A story about Robert Walser

 Guy Davenport’s short story on the writer Robert Walser is called “A Field of Snow on the Slope of the Rosenberg.” Walser’s body was found in a field of snow outside the Swiss asylum where he lived on Christmas 1956, a fact not mentioned in the story.

We know how one of the great writers of Europe died. But what was he thinking when he wandered away from the asylum?

In Davenport’s account, Walser was thinking about a historic balloon trip from Saxony to the Baltic. Those were the days when ballooning required a proper outfit that included gauntlets and goggles and when peasants, fearful of balloons, were waiting on the ground to kill them with scythes and shovels.

And Walser thought of how he’d been spoken to by “Olympia,” created by Manet, who told about Manet’s Doppelganger, Monet. Walser thought about how William James had talked for so long with his tie in his soup that it wicked to his collar, turning it red.

In Davenport’s account, Walser is a writer who was fascinated by accidents or incongruities — how they can cluster, accumulate with interest, become catastrophic, ruin people.

The idea has two parts:

 

And everything is an incongruity if you study it well.

 

And:

 

The waywardness of accidents, I mused, can go only so far until it collides with the laws of probability or the collapse of its martyr.

 

What are the odds that Monet, painting in plein air, would be knocked cold by a discus?

Davenport was a master of the kind of story that fascinates me. It’s a biography, or an episode in a biography, treated as a short story.

Scholars and historians can tell us the facts of Walser’s last day.

What was on his mind?

We have to turn to fiction to get to the more interesting question.

I’m repeating points I’ve made before:

(1) I think the model for this kind of story is Davenport’s “John Charles Tapner.” Tapner was the last man to by executed on the isle of Guernsey. In 1854, Victor Hugo, probably the world’s most famous opponent of capital punishment, visited the island to investigate.

As history, it’s a footnote. In Davenport’s fiction, we get to see what the people of Guernsey thought of their famous guest and what Hugo thought of them.

(2) Other writers have been interested in this kind of story. Bernard Malamud called his experiments “fictive biographies” and “biographed stories.”

(3) I love them.

• Source: Guy Davenport, Da Vinci’s Bicycle; New York: New Directions Classic, 1997. “A Field of Snow on the Slope of the Rosenberg,” the last of 10 stories in the collection, is on pages 149-85. The quotations are on pp. 163 and 164. For more, see “Davenport: ‘John Charles Tapner,’’ Nov. 22, 2022, and “Malamud: ‘In Kew Gardens,’” March 20, 2024.

The woods are full of autumn olives

 Autumn olives, Elaeagnus umbellate, have put out fruit that reminds me of the mayhaws of East Texas. The fruit is smaller than a mayhaw. In a game of marbles, autumn olives would be ducks, and mayhaws would be taws or shooters. But the colors are similar. The autumn olives are turning from yellow to red. I’ve been told they’re tart but make good jelly.

Mayhaws are in genus Crataegus, and three species are common in East Texas. I gathered them and made jelly as a young man. I’d make a pan of biscuits for supper. The mayhaw harvest and jelly-making was an occasion.

Autumn olives, like mayhaws, are a big shrub or small tree.

The woods around Alexander Lake at Panola Mountain are full of autumn olives, which are originally from Asia. Some people call them Japanese silverberries.

Americans begin bringing them here in 1830. Autumn olives can fix nitrogen in the soil. They can grow in poor soil and improve the soil’s quality for other plants. Pollinators love the flowers. Birds, insects and jelly makers are among those who love the fruit.  

In the 1950s, the U.S. government planted Elaeagnus umbellate to control erosion, build windbreaks, rebuild exhausted soils and provide habitat for wildlife. Government agencies developed cultivars.

In some places, garden centers sell autumn olives, and you can find online discussions about which varieties are the fastest growers.

But our sense of what’s good and bad ecologically has changed. All those benefits don’t outweigh the fact that the autumn olive competes against native species.

Councils that monitor invasive plants in some states list it as a severe threat. It’s on a Top 10 list of invasive plants in Georgia.

My heart is with the native plant advocates. But my head tells me that this plant is now part of the Piedmont. Trying to get it out of the woods would be like trying to get the invasive Norman influence out of English.

