Followers

18 February 2009

Valentine's Day


Valentine's Day was last week. The day on which we celebrate love and especially romantic love. This day is linked to Greco-Roman February holidays devoted to fertility, in particular, the festival of Lupercalia. The romantic overtone of the holiday is in commemoration of St. Valentine, a Roman priest who was martyred on February 14 in 269 A.D. It's worth noting that there are many different Christian martyrs named "Valentine," and until 1969, the Catholic Church recognized 11 different Valentine's days.

For Valentine's Day every February florists in the United States import several million pounds of roses from South America. About thirty-six million boxes of chocolates will be given as gifts today.
The holiday comes, in part, from the ancient Romans' holiday honoring Juno, the goddess of women and marriage, on the night before the Feast of Lupercalia. Roman girls would put slips of paper with their names on them into a clay jar, and the boys would choose their partner for the festival by taking a slip from the jar. This was one of the few times girls and boys were allowed to socialize, and the dancing and games often evolved into courtship and marriage.
Tradition has it that Valentine's Day as we know it began sometime in the middle of the third century. Claudius II of Rome was waging several wars and needed to recruit more soldiers for his armies. He thought that many men were reluctant to join because they didn't want to leave their wives and families, and so he temporarily banned engagements and marriages. Saint Valentine was working as a priest at the time and he and his partner Saint Marius broke the law and secretly married couples in small, candlelit rooms, whispering the ceremonial rites. Eventually Saint Valentine was caught and sentenced to death. While awaiting his punishment he would talk with the young daughter of the prison guard whose father allowed her to visit occasionally. Saint Valentine was killed on February 14, 269 A.D., but he had left a note for the guard's daughter, signed, "Love from your Valentine."
Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, didn't write much literature in her lifetime, just a novel and a few short stories, but some of her letters to her husband read like love poems.
She once wrote: "I look down the tracks and see you coming—and out of every haze and mist your darling rumpled trousers are hurrying to me. Without you, dearest dearest, I couldn't see or hear or feel or think—or live—I love you so, and I'm never in all our lives going to let us be apart another night."

Love Poem

by Donald Hall born 20 November 1928

When you fall in love,
you jockey your horse
into the flaming barn.

You hire a cabin
on the shiny Titanic.
You tease the black bear.

Reading the Monitor,
you scan the obituaries
looking for your name.

In 1918, e. e. cummings fell in love with his friend's wife, Elaine Thayer. They had an affair and later got married. The marriage only lasted a few years, but cummings wrote some of his most passionate poems to her, including:
"i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss"

The American poet Anne Bradstreet immigrated with her husband to America in 1630. Her husband was a magistrate for the Massachusetts colony, and spent long periods away from home. Anne missed him terribly, and wrote many love poems to him while he was away, including "To My Dear and Loving Husband" (1678). She wrote:
"If ever two were one then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.
If ever wife were happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold
Or all the riches that the East doth hold
My love is such that rivers cannot quench
Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense"

LEONARD MICHAELS, 1933 - 2003



Short story writer and novelist LEONARD MICHAELS was born in New York City, 1933. He grew up in the Lower East Side, the son of immigrant Polish Jews, and spoke only Yiddish until he was about five or six years old. His mother introduced him to English when she bought a complete set of Charles Dickens. He said, "If you can imagine a little boy listening to his mother, who can hardly speak English, reading Dickens hour after hour in the most extraordinary accent, it might help to account for my peculiar ear." He's the author of Going Places (1969), and I Would Have Saved Them If I Could (1975).

12 February 2009

Marianne Moore quotes

“The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint”

“Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.”

“There never was a war that was not inward; I must fight till I have conquered in myself what causes war.”

“Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage”

“Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time..

“Psychology which explains everything explains nothing, and we are still in doubt”


“Poetry is all nouns and verbs”

“Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.”

“If you will tell me why the fen appears impassable, I then will tell you why I think that I can cross it if I try”

“The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.”

William Faulkner, 1897 - 1962

William (Cuthbert) Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi (1897). He grew up listening to stories about his family, including several stories about his great-grandfather, a colonel in the Civil War, who once killed a man with a bowie knife and later killed another man who tried to avenge the first man's death. And then there were stories about Faulkner's father, who was once sitting in a drug store with a girl when the girl's spurned boyfriend walked in and shot Faulkner's father in the back with a shotgun. Somehow, Faulkner's father survived.
Aside from family lore, Faulkner's literary education came not from school but from an older friend named Phil Stone, who had gone to Yale. At that time, Faulkner had been reading Moby-Dick and Shakespeare, but it was Phil Stone who introduced him to modern literature like the works of James Joyce and Joseph Conrad.
After dropping out of high school, Faulkner spent several years trying to figure out what to do with himself. He went to the University of Mississippi for a year, where he got a D in his English class. He went to New York City, where he was fired from a job at a bookstore because he told the customers they were reading trash. Then he worked for a while at a post office, until he lost that job because he failed to deliver the mail and often closed down early to go golfing.
He published a book of poems and two relatively conventional novels, and then he met the writer Sherwood Anderson, who advised him to write about his hometown. So Faulkner began observing Oxford, Mississippi, more closely, and he began to invent an imaginary version of Oxford he called Jefferson, located in an imaginary county he called Yoknapatawpha.
He later said, "I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and by sublimating the actual into apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top."
One of the first novels he wrote about his new imaginary landscape was The Sound and the Fury, about a wild young woman named Caddy Compson and her three brothers: Benjy, who is mentally handicapped; Quentin, who falls in love with her; and Jason, who feels she has ruined the family's name by getting pregnant out of wedlock.
Faulkner went on writing through the 1930s, but he never really broke through to popular success. By 1944, all but one of his books were out of print. But in 1945, Malcolm Cowley helped publish a Portable Faulkner edition, which brought attention back to his work. Then in 1949, he won the Nobel Prize for literature. All his books were brought back into print, and they have stayed in print ever since.


