Wolfe: ‘The Far and the Near’

 Thomas Wolfe’s “The Far and the Near” is so short and so simple I wondered whether my high school English teacher would have counted it as a short story.

The problem is with the plot. If it has one, it amounts to this: A railroad engineer passes a farm just after 2 p.m. on his daily run and always blows the whistle. A woman always waves back. The woman has a little girl who waves too. During the story, the little girl grows into a woman. Both women always wave.

When the engineer retires, he decides that he must visit the farm. Instead of finding two women, smiling and waving, he sees two women, suspicious and fearful.

 

He walked away down the path and then along the road toward town, and suddenly he knew that he was an old man. His heart, which had been brave and confident when it looked along the familiar vista of the rails, was now sick with doubt and horror as it saw the strange and unsuspected visage of the earth which had always been within a stone’s throw of him, and which he had never seen or known.

 

A lot of what we experience about a place depends on context. When the context changes, we feel lost — we feel that we have looked without seeing, that we’ve studied a place and somehow don’t know it at all.

• Source: I found a copy of the story at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial:
https://wolfememorial.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/The-Far-and-the-Near.pdf

They way they prayed back then

 Each Sunday when I was a boy, a couple of men would lead the congregation in prayer. An unlettered farmer might lead the opening prayer, and a college professor might lead us as the service ended. In 1960, most of those fellows still prayed using the language of King James: thee, thou, thy and thine. Thou hast, but he hath.

The old language was especially common in country churches. But the times they were a’changin’, and the changes seemed to occur first in the cities and university towns. Language that sounded fine in the Eisenhower years sounded strange in the day of Jimi Hendrix.

The language I heard changed, and I now have to make an effort to recall it. Similarly, the technology I grew up with is gone. I can’t remember when the party line was replaced at Grandmother’s house or when the last rotary phone disappeared. I could look it up online.

With all the change, it seems odd to me that so many bad ideas survived. It’s hard to convey to young people how grateful parents were when they stood in lines to get their children vaccinated against polio. It’s hard to imagine how many men who had fought in Europe wanted their country to have some continuing presence there, to be a voice for peace and stability and a world that was prone to war and trouble.

In the time and place where I grew up, you could hear a lot of bigoted language against people who shouldn’t have had to endure it. For a while, it seemed that we were all growing up or dying off — that all that bigotry might gradually disappear in the way that language changes, so gradually you have to be paying attention to notice it.

Sounds of the season

 Some folks in Tennessee plant sweet peas on Valentine’s Day, even if they have to brush the snow away. I spent the week digging out the garden beds, just so they’ll be ready whenever the Wise Woman decides to plant.

When the week began, the garden was quiet. I listened mostly to the song of my shovel. As the week progressed, the birds started singing. By the weekend, the birds were jamming. We had three species of woodpeckers in the rhythm section.

Thoreau, hearing a nuthatch in early spring, noticed that much of the nuthatch’s music sounded like the drumming of a woodpecker. It was as if the nuthatch, as a fledgling, had learned part of the score from the woodpecker. Thoreau got lost in that line of thought and said:

 

It was the handle by which my thoughts took firmly hold on spring.

 

I imagine we’ll have another cold snap. But I also found the handle.

• Source: The quotation is from Henry David Thoreau’s Journal, March 5, 1859. I found it in Thoreau’s Animals, edited by Geoff Wisner; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017, p. 6.

McCullers: ‘A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.’

 What do people say about love?

Is it like math, which comes with prerequisites? Should a person learn how to care for a cat or dog before you presume to care for a person?

Is love systematic? Is there a science to it?

A friend and I have been exchanging notes on Carson McCuller’s story “A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.” 

The story is about love. It’s also about the kinds of things we say in public, and whether people think we’re drunk or crazy when we say things that are important to us.

The conversation started because The New York Times published a story about a class at Harvard where students choose a tree at the university’s arboretum for a semester. McCullers’s story is on the syllabus.

Can you learn to love a tree?

It’s an interesting question if you’re prone to thinking about place — and how a place becomes a place.

• Sources: Carson McCullers’s story was published in 1942. It was one of six stories collected with the novella The Ballad of the Sad Café in 1951. A copy is here:

https://homepage.ntu.edu.tw/~karchung/A_Tree.pdf

Margaret Roach, “Starting at Harvard and Falling for Your First Tree”; The New York Times, Feb. 10, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/realestate/starting-at-harvard-and-falling-for-your-first-tree.html

A scientist on self-assessment

 When E.O. Wilson was studying biology at the University of Alabama after World War II, he read an article about how European runners were better than Americans. They trained harder. Their disciplines were tougher. You could bet on it: Europeans would dominate the 1948 Olympics. A European would break the 4-minute mile.

Wilson bought a pair of surplus Army boots and started running. He thought the heavy boots would make him faster. He didn’t tell anyone about his inspiration. He just ran — for hours at a time.

 

It was my kind of activity: do it alone, avoid the drag of teams, have no one witness your trials and failures, until you can accomplish some exceptional feat.