An entomology lesson

 I would have thought that the caterpillars that are devouring our tomato plants were tomato hornworms, rather than tobacco hornworms.

But tomato hornworms, Manduca quinquemaculata, have blue or black horns. M. sexta, tobacco hornworms, have red horns. The enormous green, tomato-plant eaters I’m looking at have red horns.

These caterpillars become a moth known as the Carolina sphinx. The moths are beautiful. I’d enjoy seeing them.

It was an odd day in my education. I learned something about entomology but failed the ethics test. I learned that, when it comes to tomatoes, I am surprisingly reluctant to share.

A life in pictures

 Flannery O’Connor said that the art of writing fiction is the art of drawing pictures.

I think that might be a helpful thought in writing autobiography too.

I have some friends who have talked about writing theirs. I hope all of them do.

If I were going to try it, I think I’d write short items that drew a picture — the written equivalent of a sketch or snapshot — of moments in my life.

How many of those pictures would it take to give an accurate account of you?

Could you do it in 10? Fifty? 

It took Gandhi 167, as I recall. He wrote The Story of My Experiments with Truth as a series of columns for a weekly newspaper. Newspaper columns tend to be short — 500 words in my day, somewhat longer in Gandhi’s. When the columns were collected and published as a book, people commented on how short the chapters were. Some contemporary writers have compared Gandhi’s chapters to blog posts.

Gandhi’s book is sometimes called a spiritual autobiography. He was a complicated soul. I could see why he’d need so many pictures. He had a lot of important moments in his life.

Me? I’d need fewer pictures to tell a simpler tale. I’d say closer to 10 than 167. An essay, rather than a book.

Words spoken in other times

 I can feel grief. I can’t understand it.

One of the rules of grief and grieving is that nothing anyone else says can possibly help. I’ve found that to be true — except maybe for this, which helped a little:

 

Words that they said to me at other times, I hear now.

 

That’s Antonio Porchia in Voices, a collection of aphorisms. Porchia was a working guy of Italian descent who lived in Argentina. He said the aphorisms just came to him, like voices speaking. Sometimes he heard the voices of loved ones long gone.

Like Porchia, I often hear words that were spoken to me in other times. Those words are consoling.

• Antonio Porchia, Voices, translated by W.S. Merwin; Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 2003, 97. For a short note on Porchia as a writer, see “What is the minimum it takes to be a writer?” Sept. 11, 2021.

Solstice on the Yellow River

 We spent the morning of the solstice on the Yellow River.

Near the Rockbridge, a natural rock formation that appears to bridge the river, I found a horned caterpillar that I couldn’t identify, and then I got lost again in the mystery of wild petunias, Ruellia caroliniensis. I see them scattered around the Piedmont.

The flowers last just a day, they say, but Carolina ruellia blooms all summer.

Last summer I was wondering why I’d see a patch at Stone Mountain one week and a patch on the Yellow River the next. It must be that I see the flowers but don’t notice the plants — yet another sad bit of evidence testifying against my alleged powers of observation.

I’ve read that the flowers are often blue, but all the flowers I’ve seen are violet.

The trip was memorable for what we didn’t see.

Headed south on the trail along the river, we ran into an old Georgian who said, in a soft, slow drawl, that there was a copperhead on the trail ahead. He said it out of politeness, suspecting the Big Dog might have a go at it.

I thanked the fellow and asked the Wise Woman whether she wanted to take the right fork or the left off the main trail. She said neither. The trail she had in mind was the one that went back to the truck.

Writers who keep and study diaries

 Barbara Lounsberry, who taught at Northern Iowa, has written books about Virginia Woolf’s diaries. 

Some items from Lounsdberry’s account:

• Woolf was a writer of diaries, but she also was a reader. She read many. She studied Pepys.

• She wrote diaries — note the plural. Each had a purpose. The diaries of her reading are famous. She also kept a diary of her observations of nature.

• She sometimes argued with other diarists, though separated by centuries.

• She used her diaries to experiment with voice.

I think keeping a diary, journal or commonplace book would help most people who are or want to be writers.

