'This Small Piece of Eden'

It was April or early May and the snow was going or gone. A low wall of fieldstones surrounded the cemetery in Schoharie County, N.Y. – one of those artfully assembled walls that last for centuries in the Northeast. Jack Flavin writes of them in his poem “In a Country Cemetery”: 

“The patient art (that conceals art) of the country

mason who built this wall is a silent rebuke

to some of the monuments, the wilde enormities, it contains.

The granite courses are set into the bank

along a slight declivity, and the rings

for chaining and winching the stone from the quarry uproad

by sledge and ox are still set in the tops.”

In the cemetery I visited more than thirty years ago, the epitaphs on the earliest markers had been erased by time and acid rain, and some were tilted by the freeze-buckled earth. The lambs carved on the stones of children were worn headless. The grass, mostly red and white clover, hadn’t yet been mowed and was thick with phlox. Birds sang and the air was fresh. Life felt bountiful in the presence of so many dead. Flavin uses a passage from Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydrotaphia: Urne-Buriall (1658) as the epigraph to his poem: “Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us. A small flame sufficeth.” Flavin concludes:

“At the wall’s end, the road dwindles in perspective

and takes an ess turn to follow the river’s

meandering. Across the road, wild roses,

phlox and cinquefoil are in their June abundance.

My dog sits beside me, tranquil and regardant

on the cool stone, as we listen to the colloquy

of birds, considering this small piece of Eden.”

I seek out cemeteries; in particular, the remote, rural, often untended sort, though a sprawling urban cemetery, vast enough to have neighborhoods and thoroughfares, offers pleasures of another sort. As Theordore Dalrymple wrote in his essay with a title borrowed from Dylan Thomas, “Death Shall Have No Dominon”: “. . . cemeteries are for me like bookshops; I find it difficult to resist the temptation to enter them and linger awhile.”

'The Dead Are Speaking'

On July 30, 1937, the NKVD issued Order No. 00447, signed by Stalin and NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov, which mandated the round-up of “ex-kulaks” and other “anti-Soviet elements,” including former officials of the Tsarist regime and former members of political parties other than the Communist Party. Local police officials competed to exceed the official quotas. This was the formal start of “The Great Terror,” as identified by Robert Conquest. By November 1938, roughly 1.3 million had been arrested, of whom at least 700,000 were executed. The rest were sent to the Gulag. What can be stated with reasonable confidence is that Stalin eventually murdered as many as 60 million people. 

The statistics leave one numb and uncomprehending. The recent vogue for socialism and like-minded tyrannies in the U.S. recalls an observation in the second volume of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir Hope Abandoned (trans. Max Hayward, 1974), one of the essential books of the last century: “No one should lightly dismiss our experience, as complacent foreigners do, cherishing the hope that within them—who are so clever and cultured—things will be different.” No human, she reminds us, is immune to the seductions of evil. The Russian poet Lev Ozerov (1914-96) writes in a 1962 poem translated by Robert Chandler:

 

“The dead are speaking. Without full stops.

Or commas. And almost without words.

From camps. From isolation cells.

From buildings as they blaze.

The dead are speaking. A letter. A will.

Diaries. Exercise books from school.

On rough pages of uneven brick—

the cursive of a hurrying hand.

With slivers of tin on a bed-board,

with shards of glass on a wall

or a thin stream of blood on a barrack floor,

life signed off as best it could.”

 

[Ozerov’s poem is collected in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (eds. Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, 2015.]

'The Herb of Memory'

“In time we bow / To the necessity and claim profound / Returns in memory.”

The spice cupboard was a disorganized mess. Looking for tarragon turned into an expedition. I wiped the shelf where seasonings had spilled and what did I smell? Cloves. Then it was 1961 and I was greeting my maternal grandmother at the front door. Her fur coat was cold. With the hug I reached for her purse of black patent leather and she let it slip from her shoulder. I opened it and inside was the usual pack of Cloves gum. I took a stick and gave another to my brother. Neither of us was ever much of a gum-chewer but the ritual had to be observed.

 

This memory of a memory was inspired by Suzanne Doyle’s poem “My Grandmother’s Visit.” Like her, I was fond of my grandmother, a rare gentle spirit in our family. Memory, of course, has a dual nature. How happy I am to see her again so vividly, if briefly, but then she’s gone. My grandmother shared birth and death years with Marianne Moore – 1887-1972 – and resembled her, an old-fashioned American beauty. Reading Moore is another reliable memory-trigger, as in these lines from her poem “Rosemary”:

 

“The herb of memory,

imitating the blue robe of Mary,

is not too legendary

 

“to flower both as symbol and as pungency.”

'The Soul of a Journey Is Liberty'

Zbigniew Herbert begins his 1966 essay “Monsieur Montaigne’s Voyage to Italy” with these words:

“When a moment comes that my body will have only enough strength to fix the pillow under the head, I will have no choice but write a large piece of work, that is a book and not a collection of drafts, which will be titled: Introduction to the theory of journey.”