The Nobel Prize in Literature 1949

William Faulkner's speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.


*A gentleman can live through anything.

*A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.

*A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

*Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

*An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

*Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

*Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

*Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency to get the book written.

*Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.

*Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief.

*Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

*Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.

*I believe that man will not merely endure. He will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

*I decline to accept the end of man.

*I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.

William Carlos Williams, 1883 - 1963


Through this hole
at the bottom of the cavern
of death, the imagination
escapes intact.
It is imagination
which cannot be fathomed.
It is through this hole we escape...

Only the imagination is real!
I have declared it
time without end.
If a man die
it is because death
has first
possessed his imagination...
____

William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey (1883). Williams fell in love with the poetry of Walt Whitman in high school, and began keeping a series of notebooks full of his own Whitman-esque poems. He wanted to devote his life to writing after graduation, but his parents persuaded him to study medicine. So he became a doctor in his hometown of Rutherford, New Jersey. He set up a patients' room off the kitchen of his house at number 9 Ridge Road, and began to treat the poor immigrants who had begun moving into the neighborhood: Italians and Poles and Germans.

He came to believe that the greatest poetry was produced by devotion to the poet's local culture. He paid close attention to the language used by gas station attendants and nurses and shopkeepers, and he began to incorporate that more simple, spoken language into his poetry. And he wrote about ordinary things: plums, wheelbarrows, hospitals, and the New Jersey landscape, with its polluted rivers and suburban lawns.

Pastoral

WHEN I was younger
it was plain to me
I must make something of myself.
Older now
I walk back streets
admiring the houses
of the very poor:
roof out of line with sides
the yards cluttered
with old chicken wire, ashes,
furniture gone wrong;
the fences and outhouses
built of barrel staves
and parts of boxes, all,
if I am fortunate,
smeared a bluish green
that properly weathered
pleases me best of all colors.
No one
will believe this
of vast import to the nation.


_____________________


*Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.

*It is almost impossible to state what one in fact believes, because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to define it at the same time.

*There is something
something urgent
I have to say to you
and you alone
but it must wait
while I drink in
the joy of your approach,
perhaps for the last time.

*It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages.”

*It was the love of love,
the love that swallows up all else,
a grateful love,
a love of nature, of people,
of animals,
a love engendering
gentleness and goodness
that moved me
and that I saw in you.


*In summer, the song sings itself.

*Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

*I have discovered that most of
the beauties of travel are due to
the strange hours we keep to see them. . . .

*What power has love but forgiveness?
Novelist Bernard Malamud, born in Brooklyn, New York (1914). He grew up in Brooklyn in a household where both Yiddish and English were spoken. He wrote a few stories in college, but after he graduated he was too preoccupied with finding a job to start writing seriously. It was the middle of the Depression and he was struggling just to earn enough money to eat and pay the rent. He said, "I would dream of new suits."

In 1940, he got a job as a clerk in the U.S. Census Bureau. He spent mornings checking drainage ditch statistics, but as soon as that work was done he would crouch over his desk and write short stories on company time. Eventually, he got a few stories published in magazines and he got a job as a professor at Oregon State College.

It was while he was working there that he published his first novel, The Natural (1952), about a talented baseball player who is dragged down by his own desires and obsessions. He was inspired to write the novel after reading biographies of Babe Ruth and Bobby Feller. It was a huge success and he went on to publish many more novels.

Malamud said, "I ... write a book, or a short story, at least three times—once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say."

*The purpose of the writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

*Without heroes, we are all plain people, and don't know how far we can go.

*We have two lives—the one we learn with and the life we live after that.

*Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

*There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to go - if there are no doors or windows he walks through wall.

*Life is a tragedy full of joy."

*Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.

*What one Christian does is his own responsibility, what one Jew does is thrown back at all Jews"

*I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.

*The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.