• Source and notes: I was introduced to Lounsberry’s work by Colin Dickey’s review “A Series of Selves” in The New Republic, Jan. 20, 2019. It’s here:

https://newrepublic.com/article/152871/series-selves-virginia-woolf-diaries

Virginia Woolf’s diaries have been mentioned more than once in this collection of notes, which I can’t bring myself to call a blog. I think it’s a journal. Since the notes are posted daily it might be a diary.

The day the nightmare ended

 Juneteenth is the day slavery finally ended in the United States.

Robert E. Lee surrendered the main rebel army in Virginia in April 1865. It took a while to mop up the smaller rebel units. Generally, the Union Army moved east to west. It took a couple of months for the army to get to Texas, which was a backwater of the war. For enslaved people, the nightmare didn’t end until the soldiers arrived.

On June 19, 1865, general orders were read in Galveston, Texas, proclaiming the end of slavery. The news spread rapidly, setting off celebrations across the state.

If there had been Confederate states farther west, further removed from the war’s center, slavery would have endured a bit longer. But Texas was the end of the line.

The nightmare ended on June 19, 1865 in Galveston.

It’s true that other nightmares followed. But those nightmares can be ended and will be one day.

The experience of African Americans in places like Texas is evidence that good people and good causes prevail.

Jim Crow was brutal, anti-democratic, tyrannical. But its legacy didn’t last half as long as the demagogues who fashioned it imagined. If you’re worried about the future of the democracy, this is your holiday. It might be especially important for you and your wellbeing to celebrate this day.

The magical point of view

 Patricia Hempl, a memoirist and a teacher of memoirists, said in a lecture that Americans trust the first person point of view against all evidence. The evidence suggests lies and self-serving misrepresentations. But we Americans love the rugged individualist and trust the individual's voice.

Hempl said it’s no accident that the great American poem is “Song of Myself” and that a lot of great American novels are faux memoirs, such as Moby-Dick and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

I’m fascinated by Hemps view. I’d like to believe there’s magic in the first person but can’t quite get to belief, even shaky belief.

Maybe it was years in the newspaper business covering Texas politicians, who routinely defied belief. I don’t trust most people who live public lives. I don’t read celebrity memoirs. I try to avoid giving more attention than necessary to the voice of Donald Trump, an unbelievable — and dangerous — man.

On the other hand, I’ve read and reread the letters and autobiographical essays of neglected writers I admire, including Roy Bedichek and Stanley Walker of Texas. I have read more Sir Thomas Browne than Shakespeare.

The attraction is the person, not the point of view. When I get a sense of the person, I tune in with enthusiasm or tune out.

I got interested in Hempl because she wrote and said some interesting things about Montaigne.

Montaigne said he wrote to investigate his weaknesses. He looked at all the things he didn’t know.

He was a retired lawyer. He knew how to put things — including his own beliefs — on trial.

An essay is a kind of trial. It’s the kind of trial that searches for something, rather than trying to prove something.

That kind of thinking is usually done when a person is alone, still and quiet. It’s the kind of thinking done in the first person. Maybe that’s the magic Hempl was talking about.

Landscape and children

 Barry Lopez’s fine essay “Replacing Memory” has a note about landscape and children.

Lopez was visiting Southern California, one of the places he called home as a boy. One day, the atmosphere cleared. There was no haze. You could smell the Pacific. His wife said she could understand what he was talking about when he spoke of the clear air of his childhood.

 

I told her something Wallace Stegner wrote: whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see the world afterward. I said I thought it was emotional sight, not strictly a physical thing.

I’ve seen versions of the idea in other places. This is first version I’ve seen featuring gauze.

My version: If you pitch the puppy into the backseat of the truck and take him wherever you go, he will think that’s normal. If you do that with an old dog that’s never been in a car, you are asking for trouble.

We humans are less exceptional than we imagine. I grew up in West Texas. Though I’m an old man who’s lived in many places, that landscape is comforting in a way I couldn’t possibly explain. The Georgia Piedmont is nothing like that dry, spare landscape, which is light on land, heavy on sky.

If the sky here is clear and blue, I find myself looking at it for a long time.

• Source: Barry Lopez, About This Life; New York: Vintage Books, 1998, p. 206. “Replacing Memory” is on pp. 191-210.