 

Travel is especially prized by those unable to do so, whether confined to bed or a Soviet Bloc regime. For Herbert, permission to travel from Poland to Western Europe starting in the late nineteen-fifties became a form of cultural pilgrimage. He learned to resist Poland’s present by studying the West’s past. Here is the first stanza of his poem “Journey” (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter):

 

“If you set out on a journey let it be long

 a wandering that seems to have no aim groping your way blindly

 so you learn the roughness of the earth not only with your eyes but by touch

 so you can confront the world with your whole skin”

 

Like Montaigne, Herbert was gifted with restlessness and curiosity, essential qualities for an ambitious traveler or writer. As a result, he is one of the last century’s essential poets and “travel writers” – a dubious category, given the amount of junk published in the travel genre. His essay collection The Barbarian in the Garden (1962; trans. Michael March and Jarosław Anders, 1985) documents those early travels outside Poland. Herbert was always history-minded. Travel beyond the Communist Bloc was escape from an ugly, tedious, oppressive present into a rich past populated with painters and poets. He was an erudite traveler in space and time.

 

In the essay quoted above, Herbert is writing of Montaigne’s Travel Journal, the Frenchman’s account of his wanderings through Germany, Switzerland and Italy between June 1580 and November 1581. He sought relief from the pain of kidney stones and visited numerous spas with mineral baths. Herbert writes of him: “Montaigne was more sensitive to the odd, the ingenious, the technically innovative, than to things of beauty. He doesn’t omit to mention a single curiosity he encounters. . . . He listens. He listens to everyone and everything.” Remarkable how the qualities of the best travelers and the best writers are nearly identical.

 

Herbert visited Western Europe for the first time in 1958-59: France, then England, Italy, France again and back to Poland. His budget was tight but Herbert was no hedonistic tourist. Nor was he a stuffy academic or critic. The resulting essays chronicle a self-guided tour of Western culture by a man temporarily liberated from the bleak, vulgar constraints of Soviet-era Poland. Unlike Montaigne, Herbert revels in the inherited art and architecture of Europe.

 

Herbert begins his essay “Lascaux” (Barbarian in the Garden) with a spirited, unexpected digression: “Breakfast in a small restaurant, but what a breakfast! An omelette with truffles. Truffles belong to the world history of human folly, hence to the history of art. So a word about truffles.” This is a man temporarily freed from the grim, gray strictures of post-Stalinist Poland. He devotes the next two paragraphs to an entertaining account of truffle history and gastronomy. Herbert suggests that we “not envy Monsieur Montaigne, in whose undercarriage the sand [of kidney stones] sang somniferously, monotonously, and long.”

 

Herbert died on July 28, 1998 at age seventy-three.

 

[The Montaigne essay is found in The Collected Prose: 1948-1998 (trans. Alissa Valles, Ecco, 2010).]

 

[ADDENDUM: I was later reminded of William Hazlitt’s essay “On Going a Journey”: “The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do, just as one pleases. We go a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind, much more to get rid of others. It is because I want a little breathing-space to muse on indifferent matters . . .”]

'The Deference We Pay to Harsh Choice'

“It’s not a showy word but a worker word, a syntactic functionary; and yet, for all its organizational aplomb, it secretly delights in nuance and ambiguity.”

 

The poet and Islamic scholar Eric Ormsby is a voluptuary of language. He revels in words like a kid does ice cream. Ormsby took part in a parlor game, “One Word,” sponsored by the Poetry Society of America. Simple: pick a favorite word. In his poetry and essays, Ormsby’s vocabulary is often lush. In his review of Recollected Poems, he celebrates the Canadian poet Daryl Hine’s assault on linguistic anemia:

 

“Others will balk at his sometimes extravagant vocabulary; words such as ‘amphisbaenic’ or ‘labarum’ or ‘ithyphallic’ will send them ‘scurrying’ to their dictionaries (why do they always ‘scurry’ or even ‘scuttle’? A new word, rightly used, should be an occasion for festive processions).”

And yet Ormsby celebrates a humbler favorite word, one that every English-speaker knows: or. “[It] stands like a squat bouncer,” he writes, “at the revolving door of the disjunction. It bears the yoke of alternatives—'to be or not to be’—with all the robust orotundity of an ox.”