05 February 2009

and now his tears were saying it.
The old Alton station was his kind of place, savoring of transit and the furtive small pleasures of city life. I had bought my first pack of cigarettes here, with no protest from the man running the newsstand, though I was a young-looking fifteen. He simply gave me my change and a folder of matches advertising Sunshine beer, Alton’s local brand. Alton was a middle-sized industrial city that had been depressed ever since the textile mills began to slide South. In the meantime, with its orderly street grid and hearty cuisine, it still supplied its citizens with traditional comforts and an illusion of well-being. I lit up a block from the station, as I remember, and even though I didn’t know how to inhale, my nerves took a hit; the sidewalk seemed to lift toward me and the whole world felt lighter. From that day forward I began to catch up, socially, with the more glamorous of my peers, who already smoked.
Even my stay-at-home mother, no traveller but a reader, had a connection to the station: it was the only place in the city where you could buy The American Mercury and The Atlantic Monthly. Like the stately Carnegie library two blocks down Franklin Street, it was a place you felt safe inside. It had been built for eternity, when the railroads looked to be with us forever—a foursquare granite temple with marble floors, a high ceiling whose gilded coffers glinted through a coating of coal smoke, and tall-backed waiting benches as grave as church pews. The radiators clanked and the walls murmured as if giving back some of the human noise they absorbed, day and night. The newsstand and coffee shop were usually busy, and the waiting room was always warm, as my father and I had discovered on more than one winter night. We had been commuters to the same high school, he as a teacher and I as a student, in secondhand cars that on more than one occasion failed to start, or got stuck in a snowstorm. We would make our way to the station, one place sure to be open.
We did not foresee, that moment on the platform as the signal bells a half mile down the tracks warned of my train’s approach, that within a decade passenger service to Philadelphia would stop, and that eventually the station, like stations all across the East, would be padlocked and boarded up. It stood on its empty acre of asphalt parking space like an oversized mausoleum. All the life it had once contained was sealed into silence, and for most of the rest of the century it ignominiously waited, in this city where progress was slow, to be razed.
But my father did foresee, the glitter in his eyes told me, that time consumes us—that the boy I had been was dying if not already dead, and we would have less and less to do with each other. I had taken my life from his, and now I was stealing away with it. The train appeared, the engine, with its shining long connecting rods and high steel wheels, out of all proportion to the little soft bodies it dragged along. I boarded it. My parents looked smaller, foreshortened. We waved sheepishly through the smirched glass. I opened my book—“The Complete

John Updike, 1932 - 2009



John Updike 1932 –2009

American author John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania (1932). His family moved to a farm when he was thirteen, so he and his father -- who was a high-school math teacher -- had to commute daily into town for school. The isolation Updike felt on the farm fueled a desire to escape his life. He escaped first through cartoons and fiction in The New Yorker, and then by winning a scholarship to Harvard. He later joined the staff at The New Yorker, but left to concentrate on his writing. A prolific writer of poetry, short stories, and essays, Updike is best known for his novels, in particular the four Rabbit books, which began with the classic Rabbit Run (1961). Updike said, "The character of Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom was for me a way in -- a ticket to the America all around me. [The four novels] became a running report on the state of my hero and his nation." Rabbit Run begins,
Boys playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above wires. Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops and watches, though he's twenty-six and six three. So tall, he seems an unlikely rabbit, but the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irises, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose as he stabs a cigarette into his mouth partially explain the nickname, which was given to him as a boy. He stands there thinking, the kids keep coming, they keep crowding you up.

Updike said: "Writers take words seriously-perhaps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader."

In Extremis
I saw my toes the other day.
I hadn't looked at them for months.
Indeed, they might have passed away.
And yet they were my best friends once.
When I was small, I knew them well.
I counted on them up to ten
And put them in my mouth to tell
The larger from the lesser. Then
I loved them better than my ears,
My elbows, adenoids, and heart.
But with the swelling of the years
We drifted, toes and I, apart.
Now, gnarled and pale, each said, j'accuse!--
I hid them quickly in my shoes.