Barry Lopez: 'Replacing Memory'

 Barry Lopez, a great observer of nature, trained his eye by observing the streets of the Murray Hill section of Manhattan.

He wrote about returning to his mother’s apartment when she was dying and spending time at a window where he had spent a lot of time as a boy. The scenes through the window had a natural progression, to borrow a phrase used by biologists. Lopez had watched girls in school uniforms going and coming. He had watched young men on grocery cart bikes, three-wheelers, and listened to the empty bottles clattering in their cases.

I watched as though I’d never see such things again — screaming arguments, the unworldly navigations of the deranged, and the haughty stride of single men dressed meticulously in evening clothes.

It’s that watching that interests me — how some people turn out to be observers of life, wherever it’s lived, while others are oblivious.

The story about the view from the winder is in an essay called “Replacing Memory.” And to be fair, Lopez was an observer wherever he lived, wherever he went. He spent part of his childhood in Southern California when some of it was rural. 

 The “replacing” in the title does not suggest that we should substitute memories. The essay is more about placing our memories in their proper places. Sometimes visiting a place again, maybe especially a childhood home, can help a person do that.

But, to the extent we have a shared history, we also have collective memories, some of which we do try to replace. Lopez visited the site of the Bear River Massacre of Shoshone people in 1863 in Idaho. Many Americans would substitute that bit of the nation’s memory for something out of Hollywood.

• Source: Barry Lopez, About This Life; New York: Vintage Books, 1998, p. 193. “Replacing Memory” is on pp. 191-210.

Two views on what we ought to do

 Some people, when they retire from a life of public service, are told that they still have many talents, which should be used in opposing tyrants, poverty, injustice and other evils. It’s a good argument.

But Montaigne said that after a period of public service, we should invest in ourselves.

 

It is time to slip our knots with society now that we can contribute nothing to it. A man with nothing to lend should refrain from borrowing. Our powers are failing: let us draw them in and keep them within ourselves. Whoever can turn round the duties of love and fellowship and pour them into himself should do so. In that decline which makes a man a useless encumbrance importunate to others, let him avoid being an encumbrance, importunate and useless to himself. Let him pamper himself, cherish himself, but above all control himself, so respecting his reason and so fearing his conscience that he cannot stumble in their presence without shame. 

 

He added a quotation from Quintilian: “It is rare for anybody to respect himself enough.”

I hope people choose the course that seems best to them. I also hope people are aware there’s more than one viewpoint about the ethical thing to do.

• Source: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech; London: Penguin Books, 1993, p. 272. The quotation is in “On Solitude.”

The search for universal truths

 When I was in 10^th grade, I read Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Our Town. Under the influence of a kind teacher, I was looking for “universal truths.”

Literature was full of them, she said. Universal truths were a magical ingredient, turning an ordinary novella or play into literature. All aspiring writers should know about them.

I began to mark specimens — or passages that I thought might be specimens — in the margins of my books. (Making marginal notes was a departure for a young man who had been taught not to desecrate books with doodles.)

My search for universal truths didn’t last long. I soon became convinced that the concept was not a useful way of looking at the world. (But I still make notes in the margins of my books, a testament to a teacher’s influence.)

That year was my last complete year of school. It dawned on me that I have not reread Wilder as I’ve reread so many other writers. I ought to at least find out why I bounced off him as a teenager.

Late in life, Wilder wrote a letter to a friend quoting one of Chekhov’s maxims for writers:

 

It is not the business of writers . . . to answer the great questions (let the theologians and philosophers do that if they feel they must) but ‘to state the questions correctly.’ 

 

That rings true to me. 

• Source: Dennis Drabelle, “Book review: ‘Thornton Wilder: A Life,’ by Penelope Niven"; The Washington Post, Nov. 30, 2012.

Euripides: ‘Hippolytus’

 Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the Greek tragedies, says that Hippolytus could pass for a Sophoclean tragedy — as long as Phaedra is on stage.

The play was written by Euripides, not Sophocles, and Euripides was toying with a complex character, Phaedra, to show what a simple one, Hippolytus, looked like.