 

The OED offer up twenty principal meanings for or, starting with the first and most familiar, which entered the language in the twelfth century: “in general use, coordinating noun phrases, adjectival phrases, adverbial phrases, verbs, and clauses.” Ormsby notes of a twentieth-century adaptation of the word: “it serves ‘the Boolean function of a variable,’ whatever that may mean.” Don’t get me started on Boolean math. For Ormsby, words are meant for mastication. He chews them and relishes the flavor:

 

“It’s pleasure to enunciate an or. The broad o demands a certain preparatory embouchure which alerts the lips and musters the mouth. It has, as I said before, a sturdy orotundity: it is ore rotundo (as Horace puts it), a syllable spoken ‘with round mouth.’ The vowel can expand; it muses, ponders, hovers before closing on the r, most diffident of American consonants. In a Mediterranean mouth, of course, that r positively clatters like an angry castanet when prolonged for dramatic effect: o-r-r-r-r-r! We refrain from such oratorical flourishes. Our r is the deference we pay to harsh choice; it bridles its brash o in exculpatory velvet.”

 

I’m reminded of the interview Vladimir Nabokov gave in 1965 and later collected in Strong Opinions (1973). The interviewer asked for the proper pronunciation of his surname. Nabokov replied:

 

“Englishmen say Nab okov, accent on the first, and Italians say Nabokov, accent in the middle, as Russians also do. Na-bo -kov. A heavy open ‘o’ as in ‘Knickerbocker.’ My New England ear is not offended by the long elegant middle ‘o’ of Nabokov as delivered in American academies. The awful ‘Na-bah-kov’ is a despicable gutterism. Well, you can make your own choice now. Incidentally, the first name is pronounced Vladeemer -- rhyming with ‘redeemer’ -- not Vladimir rhyming with Faddimere (a place in England, I think).”

'Sour of Temper; Peevish; Sullen'

Jules Renard writes in his journal on July 26, 1899: “More than once I have tried being morose for a whole day. I have not succeeded. Not even that!” Renard enjoys presenting himself as a nebbish, a bungler who fails at everything. It’s a useful persona that induces sympathy in the reader and mutes egotism, permitting him to announce his buoyancy of personality while not overtly bragging. 

Dr. Johnson defines morose as “sour of temper; peevish; sullen.” In my personal lexicon, the word connotes a largely self-adopted behavior, a strategy for dealing with life, especially other people, rather than a philosophical stance or a deeper matter of temperament. In his novel Christopher Homm (1965), C.H. Sisson writes: “Even to Dad Christopher's courtship was of some use, as an exercise for morosity.” We can all think of the morose types we’ve known resembling Homm’s father. They seem not so much depressed as defensively carrying a shield of cynicism. In small doses, with a little wit and a minimum of bitterness, morosity can be amusing.

 

I knew a guy in high school who seldom spoke but you wouldn’t call him quiet. When he did speak, you expected him to say something dismissive of the faint possibility that something in the world might please him. He didn’t seem depressed, exactly, but distant, inhabiting an interior realm. Last year I saw him again at our fifty-fifth high-school reunion. He was standing by himself so I approached, shook his hand and started a conversation. He was the same guy with the same personality. He seemed surprised I remembered his name. I learned he was a lawyer, had never married and little else. I stuck around, even though it was work, marveling at the continuity of personality across more than half a century.   

 

The OED offer a secondary definition of morose, used in theology: “of a thought or feeling: wrongly or sinfully prolonged or dwelt upon. Now rare.”

 

[The Renard quote come from Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

'It Can Be Exalting'

“Do you ever feel that you spend too much time with books?” 

The answer true to the spirit of the age would be to respond in the positive and ’fess up to the years wasted, money lost, opportunities missed, relationships scuttled, life in general squandered. That would earn me sympathetic murmurs and pats on the shoulder from my fellow addicts, gathered here in a church basement. (“I can quit anytime I want.”) But that’s not the case. I have no regrets for devoting a hefty proportion of my life between the pages of books, especially when I think of popular alternatives.

 

The question was posed by a friend, a retired attorney who is my age and as well-read as anyone currently in my life. “Apart from my family,” he writes, “especially my grandkids, my life in retirement is taken up mostly by reading.” What else is a septuagenarian to do besides, in my case, writing? The driver of my reading is only secondarily a hunger for ideas. Rather, it’s a hunger for words. My friend writes:

 

“This didn't come about unpremeditatedly. I've long planned to devote my retirement to catching up on the reading I was unable to accomplish during my working years. My family aside, nothing gives me more pleasure these days than book reading. It entertains, it informs, it illuminates; with the best books, it can be exalting.”

 

He’s currently exalting with George Eliot, reading for the first time the greatest of all English novels, Middlemarch. For me, the pleasure of discovering and reading good books for the first time has been somewhat displaced by rereading them. Most of the books I read today, especially fiction, are second or third runs. One of the ancillary pleasures of this practice is re-encountering my younger selves, gauging how different the book has grown with age.

 

“It takes me out of myself and the messed-up world,” my friend writes. “And unlike family life, it's stress-free. (I avoid like Cyclospora-carrying lettuce anxiety-provoking books about politics and current affairs.) Yet despite all this, the idea sometimes comes to me that my retirement, like my stock portfolio, needs diversification, that I spend too much of it between the covers of a book. So far, I've resisted the idea successfully.”