MY FATHER’S TEARS by JOHN UPDIKE
The New Yorker Magazine

Issue of 27 February 2006


Come to think of it, I saw my father cry only once. It was at the Alton train station, back when the trains still ran. I was on my way to Philadelphia to catch the train that would return me to Boston and college. I was eager to go, for already my home an my parents had become somewhat unreal to me, and college, with its courses and the hopes for my future they inspired and the girlfriend I had acquired in my sophomore year, had become more real every semester; it shocked me—threw me off track, as i were—to see that my father’s eyes, as he shook my hand goodbye, glittered with tears
I blamed it on our shaking hands: for eighteen years, we had never had occasion for this ritual, this manly contact, and we had groped our way into it only in the past few years. He was taller than I, though I was not short, and I realized, his hand warm in mine while he tried to smile, that he had a different perspective than I. I was going somewhere, and he was seeing me go. I was growing in my own sense of myself, and to him I was getting smaller. He had loved me, it came to me as never before. It was something that had not needed to be said before, and now his tears were saying it.
The old Alton station was his kind of place, savoring of transit and the furtive small pleasures of city life. I had bought my first pack of cigarettes here, with no protest from the man running the newsstand, though I was a young-looking fifteen. He simply gave me my change and a folder of matches advertising Sunshine beer, Alton’s local brand. Alton was a middle-sized industrial city that had been depressed ever since the textile mills began to slide South. In the meantime, with its orderly street grid and hearty cuisine, it still supplied its citizens with traditional comforts and an illusion of well-being. I lit up a block from the station, as I remember, and even though I didn’t know how to inhale, my nerves took a hit; the sidewalk seemed to lift toward me and the whole world felt lighter. From that day forward I began to catch up, socially, with the more glamorous of my peers, who already smoked.
Even my stay-at-home mother, no traveller but a reader, had a connection to the station: it was the only place in the city where you could buy The American Mercury and The Atlantic Monthly. Like the stately Carnegie library two blocks down Franklin Street, it was a place you felt safe inside. It had been built for eternity, when the railroads looked to be with us forever—a foursquare granite temple with marble floors, a high ceiling whose gilded coffers glinted through a coating of coal smoke, and tall-backed waiting benches as grave as church pews. The radiators clanked and the walls murmured as if giving back some of the human noise they absorbed, day and night. The newsstand and coffee shop were usually busy, and the waiting room was always warm, as my father and I had discovered on more than one winter night. We had been commuters to the same high school, he as a teacher and I as a student, in secondhand cars that on more than one occasion failed to start, or got stuck in a snowstorm. We would make our way to the station, one place sure to be open.
We did not foresee, that moment on the platform as the signal bells a half mile down the tracks warned of my train’s approach, that within a decade passenger service to Philadelphia would stop, and that eventually the station, like stations all across the East, would be padlocked and boarded up. It stood on its empty acre of asphalt parking space like an oversized mausoleum. All the life it had once contained was sealed into silence, and for most of the rest of the century it ignominiously waited, in this city where progress was slow, to be razed.
But my father did foresee, the glitter in his eyes told me, that time consumes us—that the boy I had been was dying if not already dead, and we would have less and less to do with each other. I had taken my life from his, and now I was stealing away with it. The train appeared, the engine, with its shining long connecting rods and high steel wheels, out of all proportion to the little soft bodies it dragged along. I boarded it. My parents looked smaller, foreshortened. We waved sheepishly through the smirched glass. I opened my book—“The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton”—before Alton’s gritty outskirts had fallen away.
At the end of that long day of travel, getting off not at Boston’s South Station but at Back Bay, one stop earlier and closer to Cambridge, I was met by my girlfriend. How swanky that felt, to read Milton all day, the relatively colorless and hard-to-memorize pentameters of “Paradise Regained,” and, in sight of the other undergraduates disembarking, to be met and embraced on the platform by a girl—no, a woman—wearing a gray cloth coat, canvas tennis sneakers, and a ponytail. It must have been spring break, because if Deb was greeting me the vacation had been too short for her to go back and forth to St. Louis, where her home was. Instead, she had been waiting a week for me to return. She tended to underdress in the long New England winter, while I wore the heavy winter coat, with buckled belt and fleecy lining, that my parents had bought me, to my embarrassment, to keep me from catching colds up in New England.
She told me, as we rode first the Green Line and then the Red back to Harvard Square, what had happened to her that week. There had been an unpredicted snow squall, whose sullied traces were still around us, and she was angry to the point of tears at having been given, because of her college education, in the restaurant where she was a part-time waitress, the assignment of adding up numbers in the basement while the other waitresses pocketed all the tips. I told her what I could recall of my week in Pennsylvania, already faded in memory except for the detail lodged there like a glittering splinter—my father’s tears. My own eyes itched and burned after a day of reading in a jiggling train; I lifted them only to admire the shining water as the train travelled the stretch of track around New London.

In the years when we were newly married and still childless, Deb and I would spend a summer month with each set of parents. Her father was an eminent Unitarian minister, who preached in a gray neo-Gothic edifice built for eternity near the Washingto University campus. Each June he moved his family from the roomy brick parsonage on Lindell Boulevard to an abandoned Vermont farmhouse he had bought in the nineteen-thirties for less than five hundred dollars. Some Junes, Deb and I arrived befor her father’s parish duties permitted him and the rest of his family, a wife and two other daughters, to be there. The chilly solitude of the place, with basic cold-water plumbing but no electricity, high on a curving dirt road whose only visible house, a hal mile away, was occupied by another Unitarian minister, reinforced my sense of having moved up, thanks to my blue-eyed bride, into a new, more elevated and spacious territory
The lone bathroom was a long room, its plaster walls and wooden floor both bare, that was haunted by a small but intense rainbow, which moved around the walls as the sun in the course of the day glinted at a changing angle off the bevelled edge of the mirror on the medicine cabinet. When we troubled to heat up enough water on the kerosene stove for a daylight bath, the prismatically generated rainbow kept the bather company; it quivered and bobbed when footsteps or a breath of wind made the house tremble. To me this Ariel-like phenomenon was the magical child of Unitarian austerity, symbolic of the lofty attitude that sought out a primitive farmhouse as a relief from well-furnished urban comfort. It had to do, I knew, drawing upon my freshly installed education, with idealism, with Emerson and Thoreau, with self-reliance and taking Nature on Nature’s terms. A large side room in the house, well beyond the kerosene stove’s narrow sphere of warmth, held a big loom frame that had come with the house, and an obsolete encyclopedia, and a set, with faded spines, of aged but rarely touched books entitled “The Master Works of World Philosophy.” When I broke precedent by taking one of the volumes down, its finely ridged cloth cover gave my fingers an unpleasant tingle. It was the volume containing selections from Emerson’s essays. “Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact,” I read, and “Everything is made of one hidden stuff,” and “Every hero becomes a bore at last,” and “We boil at different degrees.”
Deb used this large room, and the vine-shaded stone porch outside, to paint her careful oils and pale watercolors. When the day was sunny, and heating the tub water on the kerosene stove seemed too much trouble, we bathed in the mountain creek an easy walk from the house, in a pond whose dam her father had designed and built. I wanted to take her nude photograph with my Brownie Hawkeye, but she primly declined. One day I sneaked a few snapshots anyway, from the old bridge, while she, with exclamations that drowned out the noise of the shutter, waded in and took the plunge.
It was in Vermont, before the others arrived, that, by our retrospective calculations, we conceived our first child, unintentionally but with no regrets. This microscopic event deep within my bride became allied in my mind with the little rainbow low on the bathroom wall, our pet imp of refraction.

