'Time So Vicious in His Reaping'

I moved to Montpelier, Ohio, a small town in the northwest corner of the state, late in the summer of 1977. My mental model for such a place was fictional, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. I was born and raised in a Cleveland suburb and a small town surrounded by corn and soybean fields seemed terribly exotic. Anderson prefaced his stories with “The Book of the Grotesque,” a brief scene-setter which today I find condescending to smalltown people. He writes:

 “It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.”

 

It’s all a little silly and saturated in semi-digested Freudian nonsense, but half a century ago I took Anderson’s grotesquerie seriously. The main financial institution in Montpelier was downtown, two blocks from where we lived, and was called the Farmer’s and Merchant’s Bank. Its president, a very old man, was our landlord, and I resented him for no good reason. The town’s weekly newspaper, where I would soon go to work, was housed in a former gas station. The grocery/liquor store on Main Street was owned and run by a crippled man with a withered arm. Across the street was a pet store owned by a man who always wore olive-green overalls, with a parrot perched on his shoulder. Down his back ran a dense white smear of bird shit.

 

I soon ran into a peculiar-looking young man, always dressed in cowboy regalia. I never saw him do anything except walk around downtown. His face was almost featureless and resembled a slice of ham. Most of one side of it had been erased. He had one eye. I soon learned that he had bungled a suicide attempt with a shotgun. Those not laughing at him adopted a protective attitude. He died a year or two later and I’ve often wondered what his life was like. What made him desperate enough to try to kill himself? Did he ever think about trying again?

 

In his biography of Edwin Arlington Robinson, Scott Donaldson devotes several interesting pages to the poet’s attitude toward death, which remained consistent through the years. When his mother died in 1896, Robinson didn’t grieve. He reasoned that her suffering was over. She was released. When the daughter of neighbors in Gardiner, Maine was drowned while the family was on vacation, Robinson wrote to a friend: “I am never sorry for the dead, but I can be damnably sorry for the living.”

 

An uncle of the same neighbors, Donaldson tells us, “suffered a disfiguring gunshot wound while rabbit hunting,” and lingered for four days. Robinson wrote to a friend that he hoped the doctors “inadvertently . . . hastened things a little.” Robinson was stoical about death, a stance that can be mistaken for insensitivity. His brother Herman became an alcoholic, was estranged from his wife and children and died of tuberculosis in 1909. His eldest brother, Dean, was a pharmacist who became a morphine addict and had taken his life in 1899 with an overdose. Death was like a neighbor in those days, intimately familiar, not something that routinely happened in a hospital.

 

Robinson wrote “For a Dead Lady” for his mother, Mary Palmer Robinson, after her death in 1896, shortly before he published his first book, The Torrent and the Night Before. Here is the final stanza:

 

“The beauty, shattered by the laws

That have creation in their keeping,

No longer trembles at applause,

Or over children that are sleeping;

And we who delve in beauty’s lore

Know all that we have known before

Of what inexorable cause

Makes Time so vicious in his reaping.”

'A Tiny Inkling of Things Far Beyond Me'

“Do you carry a notebook around with you? Do you write things down right away.” 

No, and no. I’m not that organized. My mind operates like a car radio being tuned by a five-year-old, shifting among static, lousy music, commercials and Debussy. I need anchorage. I need to be sitting, preferably at a desk or table, and I need to tell myself, “Now I’m writing.” Nothing is so “inspirational” as the act of writing. I have tested momentum and it works. Boswell quotes his friend in The Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides (1785): “A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.” True, but I’m like a dog with a favorite spot on the porch. Here is Samuel Menashe’s “Inklings” (New and Selected Poems, 2005):   

 

“Inklings sans ink

Cling to the dry

Point of the pen

Whose stem I mouth

Not knowing when

The truth will out”

 

I wondered about inkling and whether it had anything to do with ink, and thus the act of writing. The OED says no. It’s rooted in an older verb, inkle, defined as “to utter or communicate in an undertone or whisper, to hint, give a hint of.” Dr. Johnson has another theory in his Dictionary. He defines the word as “hint; whisper.” Kay Ryan is a poet who shares much with Menashe, starting with concision. Here she is in her 2008 Paris Review interview:

 

“The problem for me was that I willed my poetry at first. I had too much control. But in time the benevolences of metaphor and rhyme sent me down their rabbit holes, in new directions, so that my will—my intention—was sent hither and yon. And in that mix of intention and diversion, I could get a tiny inkling of things far beyond me.”

