October!

Eden

 

 

“There are some delightful places in this world which have a sensual charm for the eyes. One loves them with a physical love. We people who are attracted by the countryside cherish fond memories of certain springs, certain woods, certain ponds, certain hills, which have become familiar sights and can touch our hearts like happy events.
Sometimes indeed the memory goes back towards a forest glade, or a spot on a river bank or an orchard in blossom, glimpsed only once on a happy day, but preserved in our heart.”
                                                                   ― Guy de Maupassant

Often so

My Reading List, Part I

The other day I posted Ernest Hemingway's list of 16 favorite novels, or recommended novels...whatever...although one was a poetry collection and one was a memoir.
Anyway, I thought I'd make my own list of 16 books, limiting them to stuff published during Hemingway's lifetime so that he could have had the chance to read them.
To avoid making the post too long, I've broken it up into two parts.  This is Part I.
In no particular order:

John Dos Passos,  USA,  all three volumes.
You really need to read this trilogy,  pretty much forgotten as it is.  You won't be sorry.Incidentally, Hemingway hated Dos Passos, once saying that he moved right with every dollar he made; that's something often forgotten in the obfuscation of Hemingway as Macho Man:  He was a lefty through-and-through.  And, as far as I am concerned, after the Nick Adams stories he became just a tourist writer, writing frivolous drivel (well, not all of it was drivel...) about ex-patriots and foreigners whom he really couldn't know that much about while ignoring his own country and his fellow countrymen.  He lived through the Great War, the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression and wrote essentially nothing about his own country, America, during these astounding years.  Dos Passos did.  And did so with originality and a profound depth of feeling for what it is like to be alive at a certain time and place and age, to really live the lives of others as if they were your own.
A lot of professional critics dislike this novel because...well, let's just say because.  But I do.
“The young man walks by himself, fast but not fast enough, far but not far enough (faces slide out of sight, talk trails into tattered scraps, footsteps tap fainter in alleys); he must catch the last subway, the streetcar, the bus, run up the gangplanks of all the steamboats, register at all the hotels, work in the cities, answer the want ads, learn the trades, take up the jobs, live in all the boardinghouses, sleep in all the beds. One bed is not enough, one job is not enough, one life is not enough. At night, head swimming with wants, he walks by himself alone.”
 ' “What's the use of a league of nations if it's to be dominated by Great Britain and her colonies?" said Mr. Rasmussen sourly. "But don't you think any kind of a league's better than nothing?" said Eveline. "It's not the name you give things, it's who's getting theirs underneath that counts," said Robbins.
"That's a very cynical remark," said the California woman. "This isn't any time to be cynical."
"This is a time," said Robbins, "when if we weren't cynical we'd shoot ourselves.”'
  “Lies are like a sticky juice overspreading the world, a living, growing flypaper to catch and gum the wings of every human soul....  And the little helpless buzzings of honest, kindly people, aren't they like the thin little noise flies make when they're caught?”
 
Sherwood Anderson, Poor White.
Hemingway hated Anderson, too, and wrote a novel, "The Torrents of Spring,"

mocking him, his subject matter and style.  How much do you have to hate someone to waste that much of your time going after them?  What a  creep.  Anyway, Bertolt Brecht liked "Poor White" enough to write a poem inspired by it.  I didn't know that before just now looking up what Wikipedia had to say about the novel.  Alas, other than that, not much.  But I can understand why Brecht was inspired by Anderson's novel.  Hemingway was a jerk.
  “The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.”

Herman Melville, Moby Dick.
I even like the long-outdated descriptions of whale behavior and biology and all the details of life as it was lived in 1851 and before.  The mate Starbuck is, in many ways, my ideal man, and I really don't like that a crummy chain coffee shop has appropriated his name.
Lines from this novel continually refresh themselves in my mind as they are recommended by circumstance:
 "A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy!  All noble things are touched with that."
"It's not down on any map; true places never are."
"I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts."
"From hell's heart, I stab at thee!"

"Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon all mortally practical occasions. Besides, he thought, perhaps, that in this business of whaling, courage was one of the great staple outfits of the ship, like her beef and her bread, and not to be foolishly wasted. Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales after sun-down; nor for persisting in fighting a fish that too much persisted in fighting him. For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill whales for my living, and not to be killed by them for theirs; and that hundreds of men had been so killed Starbuck well knew."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince.
Well, gosh, go ahead and sneer, I don't care.  I love it so much.
  “She cast her fragrance and her radiance over me. I ought never to have run away from her.... I ought to have guessed all the affection that lay behind her poor little stratagems. Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her...”
  “For millions of years flowers have been producing thorns. For millions of years sheep have been eating them all the same. And it's not serious, trying to understand why flowers go to such trouble to produce thorns that are good for nothing? It's not important, the war between the sheep and the flowers? Suppose I happen to know a unique flower, one that exists nowhere in the world except on my planet, one that a little sheep can wipe out in a single bite one morning, just like that, without even realizing what he's doing -- that isn't important? If someone loves a flower of which just one example exists among all the millions and millions of stars, that's enough to make him happy when he looks at the stars. He tells himself 'My flower's up there somewhere...' But if the sheep eats the flower, then for him it's as if, suddenly, all the stars went out. And that isn't important?”

Walt  Whitman, Leaves of Grass.
 It can be repetitive and tedious at times, but it is a fine view of America at mid-19th century, and a fine view of the mind of a sensitive and thoughtful man who cared very deeply about his country and his fellow countrymen.  By the way, it was published the same year, 1855, as Alfred Tennyson's "Maud."  Reading them both gives you an idea of how far apart the sensibilities of the Americans and the English had become by then.
 “We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. So medicine, law, business, engineering... these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love... these are what we stay alive for.”
 “Once I passed through a populous city imprinting my
brain for future use with its shows, architecture,
customs, traditions,
Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I
Casually met there who detained me for love of me,
Day by day and night by night we were together—all else
Has long been forgotten by me,
I remember only that woman.”

W.H. Hudson, Green Mansions.
A wonderful dream from the mind of a man who did so dearly love the natural world, wilderness and non-human life.  I've read, I think, every book Hudson published, love them all, but of them all, this is my favorite.
 “To each of us, as to every kind of animal, even to small birds and insects, and to every kind of plant, there is given something peculiar—a fragrance, a melody, a special instinct, an art, a knowledge, which no other has.”
 “When I look at her I see them all—all and more, a thousand times, for I see Rima herself. And when I listen to Rima’s voice, talking in a language I cannot understand, I hear the wind whispering in the leaves, the gurgling running water, the bee among the flowers, the organ-bird singing far, far away in the shadows of the trees. I hear them all, and more, for I hear Rima.”

Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought.
His "Reverence for All Life" philosophy has profoundly affected my world view and the way I try to conduct my life.  We are kindred souls.
“To blindly accept a truth one has never reflected upon retards the advance of reason. Our world rots in deceit....  Just as a tree bears the same fruit year after year and at the same time fruit that is new each year, so must all permanently valuable ideas be continually created anew in thought. But our age pretends to make a sterile tree bear fruit by tying artificial fruits of deception and  lies onto its branches.”
 “For animals that are overworked, underfed, and cruelly treated; for all wistful creatures in captivity that beat their wings against bars; for any that are hunted or lost or deserted or frightened or hungry; for all that must be put to death...and for those who deal with them we ask a heart of compassion and gentle hands and kindly words.”
 “The thinking man must oppose all cruel customs, no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another, even the lowliest creature; for to do so is to renounce our manhood and shoulder a guilt which nothing justifies.”
  “The Full Measure of a man is not to be found in the man himself, but in the colors and textures that come alive in others because of him.”

 T.H. White, The Once and Future King.
White uses the Arthurian legend to grapple with the problem of  violence and its powerful attraction to men.
King Arthur devotes himself to finding a political system that will do away with the brutal excesses of feudal power and its “might makes right” ethos. At first he tries to channel his knights’ violent urges into the fashionable ideal of chivalry, of protecting the innocent and saving the pure. Later, he tries to focus it on religious quests, and later still, he introduces the innovation of civil law.

But despite everything Arthur does, Camelot creeps ever closer to decadence. Every system Arthur creates only invites the worst of his knights to find new ways to twist it toward their own purposes.  In the end, Arthur fails and Camelot collapses, not only because of the impersonal, overwhelming war lust of men in general, but also because of individual personal failings, as personified by Arthur himself and Sir Lancelot.
White's Lancelot has something broken inside him, emotionally, something that he is aware of but does not understand.

 Lancelot’s dream is that in spite of the thing inside of him that is broken, he might be able to become the greatest knight in the world and work miracles on behalf of God. He considers sexual purity to be fundamental to that work: In order to be the greatest knight in the world, he must be chaste; he must be a virgin. So when Elaine the lily maid drugs and rapes him, he is destroyed. “You have stolen my miracles,” he tells her, weeping. “You have stolen my being the best knight.” After that, he gives up his dream, betrays his friend and king by seducing Guinevere.