Phaedra has contradictions within herself. She loves her husband, King Theseus. She’s a virtuous woman. She wants to do the right thing by her herself, her husband and children. But she’s suddenly smitten with love for Hippolytus, her stepson.

Hippolytus is not a complex character. To him, the world is simple. He’s devoted to the goddess Artemis, and his devotion demands chastity. The goddess of love, Aphrodite, decides to bring him down.

While Phaedra is wrestling with the contradictions within, Hippolytus isn’t wrestling at all. He’s single-minded, a fanatic. There are no moral or psychological complexities, only black and white.

He’s not a tragic actor in this drama because for him there’s nothing to decide. When Phaedra decides, he becomes a tragic victim, collateral damage from her choice.

Kitto reminds us that the gods, as portrayed by the playwrights, were “elemental forces of nature.” Aphrodite, the elemental force of love, was one of them. Humans can’t completely understand her. So they must show reverence and do their best to follow her laws.

This series of notes on the Greek playwrights began with Aeschylus, who insisted that all the laws representing all the gods must be followed. Humans are confronted by impossible contradictions in this duty. They must do their best.

Kitto says Aeschylus portrayed the laws as moral laws. Euripides sees them as psychological laws, part of the laws of nature.

Phaedra is a virtuous woman because she struggles with herself. She is trying to find balance among the contradictory forces within. When she loses that battle, she hangs herself, and, unable to face the loss of her reputation, leaves a note saying Hippolytus had raped her.

Theseus, believing his wife rather than his son, exacts revenge.

Aeschylus and Sophocles could not and would not have written this play. Their idea of tragedy involved a tragic character grappling with the conflicts within.

As Kitto puts in, in Euripides the tragedy is often in the people who are not complicated enough to have those contradictions within. He was interested in “the tragic specimens of humanity who come to shipwreck” because they are missing something — a sense of balance that most of have, even if it’s far from perfect.

Of the many wonderful lines in this play, I like these, spoken by Phaedra’s old nurse:

 

The ways of life that are most fanatical

trip us up more, they say, than bring us joy.

They’re enemies to health. So I praise less

the extreme than temperance in everything.

The wise will bear me out.

 

Religious fanaticism is a dominant theme in the news. It’s striking to read enlightening commentary on the news in an ancient play.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Hippolytus is on pp. 210-18.

Hippolytus, translated by David Grene, is in Euripides I in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 157-221. The quotation is on p. 173.

Mist on the lake

 It was early morning and a knee-high fog covered Alexander Lake near Panola Mountain. The fog was heavy but almost eerily low. As the sun rose and the fog thinned, a million little lights sparkled through the mist: water boatmen skittering on the surface and fish rising to eat them.

The loop around the lake is a good walk. American black elderberry, Sambucus canadensis, is in bloom. If you don’t know it, imagine Queen Anne’s lace growing in trees and you won’t be far off. Blackberries are red, and some are turning to purple.

At the far end of the lake, the Enormous Dog and I saw a big buck at the same time and froze. He was moving so carefully it was almost impossible to see him. How could something that big be so close, yet invisible?

The Wise Woman couldn't see him. She was convinced I was making things up and was on the verge of telling me off when the big buck snorted at the dog. He sounded like an 18-wheeler letting off airbrakes.

The dog is big, about 100 pounds. The buck was bigger. He snorted once and was gone.

It’s getting warm — 90 degrees by midafternoon — in the Piedmont. That’s why old folks are out walking early, while it’s still cool, while there’s still mist on the lake.

Euripides: ‘Medea’

 The history of drama contains more than one story about a critic panning a playwright. But the story of Euripides, one of the world’s great playwrights, begins with him taking a pounding from a critic named Aristotle.

Aristotle wrote the book — the first one, anyway — on what tragedy should be. In his view, a tragic hero must be like the rest of us, a blend of good and bad, strengths and weaknesses. Otherwise, how would we ordinary folks in the audience empathize with the hero or heroine’s struggles? How could be feel pity?

But Medea, the title character of Euripides’ great play, is not like us. 

