'Sings His Toil Away'

“If Doctor Johnson had been a toad, his most famous poem would surely have been ‘The Vanity of Amphibian Wishes’ rather than ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes.’” 

I love the sort of essay that resembles a tramp through the woods, or up and down city streets, without destination. Charles Lamb was good at this sort of thing, as was Robert Louis Stevenson. The writer must avoid the ostentatiously cute, folksy or whimsical, and forget all about itinerary. Interesting digressions, a good associative memory and a ready sense of irony are essential. The opposite extreme among essays is the tightly organized thesis, often persuasive and scolding in intent. It’s like the difference between a smorgasbord and a menu of bread and water. Both have their attractions, only one is a pleasure.

 

Who can imagine an essay in which the sentence quoted at the top might appear? It’s one of those utterances we can say with certainty has never in human history been written, spoken or even contemplated. And yet it makes pleasing sense. The author is Theodore Dalrymple, writing in his essay “Frogs and Fouquet,” published in the May issue of New English Review. You’re excused if you assumed “Frogs” referred to the French. The essay begins in a recurrent locale in Dalrymple’s work, Père Lachaise. Based on that premise alone, you could never foresee where he’s headed. I suspect he didn’t either. Dalrymple revels in the democracy embodied (so to speak) by a cemetery:

 

“[I]nterred in the great cemetery are terrorists, the victims of terrorists, politicians, pork butchers, painters and sculptors, journalists, scientists, doctors, lawyers, mayors, musicians, actors, engineers, exiles from dictatorships, diplomats, inventors, criminals killed while robbing banks, policemen, mystics, philosophers, historians, poets, mathematicians, generals and soldiers of lower rank, grocers, merchants, admirals, revolutionaries, pharmacists, Chinese, Iranians, Romanians, Vietnamese, Palestinian, Indians, and those (far more numerous) memorialised simply as the husband, wife, son or daughter of someone else.”

 

Like Dalrymple, I’ve spent hours rambling through Père Lachaise, but I’m reminded of a smaller, less renowned final resting place, Vale Cemetery in Schenectady, N.Y. For six years I lived within walking distance of it. Here are buried Charles Steinmetz and some 33,000 others, at the center of a once-thriving American city. A cemetery supplies, free of charge, both paths for walking and plenty of reading material. I remember the vast neighborhood within Vale devoted to the graves of those dead in the influenza pandemic of a century ago. Hiking-for-health I’ve always found distasteful. A walk ought to be contemplative, cheering, humbling. As Johnson puts it in “The Vanity of Human Wishes”:

 

“The needy Traveller, secure and gay,

Walks the wild Heath, and sings his Toil away.”