'You Must First Invent the Universe'

I interviewed Carl Sagan about three years before his death in 1996. The astronomer was charming, patient, friendly and one of the most articulate men I had ever met. He seemed to relish the act of thinking. Questions prompted thought, not prerecorded soundbites. I was prepared to find him a media-created mannequin. Instead, he was smart and attentive, not merely the star of Cosmos. Our interview soon turned into a conversation. George Santayana characterized sensibilities like Sagan’s in Realms of Being (1942): “A mind that would keep up with the truth must therefore be as nimble as the flux of existence. It must be a newspaper mind.” 

The line I remember most vividly from Cosmos has turned into a popular meme: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” In short, nothing is original in the human realm. Every invention is based on the inventiveness of our forebears. Combining and fine-tuning previous accomplishments and insights might constitute originality. Otherwise, creation is recycling.

 

On July 28, 1763, Johnson dined with Boswell at the Turk’s Head coffee-house. The conversation begins with Johnson’s criticisms of Swift and Sheridan, writers for whom he had little sympathy. As Boswell puts it, “the conversation then took a philosophical turn” and he reports Johnson saying:

 

"Human experience, which is constantly contradicting theory, is the great test of truth. A system, built upon the discoveries of a great many minds, is always of more strength, than what is produced by the mere workings of any one mind, which, of itself, can do very little. There is not so poor a book in the world that would not be a prodigious effort were it wrought out entirely by a single mind, without the aid of prior investigators.”

 

Johnson isn’t disparaging writers and other creators. He is urging humility and a recognition of our ever-present precursors.

'A Form of Knowledge'

A reader asks why “Anecdotal Evidence”? I don’t have a definitive answer. When I covered courts as a newspaper reporter I would hear lawyers and judges casually disparage anecdotal evidence, as opposed to physical evidence or sworn testimony. In other words, it was less reliable, likelier to be dubious or fictional, and thus more like literature. The OED bolsters this understanding in its definition of anecdote: “a short account of an amusing, interesting, or telling incident or experience; sometimes with implications of superficiality or unreliability.” 

You and I dwell every day in the realm of anecdotal evidence. You go to the grocery, witness a shoplifter being taken away, and you go home and tell your spouse. We’re surrounded by anecdotes, assuming we’re paying attention, and as humans we instinctively share such stories, even with strangers. They form part of the civil contract. Anecdotes overlap significantly with what we usually prize as “good gossip,” another ingredient of the social glue. Dr. Johnson tells us in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775):

 

“I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made. If a man is to wait till he weaves anecdotes into a system, we may be long in getting them, and get but a few, in comparison of what we might get.”

 

Another source was “Anecdote and Storyteller,” an essay by Irving Howe posthumously collected in A Critic’s Notebook (1994). Howe defines an anecdote as a “brief, unelaborated, often humorous account of a single incident, taken to be piquant in its own right.” And goes on: “One of its attractions is that in times of dislocation, the anecdote holds out the possibility that human beings may still connect, perhaps only briefly, through memory and story.” In the Spring 1992 issue of The American Scholar, Joseph Epstein’s essay is titled “Merely Anecdotal.” He enjoys anecdotes and takes them seriously:

 

“If anecdotes are a form of knowledge -- about the zaniness of human behavior, about the shocking stupidity as well as the startling intelligence of people, about our irrationality, our unpredictability, our hopeless comicality -- then it is a form of knowledge that is cumulative and yet without end. If anecdotes teach anything at all, it is probably that it is best never to think we know the last word about any human heart, not even our own.”

 

[“Merely Anecdotal” is collected in Epstein’s 1995 essay collection With My Trousers Rolled.]

'Give Thanks, Give Thanks'

Already people are complaining about spring’s tardiness. This is Houston, where a week or two of cold, even a few brief dips below freezing, are likened to Shackleton in Antarctica. The garden has wilted, shifted from green to brown in weeks. Look at the bright side: you don’t have to mow the lawn. For the moment, no mosquitoes. In the North, February was one of my favorite months. 

Someone asked if I missed Northern winters, and I do, though winter at those latitudes is not one thing. Some years it means snow and cold and little else. Other years it’s a cycle of freezes and thaws, beginning in October or November and ending for good in May with the big thaw of summer, the season that seems like an anomaly, a mere interruption of winter. The best part is the thaw that arrives late in January or early in February, boosting the temperature into the forties or higher. It’s a thaw you can smell, especially in the woods. I think of it as slow-motion decomposition. The earth in patches is bare again and the mineral scent of rot – death turning into life – fills the woods. Skunk cabbage melts snow cover and sends up twisted purple buds, a false harbinger of true spring. It’s a tease, of course. A deep freeze soon follows, sometimes lasting into April.