Her father, when he arrived, was a father I wasn’t used to. Mine, though he had sufficient survival skills, enacted the role of an underdog, a man whose every day, at school or elsewhere, proceeded through a series of scrapes and embarrassments. The ca wouldn’t start, the students wouldn’t behave. He needed people, the rub of them, for stimulation. Reverend Whitworth liked Vermont because, compared with St. Louis, it had no people in it. He didn’t leave his hill for weeks at a time, letting the rest of u drive the two miles of dirt road to the nearest settlement, where the grocery store, the hardware store, and the post office all occupied one building, with one proprietor, who also managed the local sawmill. We would come back with local gossip and a day-old newspaper, and my father-in-law would listen to our excited tales of the greater world with a tilted head and a slant smile that let us guess he wasn’t hearing a word. He had things to do: he built stone walls, and refined the engineering of his dam, an took a daily nap, during which the rest of us were to be silent
He was a handsome man, with a head of tightly wiry hair whose graying did not diminish its density, but he was frail inside from rheumatic fever in his Maine boyhood. Rural peace, the silence of woods, the sway and flicker of kerosene light as drafts blew on the flaming wick and lamps were carried from room to room—these were his elements, not city bustle. During these hilltop vacation months, he moved among us—his wife, his three daughters, his son-in-law, his wife’s spinster sister—like a planet exempt from the law of gravitational attraction.
His interactions came mostly with games, which he methodically tended to win—family croquet in the afternoons, family Hearts in the evening, in the merged auras of the kerosene stove and the mantle lamp on the table. This was a special lamp, which intensified and whitened the glow of a flame with a mantle, a kind of conical net of ash so delicate it could be broken by even a carelessly rough setting-down of the glass base on the table. Reverend Whitworth was ostentatiously careful in everything his hands did, and I resented this, with the implacable ressentiment of youth. I resented his fussy pipesmoker’s gestures as he tamped and lighted and puffed; I resented his strictly observed naps, his sterling blue eyes (which Deb had inherited), his untroubled Unitarianism. Somehow, in my vicinity of Pennsylvania blue eyes were so rare as to be freakish—hazel was as far as irises ventured from the basic brown the immigrants from Wales and southern Germany had brought to the Schuylkill Valley.
As for Unitarianism, it seemed so milky, so smugly vague and evasive: an unimpeachably featureless dilution of the Christian religion as I had met it in its Lutheran form—the whole implausible, colorful, comforting tapestry of the Incarnation and the Magi, Christmas carols and Santa Claus, Adam and Eve, nakedness and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the serpent and the Fall, betrayal in the garden and Redemption on the Cross, “Why hast Thou forsaken me?” and Pilate washing his hands and Resurrection on the third day, posthumous suppers in an upper room and doubting Thomas and angels haunting the shadier margins of Jerusalem, the instructions to the disciples and Paul’s being knocked from his donkey on the road to Damascus and the disciples talking in tongues (a practice at which the stolid churchgoers of Alton and its environs did draw the line). Our public-school day began with a Bible reading and the Lord’s Prayer; our teachers and bankers and undertakers and mailmen all professed to be conventional Christians, and what was good enough for them should have been, I think I thought, good enough for Unitarians. I had read enough Kierkegaard and Barth and Unamuno to know about the leap of faith, and Reverend Whitworth was not making that leap; he was taking naps and building stone walls instead. In his bedroom I spotted a paperback Tillich, “The Courage to Be,” probably, but I never caught him reading it, or “The Master Works of World Philosophy,” either. The only time I felt him as a holy man was when, speaking with deliberate tenderness to one of his three daughters, he slipped into a “thee” or “thou” from his Quaker boyhood.
He was to be brought low, all dignity shed, before he died. Alzheimer’s didn’t so much invade his brain as deepen the benign fuzziness and preoccupation that had always been there. At the memorial service for his wife, dead of cancer, he turned to me before the service began and said, with a kindly though puzzled smile, “Well, James, I don’t quite know what’s up, but I guess it will all come clear.” He didn’t realize that his wife of forty-five years was being memorialized.
With her gone, he deteriorated rapidly. At the nursing home where we finally took him, he began to whimper at the admission desk, and jiggle up and down as if bouncing something in his pants, and I knew he needed to urinate, but I lacked the manliness to lead him quickly to the lavatory and take his penis out of his fly for him, so he wet himself and the floor. I was, in those years just before my divorce from Deb, the eldest son-in-law, the first mate, as it were, of the extended family, and I was failing in my role, though still taking a certain pride in it. My father-in-law had always, curiously, from those first summers in Vermont, trusted me—trusted me first with his daughter’s well-being, and then with helping him lift the stones into place on his wall, where I could have pinched one of his fingers or dropped a rock on his toes.
I loved him, in fact. As innocent of harm as my own father, he made fewer demands on those around him. A little silence during his nap does not seem, now, too much to ask, though at the time it irritated me. His theology, or lack of it, seems one of the spacious views I enjoyed thanks to him. His was a cosmos from which the mists of superstition had almost cleared. His parish, there in the Gateway to the West, included university existentialists, and some of their hip philosophy buffed up his old-fashioned transcendentalist sermons, which he delivered in a beautiful voice, tentatively. Though Unitarian, he was of the theist branch, Deb would tell me in bed, hoping to mediate between us. I wasn’t, as I remember it, graceless enough to quarrel with him often, but he could not have been ignorant of my Harvard neo-orthodoxy, with its Eliotic undercurrent of panic.
In Vermont, my household task was to burn the day’s wastepaper, in a barrel up the slope behind the house, toward the spring that supplied our cold water. One could look across twenty miles of wooded valley to the next ridge of the Green Mountains. With Reverend Whitworth’s blessing, I had been admitted to a world of long views and icy swims and New England reticence. He was a transparently good man who took himself with a little Maine salt. It is easy to love people in memory; the hard trick is to love them when they are there, in front of you.