The novel would be relentlessly grim were it not written in such lucid and beautiful language.  A thoughtful, wise, sad book that will stay with you.

“Arthur was not one of those interesting characters whose subtle motives can be dissected. He was only a simple and affectionate man, because Merlyn had believed that love and simplicity were worth having.”
  “You have become the king of a domain in which the popular agitators hate each other for racial reasons, while the nobility fight each other for fun, and neither the racial maniac nor the overlord stops to consider the lot of the common soldier, who is the one person that gets hurt.”

Henri Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes.
Most of this book is a beautiful bittersweet dream.  Much of its appeal comes from the exquisite, delicate writing (I read it in French) which a translation can't really replicate.  Even the title is not really  translatable.  Still, this is not a novel to pass up. 
In addition to a compelling, fascinating story, the novel is full of elegant description, especially of the country surrounding the villages and the changes of the seasons.  It’s a story about fairy tales and what comes afterwards, what happens after the end of the conventional myth. 

“We said to him: here is your happiness, here is what you spent your whole youth looking for, here is the girl you saw in all your dreams!
How could anyone, pushed by the shoulders like that, avoid a reaction of indecision, then fear, then dismay--how could he resist the temptation to escape?”
 “This evening, which I have tried to spirit away, is a strange burden to me. While time moves on, while the day will soon end and I already wish it gone, there are men who have entrusted all their hopes to it, all their love and their last efforts. There are dying men or others who are waiting for a debt to come due, who wish that tomorrow would never come. There are others for whom the day will break like a pang of remorse; and others who are tired, for whom the night will never be long enough to give them the rest that they need. And I - who have lost my day - what right do I have to wish that tomorrow comes?”

Alexandre Dumas fils, La Dame aux Camélias.
 This novel so profoundly affected me that it would be impossible to write anything about it.  I think about it often as its fundamental truth is reinforced by every day that I live.
 “We must have done something very wicked before we were born, or else we must be going to be very happy indeed when we are dead, for God to let this life have all the tortures of expiation and all the sorrows of an ordeal.”
 “Because when you saw me spitting blood you took my hand; because you wept; because you are the only human being who has ever pitied me. I am going to say a mad thing to you: I once had a little dog who looked at me with a sad look when I coughed; that is the only creature I ever loved. When he died I cried more than when my mother died. Well, I loved you all at once, as much as my dog. If men knew what they can have for a tear, they would be better loved and we should be less ruinous to them.”
  “Here is Christianity with its marvelous parable of the Prodigal Son to teach us indulgence and pardon. Jesus was full of love for souls wounded by the passions of men; he loved to bind up their wounds and to find in those very wounds the balm which should heal them. Thus he said to the Magdalen: 'Much shall be forgiven thee because thou hast loved much,' a sublimity of pardon which can only have called forth a sublime faith.
Why do we make ourselves more strict than Christ? Why, holding obstinately to the opinions of the world, which hardens itself in order that it may be thought strong, do we reject, as it rejects, souls bleeding at wounds by which, like a sick man's bad blood, the evil of their past may be healed, if only a friendly hand is stretched out to lave them and set them in the convalescence of the heart?”

Oh, yeah?

But, by God, these days you had better pretend to care -- and care with enthusiasm.  Or else.  And the "or else" is getting more draconian every day.

Emotions

Why is it easier to feel sad than to feel happy?  Is the world really that much of a disappointment, full of so much pain, grief, disappointment and regret that our default emotions are resignation and sadness?
Or is it merely a quirk of personality developed from our lived experience, or, more mechanically, merely  a propensity  of our genetic make-up,  like a fear of heights or a taste for salty snacks?
Whatever it is, many of those of a thoughtful literary bent seem to have had a melancholy view of life, and a slightly bitter one, too.

Of course I prayed--
and did God care?
He cared as much as if in the air
a bird had cried 'Give me,'
and stamped her foot!
--Emily Dickinson




These
are the desolate, dark weeks
when nature in its barrenness
equals the stupidity of man.