 

See Aaron Poochigian’s “The Renaissance,” a paean to spring. He doesn’t say so but he’s writing of spring in New York City. An urban spring without skunk cabbage. Here is the final stanza, composed with Poochigian’s customary gusto:

 

“For here and now, this vernal

victory over the squally

season of melancholy

indulgence, for the diurnal

human madrigal

and hibiscus on terraced banks,

for the boon of ‘I’ at all,

give thanks, give thanks.”

 

Poochigian’s epigraph to the poem is from Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”: “In the prison of his days / Teach the free man how to praise.”

'Hold Fast, Hold Fast to These'

“I use books to help me remember my life, to give that life fuller sense and broader contour.”

Some years I remember mostly for the books I read. Take 1970. Sure, I graduated from high school, we invaded Cambodia and the Beatles broke up. What I remember most vividly is for the first time having access to a university library. My life pivoted. Sure, some books I found with the aid of the catalog but I loved trolling the shelves, going floor to floor, trusting in bookish serendipity. That is literally how I discovered Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy and Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé. I had never heard of either book or writer before finding them, read both cover to cover, and have reread them in the subsequent half-century.

 

That brings us to Ernest Hilbert’s sonnet “Cover to Cover,” which opens with a line every devoted reader will understand: “I don’t collect them. They just accumulate . . .” The sentence quoted at the top is from a prose passage by Hilbert that accompanies his poem. He writes:

 

“As I grow older, more and more volumes gather about me as well, like barnacles on the hide of an aging gray whale. I feel an intense animal affection for the books I’ve read, but I also experience their incredible weight as if it were on my very back. How many things do we actually hold in our hands, feel in so many ways for so long before relinquishing?”

 

Just the other day I discovered a poet new to me. James Reidel uses as an epigraph to Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees (2003) these lines from Lindley Williams Hubbell’s “Angelology”: “The tragic view of life / Requires a degree of health than seldom persists / After forty.” A little poking around turned up Hubbell’s “Old Books” in the February 1938 issue of Poetry:

 

“Sappho’s dark hyacinth,

Prospero with his rod,

Achilles in his tent,

Saint Francis praising God:

 

“Hold fast, hold fast to these,

The sturdy and the few

That are more lovely than your love,

More actual than you.”

 

I’m not sure about that final sentiment but I’m sympathetic to “holding fast” to the “sturdy and the few,” including Burton, who writes in The Anatomy of Melancholy:

   

“Heinsius, the keeper of the library at Leyden in Holland, was mewed up in it all year long; and that to which thy thinking should have bred a loathing, caused in him a greater liking. ‘I no sooner’ (saith he) ‘come into the Library, but I bolt the doore to me, excluding lust, ambition, avarice, and all such vices, whose nurse is idlenesse, the Mother of ignorance, and Melancholy her selfe, and in the very lap of eternity, amongst so many divine soules, I take my seat, with so lofty a spirit and sweet content that I pitty all our great ones, and rich men that know not this happinesse.’”

 

Burton was born on this day, February 8, in 1577, and died in 1640 at age sixty-two.

'A Harmless Drudge'

After reading the February 3 post on “euphonious” words, a reader in the UK writes, “I wondered whether any particular dictionary definitions delighted you.” He adds: “I remember, in my late teens, having to look up the meaning of micturate; I’ve remembered the definition, with amusement, ever since: ‘the morbid propensity to urinate frequently.’” He guessed he had encountered the definition in The Chambers Dictionary but was unable to find it. A general internet search was also futile. 

By happy coincidence, today, February 7, is the 251^st anniversary of the letter Dr. Johnson wrote to Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield. In 1747, Johnson had published his Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language, outlining his intentions and methods for preparing the volume. Chesterfield published two anonymous essays endorsing the project. After seven years of almost single-handed labor, Johnson published the Dictionary on April 15, 1755 – without Chesterfield’s promised public patronage.

 

Johnson got his revenge in the Dictionary, where he defines patron as “one who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.” Of course, Johnson also defined lexicographer as “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.” Plenty of Johnson’s definitions “delight” me, to use my reader’s word. As Macaulay put it, Johnson’s masterpiece is “the first dictionary that could be read with pleasure.” A Johnsonian sampler of delightful words and definitions:

 

Kissingcrust: “crust formed where one loaf in the oven touches another.”

 

Smellfeast: “a parasite; one who haunts good tables.”

 

Thabdomancy (a Sir Thomas Browne coinage): “divination by a wand.”

 

Hector: “a bully; a blustering, turbulent, pervicacious, noisy fellow.”

 

Some of Johnson’s definitions amount to compact moral essays or treatises. Take conscience: “the knowledge or faculty by which we judge of the goodness or wickedness of ourselves.”