Pennsylvania had its different tensions for Deb and me. We had gotten off to a bad start. The first time I brought her home to meet my parents, we disembarked at the wrong train station. The train from Philadelphia was a local. One of its stops was a hill factory town seven miles from Alton, also along the Schuylkill and closer by a few miles to the country farmhouse to which we had moved, at my mother’s instigation, after the war. We were among a handful of passengers to get off the train, and th platform in its tunnel of trees soon emptied. No one had come to meet us. My parents, in spite of arrangements clear in my own mind—I was trying to save them mileage—had gone to Alton
Now I wonder how, in that era before cell phones, we managed to make contact. But in that same era even little railroad stations still were manned; perhaps the stationmaster telegraphed word of our plight to Alton and had my parents paged in the echoing great station. Or perhaps, by the mental telegraphy that used to operate in backward regions, they guessed the truth when we didn’t disembark and simply drove to where we were. I was a young swain, and Deb, so securely in her element in St. Louis or Cambridge, seemed lost in my home territory. I kept failing to protect her from our primitive ways. Blamelessly, she kept doing things wrong.
Though we were not yet married, she had put some dirty socks and underwear of mine through her own laundry, and packed them, clean, in her suitcase. When my mother, helpfully hovering in the guest bedroom, noticed this transposition, she let loose one of her silent bursts of anger, a merciless succession of waves that dyed an angry red V on her forehead, between the eyebrows, and filled the little sandstone house to its corners, upstairs and down. The house of my childhood, in the town of Olinger, a mere trolley-car ride from Alton, had been a long narrow brick one, with a long back yard, so there were places to escape to when my mother was, in my father’s bemused phrase, “throwing an atmosphere.” But in the new house we could all hear one another turn over in bed at night, and even the out-of-doors, buzzing with insects and seething with weeds, offered no escape from my mother’s psychological heat. I had grown up with her aggrieved moods, turned on usually by adult conflicts out of my sight and hearing. She could maintain one for days until, coming home from school or a friend’s house, I would find it miraculously lifted. Her temper was part of my growing up, like Pennsylvania mugginess and the hot spells that could kill old people in their stifling row houses and expand the steel tracks on the street enough to derail trolley cars.
Whispering, I tried to apologize for this climate to Deb, while my mother’s sulk, which had frozen all our tongues during dinner, continued to emanate from her bedroom down into the living room. The click of her latch had reverberated above us like a thunderclap. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” I assured Deb, though in my heart I felt that offending my mother was wrong, a primal wrong. I blamed Deb for mixing up my underwear with hers; she should have anticipated the issue, the implications. “It’s the way she is.”
“Well, she should wake up and get over it” was Deb’s response, so loud I feared it could be heard upstairs. Amazed, I realized that she wasn’t tuned as finely as I to the waves of my mother’s anger.
Near the sofa where we sat, my father, dolefully correcting math papers in the rocking chair, said, “Mildred doesn’t mean anything by it. It’s her femininity acting up.”
Femininity explained and justified everything for his sexist generation, but not for mine. I was mortified by this tension. That same visit, perhaps, or later, Deb, thinking she was doing a good deed, began on Sunday morning to weed the patch of pansies my mother had planted near the back porch and then neglected. Deb stood uncomprehending, her feet sweetly bare in the soft soil, like Ingrid Bergman’s in “Stromboli,” when I explained that around here nobody worked on Sundays; they went to church. “How silly,” Deb said. “My father all summer does his walls and things on Sundays.”
“He’s a different denomination.”
“Jim, I can’t believe this. I really can’t.”
“Sh-h-h. She’s inside, banging dishes around.”
“Well, let her. They’re her dishes.”
“And we have to get ready for church.”
“I didn’t bring church clothes.”
“Just put on shoes and the dress you wore down on the train.”
“Shit I will. I’d look ridiculous. I’d rather stay here and weed. Your grandparents will be staying, won’t they?”
“My grandmother. My grandfather goes. He reads the Bible every day on the sofa, haven’t you noticed?”
“I didn’t know there were places like this left in America.”
“Well—” My answer was going to be lame, she saw, so she interrupted, with those sterling blue eyes. “I see now where you get your nonsense from, being so rude to Daddy.”
I was scandalized but thrilled, perceiving that a defense against my mother was possible. In the event, Deb stayed with my grandmother, who was disabled and speechless with Parkinson’s disease. My rudeness to Reverend Whitworth was revenged when, baptizing our first child, his first grandchild, in a thoroughly negotiated Unitarian family service in the house of her Lutheran grandparents, he made a little joke about the “holy water”—water fetched from our own spring, which was down below the house instead of, as in Vermont, up above it. My mother sulked for the rest of the day about that, and always spoke of Catherine, our first child, as “the baby who didn’t get baptized.” By the time the three other babies arrived, Deb and I had moved to Massachusetts, where we had met and courted, and joined the Congregational Church as a reasonable compromise.