The year plunges into night
and the heart plunges
lower than night

to an empty, windswept place
without sun, stars or moon
but a peculiar light as of thought

that spins a dark fire--
whirling upon itself until,
in the cold, it kindles

to make a woman aware of nothing
that she knows, not loneliness
itself--Not a ghost but

would be embraced--emptiness,
despair--(they
whine and whistle) among

the flashes and booms of war;
houses of whose rooms
the cold is greater than can be thought,

the people gone that we loved,
the beds lying empty, the couches
damp, the chairs unused--

Hide it away somewhere
out of the mind, let it get roots
and grow, unrelated to jealous

ears and eyes--for itself.
In this mine they come to dig--all.
Is this the counterfoil to sweetest
music? The source of poetry that
seeing the clock stopped, says,
The clock has stopped

that ticked yesterday so well?
and hears the sound of lake water
splashing--that is now stone.
--William Carlos Williams

September

---

September was when it began.
Locusts dying in the fields; our dogs
Silent, moving like shadows on a wall;
And strange worms crawling; flies of a kind
We had never seen before; huge vineyard moths;
Badgers and snakes, abandoning
Their holes in the field; the fruit gone rotten;
Queer fungi sprouting; the fields and woods
Covered with spiderwebs; black vapors
Rising from the earth - all these,
And more began that fall. Ravens flew round
The hospital in pairs. Where there was water,
We could hear the sound of beating clothes
All through the night. We could not count
All the miscarriages, the quarrels, the jealousies.
And one day in a field I saw
A swarm of frogs, swollen and hideous,
Hundreds upon hundreds, sitting on each other,
Huddled together, silent, ominous,
And heard the sound of rushing wind.
~ Weldon Kees

                                "Line Storm" by John Stuart Curry, 1934.

Back to the Future

 

If the government won't enforce civil peace ....

Tell me

File under what was I thinking?

Roosevelt and selfies

Take selfies and post them to Instagram!  Live stream to your fan boys!  Take requests! Watch the money roll in!  Well...maybe that wouldn't have worked for TR.  But still --



This is the age of the selfie.  Lots of people sneer at the fad, but I don't see the harm.  Too many of the commenting class seem to be uptight snobs, looking down their noses at us inferior beings who actually enjoy our lives.  Everybody is vain.  Everybody has an ego. Why pretend otherwise?  Once in a while, "If it feels good, do it!" is sound advice.
 Time and place, of course, but that also goes for prim rectitude and priggishness. Free your inner libertine from time to time, cut loose and howl!
You'll have to settle down and get back to work soon enough.

For no reason at all?

Ernest Hemingway's favorite novels

How many have you read?  I've read 10 -- well, I haven't read all of the Oxford Book of English Verse, but that's not really a novel.  "Far Away and Long Ago" is one of my favorites.  It's not a novel, either, but a memoir.
Ya know...this basically looks like a high school reading list.  There's really nothing unusual about the choices, especially considering when the list was written: Somerset Maugham, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and ee cummings were all contemporary, well-known authors, and the rest were not that far in the past.

Another one gone

Good-bye August, good-bye summer,

Shorter days are such a bummer.

Stephen kissed me in the spring,

    Robin in the fall,

    But Colin only looked at me

    And never kissed at all.

    Stephen's kiss was lost in jest,

    Robin's lost in play,

    But the kiss in Colin's eyes 

    Haunts me night and day.

    ~ Sara Teasdale

Understatement

My father watched westerns

He couldn’t get enough of them: those dusty
landscapes on the other side of the screen,
men on horses seeking justice or revenge.
All through my life if he was tired I would
find him in a dark room full of gunfire.
His movie titles included words like Lone
and Lonesome though mostly families
stuck together and young men learned
to risk their lives for whatever was noble
or right. I could not sit through them;
women were left behind in saloons
with hair and dresses as soft as pillows,
their possibilities perfumed by estrogen.
But it was the men my father was watching.
They had wide hats and leather boots,
masks made of betrayal. My father
remembered the dangerous people
he faced in courtrooms, his arguments
like bullets. His mind was full of places
that were not yet settled, places where
law was new. A man had a horse, a few
friends, some deep internal compass.
People relied on him; what he needed most
was courage. My father related to this.
He knew, after all, how the west was won.

