`The Capricious Infinite'

My 7-year-old’s teacher asked him to select three possessions he prizes and bring them to school on Monday in a brown paper bag. The object was to help introduce Michael to his new second-grade classmates whom he met for the first time last week, four days after we arrived from Houston. Without fuss he picked a stout volume of Poe’s stories and poems, Uncle John’s Top Secret! Bathroom Reader for Kids Only and a Bionicle (a Lego creation, portmanteau’ed from “biological” and “chronicle”). Rather than explain Uncle John’s, I’ll give a sample. On Page 64 is a coded message Michael chose to read to his class:

“OMHW VYPI, EHYPXW HVSSP!”

Here’s the message, decoded, also read to the class:

“KIDS RULE, ADULTS DROOL!”

Only with Poe do I feel on familiar ground. I remember sitting in a dentist’s waiting room as a kid, memorizing “The Bells” out of a desire to prolong the pleasure I took in its music. That’s how I learned “tintinabulation,” even before studying Latin:

“To the tintinabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells –
From the mingling and the tinkling of the bells.”

I introduced Michael to Poe several weeks ago when his interest in cryptography was peaking. I told him Poe had written a story, “The Gold Bug,” in which a coded message is central to the plot. Unfortunately, Poe’s clotted prose defeated my 7-year-old, as it has many worthies before him, so I started reading Poe aloud – “The Raven,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” etc. That works but it’s slow going. Almost every stanza or paragraph contains unfamiliar words or phrases – nitre, roquelaire, flambeaux, rapier, Pallas, Plutonian shore, nepenthe. What held Michael’s interest, what enabled him to tolerate the necessity of my improvised footnotes, was Poe’s music and creepiness. Poe writes for kids, adolescents at the oldest, who savor mood and melodrama more than plausibility and human insight. What Michael liked most about “The Cask of Amontillado” was not the bricking-in of Fortunato but all those dripping bones. For four pages you can put up with a lot of turgidity for the pleasure of dripping bones. I asked why he likes Poe and he said: “It’s suspenseful. It’s mysterious. Sometimes it’s scary.” Not a bad start. I thought of Randall Jarrell’s “Children Selecting Books in a Library,” particularly these lines:

“Their tales are full of sorcerers and ogres
Because their lives are: the capricious infinite
That, like parents, no one has yet escaped
Except by luck or magic; and since strength
And wit are useless, be kind or stupid, wait
Some power's gratitude, the tide of things.”

Even as adults we’re looking for correlatives to our lives in everything we read. How else could it be? Humans write for humans, to plumb “the capricious infinite,” and that’s why we read what they’ve written, even when it’s turgid.