When her husband, Jason, discarded her, Medea killed their children. Killing your kids is a hard thing to do, and Medea spoke eloquently about the difficulty. But her husband had left her to marry royalty — the daughter of King Creon of Corinth — and Medea had to hurt him. She said he left her no choice.

Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the Greek tragedies, gets to the crucial point about Aristotle’s criticism: Euripides didn’t write a bad play based on Aristotle’s standards. He didn’t use Aristotle’s standards at all.

Medea was not like one of Sophocles’ heroes. Her character was not a balance of strengths and weaknesses, with a single weakness that tragically overcame her great strengths.

Medea’s personality was passionate. In the clutch, her emotions always overrode her reasoning.

That was just who she was. When she first met Jason, her love for him was so passionate that she abandoned her family. When she felt he was threatened, she killed her brother and father in his defense. Her passion overrode any second thoughts.

As Kitto put it, she was “quite uncontrolled in love and hate.”

The tragedy is not that her great strengths are undone by a tragic flaw. The tragedy is that her passions are stronger than her reasoning. The tragedy is that such personalities exist at all.

Kitto said that Euripides did not want us to empathize with Medea, but understand her.

We are a long way from Sophocles, and a longer way still from Aeschylus. But I’d say the proposition that some temperaments are disastrous makes sense, perhaps because it’s an election year and one of the candidates has such an oversized personality it’s hard to miss its disastrous features.

There is much good poetry in Euripides. But in reading this play again, I was struck by the character of the children’s nurse, who is a subtle student of Medea’s psychology. She spoke these lines about Medea:

 

She’s a strange woman. I know it won’t be easy

To make and enemy of her and come off best.

 

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Medea is on pp. 197-210.

Medea, translated by Rex Warner, is in Euripides I in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 55-108. The quotations are on pp. 70 and 60.

Writing lesson: on talent

 Mario Vargas Llosa said that talent, for novelists, means years of discipline. There are no child prodigies among novelists.

I think only those who come to literature as they might to religion … have what it takes to really become writers and transcend themselves in their works.

 

I’ve heard that bit of advice from many writers — from poets who wrote like angels and from newspaper guys who did not resemble angels in any way.

• Source: Mario Varga Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist, translated by Natasha Wimmer; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, p. 13.

Another reason we need the poets

 About Stephen Dunn: I don’t know of a poet who wrote better about poisonous work. He wrote about pointless jobs, bad jobs and bad attitudes toward good jobs. In “Checklist,” he wrote of work

that takes from the body

and does not give back.

He wrote of work that “drops the body off at the liquor cabinet.”

Maybe you’ve had a job like that.

People complain about their jobs. If you want to improve the literary quality of those complaints, consult Dunn. He’s tops.

• Source: Stephen Dunn, Different Hours; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010, p. 88.

Frost: ‘The Black Cottage’

 Robert Frost’s “The Black Cottage” is one of the treasures of American literature. It’s an account of a  conversation on a walk.

The poet and a minister go see the cottage of a woman who died and whose sons left it as it was, promising to come back to summer in the old home place. The old woman’s husband died 50 years ago in the Civil War. She would tell people the war was not about the union or slavery but about the “principle that all men are created free and equal.” 

            That’s a hard mystery of Jefferson’s.

            What did he mean? Of course the easy way

            Is to decide it simply isn’t true.

            It may not be. I heard a fellow say so.

            But never mind, the Welshman got it planted

            Where it will trouble us a thousand years.

            Each age will have to reconsider it.

 

The old woman believed in the principle that all men are created free and equal though she’d seen few black people and no people labeled with other colors. The minister recalled how he had once been tempted to make a small change in the creed — the part about how Christ “descended into Hades” seemed a bit much — but could not with the old woman watching.

 

            For, dear me, why abandon a belief

            Merely because it ceases to be true.

            Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt,

            It will turn true again, for so it goes.

 

The minister sees change as truths going in and out of favor. He confesses he sometimes would like to be a desert monarch — a desert being a place no one wants to conquer to force change upon, a place like the deserted cottage.

It’s a strange and wonderful poem. I catch only parts of it, but I’m pretty sure it’s Frost’s best.

• Source: The Voice That is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, edited by Hayden Carruth; New York: Bantam Classics, 1983, pp. 5-8.

