haiku (2005), were all published unassumingly by the Davies...