~ Faith Shearin
from Moving the Piano

American Letter

"Our Banner in the Sky" by Frederic Edwin Church

It is a strange thing — to be an American.
Neither an old house it is with the air
Tasting of hung herbs and the sun returning
Year after year to the same door and the churn
Making the same sound in the cool of the kitchen
Mother to son's wife, and the place to sit
Marked in the dusk by the worn stone at the wellhead —
That — nor the eyes like each other's eyes and the skull
Shaped to the same fault and the hands' sameness.
Neither a place it is nor a blood name.
America is West and the wind blowing.
America is a great word and the snow,
A way, a white bird, the rain falling,
A shining thing in the mind and the gulls' call.
America is neither a land nor a people,
A word's shape it is, a wind's sweep —
America is alone: many together,
Many of one mouth, of one breath,
Dressed as one — and none brothers among them:
Only the taught speech and the aped tongue.
America is alone and the gulls calling.

An excerpt from An American Letter by Archibald MacLeish

Home

Our father owned a star,
and by its light

we lived in father’s house
and slept at night.
The tragedy of life,
like death and war,
were faces looking in
at our front door.
But finally all came in,
from near and far:
you can’t believe in locks
and own a star.

~ William Stafford from Another World Instead

Say Goodnight, Gracie

The late Gracie Allen was a very lucid comedienne,

Especially in the way that lucid means shining and bright.

What her husband George Burns called her illogical logic

Made a halo around our syntax and ourselves as we laughed.

George Burns most often was her artful inconspicuous straight man.

He could move people about stage, construct skits and scenes, write

And gather jokes. They were married as long as ordinary magic

Would allow, thirty-eight years, until Gracie Allen's death.

In her fifties Gracie Allen developed a heart condition.

She would call George Burns when her heart felt funny and fluttered

He'd give her a pill and they'd hold each other till the palpitation

Stopped—just a few minutes, many times and pills. As magic fills

Then fulfilled must leave a space, one day Gracie Allen's

               heart fluttered

And hurt and stopped. George Burns said unbelievingly to the doctor,

               "But I still have some of the pills."

--Alice Notley

Nice shot!

Kinda...

Wouldn't it?

Mistake!

So I skipped 7th grade.  Looking back, although the intent by those who recommended my doing so was good, that was a mistake.  I was too young when I entered high school, my brain not sufficiently developed, nor my social skills and understanding of the world. 
I also lost my age cohort of friends with whom I  could have faced the new experience together.  That may have been the worst part of it.
I remember on Orientation Day, when we freshman were introduced to the school, met the faculty and staff, and shown the excellent facilities -- library, science labs, study halls, student lounge, gymnasium, outdoor amenities, swimming pool, cafeteria, school museum; oh, it was a great school, no doubt -- I was quite overwhelmed. 
At a pause to let stragglers catch up, our guide, one of the student counselors, just to pass the time, I'm sure, happened to ask me how I found the library.  Those were his exact words:  "How do you find the library?"  Maybe he said "did" but I heard "do."  So I told him.  That is, I gave him directions: walk back down the hall behind us, take the stairs to the left, turn right and it's at the very end.  I was baffled why he would ask me this since we had just been there, but thought it must be some kind of check to see if I had been paying attention or something.
But the look on that man's face.  The emotions that raced across it.  He thought I was being a smart ass.  No!  No!  I, a 12-year-old, just took the words at face value and answered him as accurately as I could.  But I had made an enemy and I had no idea that I had, any more than I had any idea what the ripple of laughter that followed my response meant.
There were a lot of episodes like that to come.  Many could have been avoided if I had just not skipped a grade and been a year more mature when I entered high school.
Oh -- what's the significance of the image I illustrate this post with?  None.  Other than sometimes I wish I could walk away from parts of my life and forget all about them.

Girl flyers

I ran across this comment on a message board discussing East Asian cultural and history matters:
"I just finished reading the book Under The Same Army Flag. It was printed in China in 2005. The book has over 50 short remembrances from Chinese soldiers who fought in Burma and India during World War II.  In the chapter titled "War Time" by Li Derun is the following:
'All Americans seemed to be open-minded with lively personalities, men and women alike. When we were with ground services at the airport, we often ran into American female pilots who flew small aircraft.  The small aircraft with only two seats were used to rescue injured soldiers, flying into the most dangerous and difficult locations where there often was no formal landing strip.
"Unlike Chinese women who tend to be shy and more reserved, American girls were outgoing, forthright, and each had a unique personality, and they were dedicated, hard workers too. When there was an injured soldier, they would spare no effort to rescue him regardless of his rank or nationality, always safely getting him to the hospital. Their job had no regular hours, and sometimes they had to fly back and forth round-the-clock.'
Although the author is a little vague about where and when he was writing about, it appears to have been the airfield in DinJan in either late 1944 or early 1945."