Robert Frost's paragraphs

 When Robert Frost was about 20, he wrote paragraphs for a newspaper in Massachusetts. Louis Untermeyer said the paragraphs, though in prose, “were really poetic eclogues, little pastoral pieces.” I would like to read Frost’s paragraphs about mending stone fences making wood piles.

Frost is a puzzle to me. I feel I should like him far more than I do. I think “The Black Cottage” is one of the most astonishing things written by an American. I’ve admired that poem for decades without ever really coming around to loving his other work.

When I was a boy in school, adults would sometimes tell me that I ought to be friends with a fellow who was interested in the same things I was. It usually worked out this way: Despite sharing interests, this fellow and I would find we just didn’t like each other that much. Even as children, we choose our own friends.

When Frost was approaching 85, he made a list of books that had meant the most to him:

• The Old Testament

• The Odyssey — Homer

• The poems of Catullus

• The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — Edward Gibbon

• Incidents of Travel in Yucatan — John C. Stevens

The only book on his list that might be on mine is The Odyssey — and if I could have only one of Homer’s poems it would be The Iliad.

• Sources: Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken, edited by Louis Untermeyer; New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1951. Untermeyer’s note on Frost’s paragraphs is on p. xiii.

The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, edited by Mark Richardson; Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard, 2007. Frost’s list is on p. 199.

A second thought about metaphors

 Jorge Luis Borges said he studied Old English because he was drawn to the metaphors. The ocean was “the whale’s road.”

A good metaphor persuades. You believe that you understand something in a new way. 

• Source: Borges’ comment comes from Jacob A. Stein, “The Power of Metaphor”; The American Scholar, June 20, 2016.

Frost: ‘Education by Poetry’

 Robert Frost said: 

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.

 

Frost held that thinking is learning to manage metaphors. That’s best taught through poetry.

The argument takes off like this: Poetry educates in metaphor, and if you can’t handle a metaphor, you cannot be trusted to safely handle questions about science, history or philosophy. Zeno’s Paradox was a mixed metaphor, mixing the concept of number with the concept of space-time. Arguments about free also involve errors of metaphor. Statistical scientists know that what can be said generally about people cannot be said of an individual, who was not likely to have 2.5 children, even in a previous and imaginary golden age.

Frost said a person who studied the poets would learn how a metaphor could enlighten and how it could break down. Frost held that education in poetry was priceless.

 

I would be willing to throw away everything but that: enthusiasm tamed by metaphor.

 

I read Frost’s essay “Education by Poetry” with pleasure, not much concerned about whether it was true. But it reminded me that in an earlier life I knew a philosopher who used to have a standing lamentation. When we’d get stuck working on a problem, he’d say: What we need is a better metaphor.

• Source: “Education by Poetry” is in The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, edited by Mark Richardson; Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard, 2007. The quotations are on pp. 108 and 104.

Knowing where to begin

 Annie Ernaux, the French writer who won the Nobel in 2022, said she always knew where to start. It’s a line written in her diary when she was 22:

I will write to avenge my people, j’écrirai pour venger ma race.

 

The people she’s talking about are farm laborers, factory workers, shopkeepers, “people despised for their manners, their accent, their lack of education.”

I had to remind myself she was writing about despised people in France. I picture the despised people I’ve known in my own neighborhood.

The world is full of people who face injustice all their lives, and Ernaux spoke of an ideology that is rising in Europe that heightens the threat. She described the ideology’s main traits in these words:

 

• the exclusion of foreigners and immigrants

• the abandonment of the economically weak

• the surveillance of women’s bodies

 

It sounds like the ideology that took this country hostage in 2016 and seeks to do so again.

• Source: Annie Ernaux, “The Nobel Lecture in Literature,” translated by Alison L. Strayer, is here:
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2022/ernaux/lecture/

A small drama on the river

 By some quirk, teacup-sized whirlpools formed behind a snag in the shallows, out of the main current of the Yellow River. The tiny whirlpools lasted for a second or two and would then disappear. But they formed, one after another, and scores of water boatmen, insects in family Corixidae, were swarming around them.

It seemed like a feeding frenzy, and I wondered whether the little whirlpools were stirring up mosquito larvae.