We are surrounded by holy water; all water, our chemical mother, is holy. Flying from Boston to New York, my habit is to take a seat on the right-hand side of the plane, but the other day I sat on the left, and was rewarded, at that hour of midmorning by the sun’s reflections on the waters of Connecticut—not just the rivers and the Sound but little ponds and pools and glittering threads of water that for a few seconds hurled silver light skyward into my eyes. My father’s tears for a moment had caught th light; that is how I saw them. When he was dead, Deb and I divorced. Why? It’s hard to say. We boil at different degrees, Emerson said, and a woman came along who had my boiling point. The snapshots I took of Deb naked, interestingly, she claimed a part of her just settlement. It seemed to me they were mine—I’d taken them. But she said her body was hers
After our divorce, my mother told me, of my father, “He worried about you two from the first time you brought her home. He didn’t think she was feminine enough for you.”
“He was big on femininity,” I said, not knowing whether to believe her or not. The dead are so easy to misquote.

My reflex is always to come to Deb’s defense, even though it was I who wanted the divorce. It shocks me, at my high-school class reunions, when my classmates bother to tell me how much they prefer my second wife. It is true, Sylvia really mixes it u with them, in a way that Deb shyly didn’t. But then Deb assumed that they were part of my past, something I had put behind me but reunited with every five years or so, whereas Sylvia, knowing me in my old age, recognizes that I have never really lef Pennsylvania, that it is where the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition. The most recent reunion, the fifty-fifth, might have depressed Deb—all these people in their early seventies, most of them still living in the county withi a short drive of where they had been born, even in the same semi-detached house where they had been raised. Some came in wheelchairs, and some were too sick to drive and were chauffeured to the reunion by their middle-aged children. The list of ou deceased classmates on the back of the program grows longer; the class beauties are gone to fat or bony cronehood; the sports stars and non-athletic alike move about with the aid of pacemakers and plastic knees, retired and taking up space at an age whe most of our fathers were considerately dead
But we don’t see ourselves that way, as lame and old. We see kindergarten children—the same round fresh faces, the same cup ears and long-lashed eyes. We hear the gleeful shrieking during elementary-school recess and the seductive saxophones and muted trumpets of the homebred swing bands that serenaded the blue-lit gymnasium during high-school dances. We see in each other the enduring simplicities of a town rendered changeless by Depression and then by a world war whose bombs never reached us, though rationing and toy tanks and air-raid drills did. Old rivalries are rekindled and put aside; old romances flare for a moment and subside into the general warmth, the diffuse love. When the class secretary, dear Ann Mahlon, her luxuriant head of chestnut curls now whiter than bleached laundry, takes the microphone and runs us through a quiz on the old days—teachers’ nicknames, the names of vanished luncheonettes and ice-cream parlors, the titles of our junior and senior plays, the winner of the scrap drive in third grade—the answers are shouted out on all sides. Not one piece of trivia stumps us: we were there, together, then, and the spouses, Sylvia among them, good-naturedly applaud so much long-hoarded treasure of useless knowing.
These were not just my classmates; they had been my father’s students, and his memory kept coming up. He was several times the correct answer—“Mr. Werley!”—in Ann Mahlon’s quiz. Cookie Behn, who had been deposited in our class by his failing grades and who, a year older than we, already had Alzheimer’s, kept coming up to me in the circulation after dinner, squinting as if at a strong light and huskily, ardently asking me, “Your father, Jimbo—is he still with us?” He had forgotten the facts but remembered that saying “still alive,” like the word “dead,” was somehow tactless.
“No, Cookie,” I said each time. “He died in 1972, of his second heart attack.” Oddly, it did not feel absurd to be calling a seventy-four-year-old man on a pronged cane Cookie.
He nodded, his expression grave as well as mildly puzzled. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.
I said, “I’m sorry to tell you,” though my father would have been over a hundred and running up big bills in a nursing home.
“And your mother, Jim?” Cookie persisted.
“She outlived him by seventeen years,” I told him, curtly, as if I resented the fact. “She was a happy widow.”
“She was a very dignified lady,” he said slowly, nodding as if to agree with himself. It touched me that he was attempting to remember my mother, and that what he said was, after all, true enough of her in her relations with the outside world. She had been outwardly dignified and, in her youth, beautiful or, as she once put it to me during her increasingly frank long widowhood, “not quite beautiful.”
My father had died when Deb and I were in Italy. We had gone there, with another couple in trouble, to see if we couldn’t make the marriage “work.” Our hotel in Florence was a small one with a peek at the Arno; returning from a trip to Fiesole—its little Roman stadium, its little museum—we had impulsively decided, the four of us, to have an afternoon drink in the hotel’s upstairs cafĂ©, rather than return to the confinement of our rooms. The place was empty except for some Germans drinking beer in a corner, and some Italians standing up with espressos at the bar. If I heard the telephone ring at all, I assumed it had nothing to do with me. But the bartender came from behind the bar and walked over to me and said, “Signor Wer-lei? Telephone for you.” Who could know I was here?
It was my mother, sounding very small and scratchy. “Jimmy? Were you having fun? I’m sorry to disturb you.”
“I’m impressed you could find me.”
“The operators helped,” she explained.
“What’s happened, Mother?”
“Your father’s in the hospital. With his second heart attack.”
“How bad is it?”
“Well, he sat up in the car as I drove him into Alton.”
“Well, then, it isn’t too bad.”
There was a delay in her responses that I blamed on the transatlantic cable. She said at last, “I wouldn’t be too sure of that.” Except when we talked on the telephone, I never noticed what a distinct Pennsylvania accent my mother had. When we were face to face, her voice sounded as transparent as my own. “He woke up with this pressing feeling on his chest, and usually he ignores it. He didn’t today. It’s noon here now.”
“So you want me to come back,” I accused her. I knew my father wouldn’t want me inconvenienced. We had reservations for the Uffizi tomorrow.
She sighed; the cable under the ocean crackled. “Jimmy, I think you better. You and Deb, of course, unless she’d rather stay there and enjoy the art. Dr. Shirk doesn’t like what he’s hearing, and you know how hard to impress he usually is.”
This was before open-heart surgery and angioplasty; there was little for doctors to do then but listen with a stethoscope and prescribe nitroglycerin. The concierge looked up the next train to Rome, the other couple saw us to the Florence station—just beyond the Medici chapels, which we had always wanted to see, and were destined never to see together. In Rome, the taxi-driver found an airline office that was open. I will never forget the courtesy and patience with which that young airline clerk, in his schoolbook English, took our tickets to Boston the next week and converted them into tickets to Philadelphia the next day. More planes flew then. We made an evening flight to London, and had to lay over for the night. On the side of Heathrow away from London there turned out to be a world of new, tall hotels for passengers in transit. We got into our room around midnight. I called my mother—it was suppertime in Pennsylvania—and learned that my father was dead. To my mother, it was news a number of hours old, and she described in weary retrospect her afternoon of sitting in the Alton hospital and receiving increasingly dire reports. She said, “Doc Shirk said he fought real hard at the end. It was ugly.”
I hung up, and shared the news with Deb. She put her arms around me in the bed and told me, “Cry.” Though I saw the opportunity, and the rightness of it, I don’t believe I did. My father’s tears had used up mine.

Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

Marianne Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri (1887). Her father was an engineer and inventor who had spent his life trying to build a smokeless furnace. When his business failed, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an institution for the mentally ill. Marianne Moore was born just after her parents had separated, and she never met her father.
She went with her mother to live with her grandfather, the pastor of a Presbyterian Church. She had started writing poetry by the time she was eight years old. One of her first known poems was addressed to Santa Claus, requesting a horn for her brother and a doll for herself, in rhyme. When she was nine years old, her mother wrote in a letter, "She dotes on poetry to a horrible degree. I know we shall yet have a poetess in the family, and finish our days languishing in an attic."
She went to Bryn Mawr College, where she hoped to study English literature, but after a professor wrote a disparaging comment on one of her papers, she switched to biology. Working in a laboratory had a profound effect on her writing. She said, "Precision, economy of statement, logic...drawing and identifying, liberated [my] imagination."
After college, Moore got a series of jobs teaching typing and bookkeeping, and she contributed poems to Bryn Mawr's alumni magazine. Then, in 1915, she published two poems in The Egoist, an influential literary magazine which was also publishing the early work of James Joyce at the time. Her work caught the attention of modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and she moved to Greenwich Village to join the literary scene there. She became friends with poets such as William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. She went to parties every night, and attended art shows and exhibitions, even though she went on living with her mother and read the Bible every day.
Her first collection Poems (1921) was published without her knowledge by the poet Hilda Doolittle, who admired her work. Her poetry was often compared to modern painting, and she was known for her eccentric titles, including "Holes Bored by Scissors in a Work Bag," "In 'Designing a Cloak to Cloak His Designs,' You Wrested from Oblivion, a Coat of Immortality for Your Own Use," and "To Be Liked by You Would Be a Calamity."
She often just wrote about random objects, such as a picture of an Egyptian desert rat, a can of shoe-polish, a magazine advertisement for Missouri hogs, or a mechanical crow. She's perhaps best known for her poem that begins, "The Mind...is an enchanted thing / like the glaze on a / katydid-wing."
Moore became a celebrity poet in her old age. The Ford Motor Company hired her to come up with a name for a new automobile. She suggested "Utopian Turtletop" but Ford decided to call the car the Edsel.
She was an avid baseball fan for all of her adult life and, when she was eighty-one years old, she was asked to throw out the first ball for the opening day at Yankee Stadium. She threw a sinking slider. She said that one of the most beautiful things in the world was, "That eight-shaped stitch with which the outer leather is drawn tight on a baseball."
Marianne Moore's Complete Poems came out in 1981.
She wrote, "Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads."

Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
Silence


My father used to say,
"Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
nor the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self reliant like the cat --
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth --
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint."
Nor was he insincere in saying, "`Make my house your inn'."
Inns are not residences.



Notes

1] "My father used to say: a remark in conversation; Miss A. M. Homans, Professor Emeritus of Hygiene, Wellesley College. `My father used to say, "superior people never make long visits, then people are not so glad when you've gone." When I am visiting, I like to go about by myself. I never had to be shown Longfellow's grave nor the glass flowers at Harvard.'" [Moore's note, p. 105]

3] Longfellow: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, US poet (1807-82).

13] "`Make my house your inn': Edmund Burke to a stranger with whom he had fallen into conversation in a bookshop. Life of Burke: James Prior; `"Throw yourself into a coach," said he. "Come down and make my house your inn."'" [Moore's note, p. 105]

_____________________

What Are Years?

What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt, -
dumbly calling, deafly listening-that
in misfortune, even death,
encourage others
and in it's defeat, stirs

the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accededs to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.

So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity.
_____