 

Months later he tried out for the track team, lacing up spikes for the first time. He ran a mile, timed by a coach.

He wasn’t close. Determination and discipline are wonderful, but being an elite athlete is more about heredity.

Characteristically, Wilson thought about it:

 

The experience has often made me think more objectively about my own limitations and more generally about those of the species to with I belong. For the obsessed and ambitious, the only strategy is to probe in all directions and learn where one’s abilities are exceptional, where mediocre, where poor, then fashion tactics and prostheses to achieve the best possible result. And never give up hope that the fates will allow some unexpected breakthrough.

 

I’ve often wondered about education — what a good education would look like and what good educational advice would sound like. I think Wilson is right. If you are looking for a way to assess yourself, the agony of defeat is as important as the thrill of victory.

If you’re wondering what Wilson meant by “prostheses,” he had collaborators who helped with math. He was one of the most influential biologists of the 20^th century, but he needed help in working out the mathematical models for his own ideas.

• Source: Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist; Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1994, pp. 118 and 121-2.

Guineafowl as psychic wounds

 Crows and their kin have big brains. If you make a graph comparing the weight of various animals’ brains with their total weight, you’ll get a line that Darwin would recognize as the story of evolution. Some of the more primitive animals don’t really have brains. Mammals have larger brains. Corvids are a flier on the graph.

A guineafowl, by contrast, is a big bird with a small head — “a walnut on top of a watermelon” is the way country folks usually put it.

My grandfather kept guineafowl, and I had to help him in the seemingly hopeless task of trying to keep them alive.

The birds would walk out to the road in front of the house and be astonished by the view. No tall grass to hide food or predators. They’d stand in the road and look one way and then the other and would still be looking when they’d be flattened by a truck.

It was a dismal job for a boy, collecting the carcasses. Sometimes a big truck would take out half a dozen birds.

My grandfather was hardheaded. He kept thinking the birds would pay off, despite the losses.

Guinea hens have a two-note call, described as “pot-rack” in the South and “buck-wheat” in the North. The hens begin squawking and then slowly synchronize the two notes until they are in unison. It’s loud and unnerving.

It’s also a behavior that keeps them alive. Grandfather’s birds roosted in a chinaberry tree. No two hens would face in the same direction. If anything moved — a stray dog or a leaf blowing in the breeze — the birds would raise the alarm. They were more alert than any watchdog.

During the years my grandfather kept guineafowl, no one ever slept through the night.

Perhaps in compensation for being so helpless, these birds evolved strange superpowers. I’ve never seen anything so efficient at killing snakes. Coyotes are good. But the guineafowl exterminated snakes wherever they ranged.

The hens would be so excited when one blundered across a snake in the pasture. The word would spread, and instantly the whole flock would descend on the poor reptile.

The guineafowl were also incredible eaters of grasshoppers. I came see that the guineafowl had evolved like the prairie chicken. They were creatures of the grasslands, and the pastures of East Texas suited them.

The big grassland birds evolved to eat the insects. The plagues of locusts that destroyed crops on the Great Plains occurred after hunters killed off the prairie chicken, shipping hundreds of thousands of carcasses a year to the East Coast and on to Europe.

Texas had plenty of grasshoppers, and so my grandfather was right. The guineafowl found their niche and survived.

Greek myths and yardbirds

 I’m at the point in the Greek myths where Deianeira makes her entrance. She’s best remembered as the woman who was the end of Heracles.

She loved him. He had rescued her when her father was planning to marry her off to the river God Achelous, he of the (literally) flowing beard. Deianeira imagined the wedding night as something akin to waterboarding and was praying for death when Heracles, in need of a wife, knocked on the door.

Achelous was a shapeshifter, but he only had three shapes: bull, speckled serpent and bull-headed man. Heracles didn’t have much trouble with any of those forms.

Achelous slunk off minus a horn, and the happy couple went off on their honeymoon. The newlyweds were stopped by the River Evenus, which was flooded.

The lusty Centaur Nessus was there, claiming to be the gods’ ferryman, having been awarded the post for his noble character. He promised to take Deianeira across. Heracles would have to swim.

When Nessus got to the other side and put his hands on Deianeira, she cried out, and Heracles shot Nessus from the other bank. As Nessus was dying, he told Deianeira to collect a vial of his blood as a potion. If Heracles ever had eyes for another woman, Deianeira could put the potion on his shirt and she would never have to complain about his behavior again.

Sophocles did wonders with that story.

That’s the famous story, but I got derailed by an earlier one.

Deianeira was one of the sisters of Meleager, one of the argonauts. When he died, the sisters cried so loudly that Artemis turned them into guineafowl. The goddess later relented and returned Deianeira and Gorge to human form.

My grandfather kept guineafowl, and if you’ve ever been around these birds, the memories are hard to get rid of. I have other things to think about, but my memory has been serving up nothing but guineafowl for days.

• Source and notes: Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 190-5. For an earlier note, see ‘Sophocles: ‘The Women of Trachis,’ April 10, 2024. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2024/04/sophocles-women-of-trachis.html