It took a while to see them, but two Southern painted turtles, Chrysemys picta, were hugging the bottom, looking up at the insects.

If you get out of the house, you sometimes see little wonders.

Sophocles: 'Oedipus at Colonus'

 Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the Greek tragedies, says that Oedipus at Colonus is the end of Greek tragedy. In his mind, the play is unsurpassed.

The drama is about change in one person. As the play begins, Oedipus, led by his daughter Antigone, wanders into the sacred grove of the Eumenides in Colonus, just north of Athens. He arrives old, blind and helpless.

But slowly he gets stronger. Halfway into the play, he is powerful, speaking with authority, certain that his vision of the world is how things are and must be. In the end, we see him hopping from rock to rock, as if led by some god or spirit to the place where he will be buried.

Oedipus, in his wanderings, found that he’d been too harsh in his judgment of himself. He had not wished to sin, to defy the norms of human behavior. As a young man, he’d defended himself against an armed assailant. He did not know that his attacker was his father. He did not know the queen he would claim for his public service was his mother.

Kitto says that as Oedipus’s personality emerges in the play, we see the playwright’s philosophy embodied. Goodness in a person doesn’t guarantee happiness. Disaster isn’t reserved for people who are bad. Some things happen to human beings just because they are human, rather than gods. The test of a person’s humanity is how he or she endures calamity.

Oedipus didn’t crumble.

He defied his enemies and was determined to help his friends. He was that way on his last day.

On that day, Oedipus was taking stock in himself, and others were re-evaluating him. Family members visited him, driven by new oracles that said the victor in the dispute over the throne of Thebes would be the one blessed by Oedipus. The old king’s curse would mean certain doom. Kinsmen who had betrayed him came to ask for favor.

The omens changed the Thebans’ perception of Oedipus. But the perception of the Athenians also changed. They had no stake in the Theban quarrel but had heard of the famous man and his tragedy. They had imagined Oedipus to be cursed by the gods. Instead, they learn to see that a person can be unhappy in fortune but noble in spirit.

The play includes some famous passages. One is a description of the sacred grove, a rare nature ode in Greek tragedy. The ode to Time begins with these lines, spoken to Theseus, king of Athens:  

 

Most gentle son of Aegeus! The immortal

Gods alone have neither age nor death!

All other things almighty Time disquiets.

Earth wastes away; the body wastes away;

Faith dies; distrust is born.

And imperceptibly the spirit changes

Between a man and his friend, or between two cities.

 

But I like the lines that Oedipus speaks when he first meets Theseus:

 

I come to give you something, and the gift

Is my own beaten self: no feast for the eyes;

Yet in me is more lasting grace than beauty.

 

Professor Kitto says this play is the best. I must reserve judgment. I started the year with Aeschylus and I’m just finishing with Sophocles. All of Euripides lies ahead. But Oedipus at Colonus is an astonishing play.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Oedipus at Colonus is on pp. 405-23. 

Oedipus at Colonus, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, is in Sophocles I in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 77-155. The quotations are on pp. 107 and 105.

Just puttering

 In 1943, Earnest Elmo Calkin, a retired advertising executive, wrote an essay about puttering.

It was war time. Most of the tradesmen in the military. Handymen were scarce, and spare parts were rationed. If something broke, you had improvise and overcome. Puttering was almost a patriotic duty.

I putter, but not out of patriotism. I think it has something to do with my need for balance. I need to do a little (not much) writing almost every day. I need to see a little of the natural world. I need to commune with gentle spirits and great souls, especially the Wise Woman. I need to read. And I need to putter. For me, puttering includes cleaning toilets and mowing lawns and all that stuff — not just repairs and maintenance. I like to use my hands.

Calkin mentioned casually that putterers must have tools. He spoke highly of a sloyd knife, which I had to look up. Now that I’m enlightened, I feel as if there’s an empty space in my tool bag.

• Source and notes: Earnest Elmo Calkin, “Hitting the Nail or The Art of Puttering”; The Atlantic, July 1943. It’s online here:

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/archives/1943/07/172-1/132419898.pdf

Thanks, Christopher, for sending this my way.